The Five Tech Trends That Caught Our Attention in 2025

You can’t deny that 2025 has been a year of major technology shifts, affecting both businesses and everyday users in many ways. From AI to outages at major cloud providers and increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, this year has almost had it all.

In this article, RFA's Global Managing Director, & CRO, George Ralph, walks through some of the key technology trends that caught his attention — and that he believes will impact many organizations in 2026.

1. AI Evolved from Tools to Autonomous Agents

In the previous few years (since that ChatGPT moment in 2022), generative AI was mainly used for simpler tasks such as text generation, summarizing documents, and image creation. In 2025, that changed. We’ve seen major progress in making AI systems more capable of handling complex, real-world tasks.

This shift has been driven by a stronger focus on agentic AI. Instead of responding to a single prompt and stopping there, AI agents can now plan, take actions, use tools, and complete multi-step workflows with minimal human input.

One technology that plays a key role in this transition is MCP (Model Context Protocol). Introduced by Anthropic, MCP provides a standard way for AI models to securely connect to external tools, data sources, and internal systems.

Rather than just answering questions, an AI agent can use MCP to access files, call APIs, query databases, and maintain context across multiple steps. Of course this requires the user to give the agent access to all this data. Overall, this makes it much easier to build AI systems that can support real business workflows, not just isolated tasks.

That said, AI Agents are still far from perfect. Success rates are still not high enough for many critical or fully autonomous use cases, and human oversight is often required. However, despite these limitations, AI Agents still represent a huge shift in how AI is being used today.

2. AI Browsers

The browser market has been relatively stable for more than a decade, with major players like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Safari offering largely similar features. AI browsers are starting to change that.

In 2025, we saw the emergence of AI-first browsers that try to rethink how people interact with the web. Browsers such as Perplexity’s Comet, OpenAI’s Atlas, and Dia from The Browser Company embed AI directly into the browsing experience instead of treating it as a separate chatbot.

AI browsers work by understanding what you’re doing in real time (reading the page you’re on, keeping track of your task), and helping you take action faster. This can include summarizing content, finding information across tabs, filling forms, or assisting with research and writing as you browse.

Several established players have responded to this trend quickly. Google and Microsoft have started integrating similar AI features directly into Chrome and Edge respectively, blurring the line between traditional browsers and AI browsers.

3. Major Cloud Outages

In 2025, we saw several major cloud outages that affected millions of businesses and users worldwide. These incidents made it clear just how dependent we have become on a small number of cloud providers.

Some notable examples include a global AWS outage in October 2025, which lasted over 15 hours and disrupted millions of websites and applications running on its infrastructure. Cloudflare also experienced multiple outages later in the year, including a November incident that impacted major platforms like ChatGPT and X.

These events forced many businesses to rethink how they design their cloud infrastructure. Relying on a single provider or region is increasingly seen as a risk. As a result, more organizations are now considering multi-region and multi-cloud setups for critical systems to reduce downtime when one provider or region is affected.

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A positive development in this area was the collaboration between Google Cloud and AWS to support Kubernetes-based multi-cloud environments. This partnership makes it easier for organizations to run and manage containerized workloads across both clouds. Microsoft Azure is also expected to align with this direction very soon.

4. Massive AI Infrastructure Investments

In 2025, major technology companies made enormous investments in AI infrastructure. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta collectively invested an estimated $350 to $400 billion in AI-related capital expenditure.

Most of this spending went into building new data centers, developing custom AI chips, and expanding cloud infrastructure to support large-scale AI workloads.

These investments clearly show that AI is no longer experimental, but a strategic priority for the major tech companies. For business leaders out there, the message is clear: ignoring AI is no longer a wise option. Organizations now need to seriously consider how AI can be used to their advantage.

Whether it’s boosting productivity, improving security, automating repetitive tasks, or simply making everyday work easier for teams, organizations need to figure out how to use this technology. Those that fail to explore practical AI use cases risk falling behind as the technology continues to mature.

5. Talent and Skills Shifts in Tech Hiring

Another major trend in 2025 was the sharp increase in demand for AI and cybersecurity talent. Big tech companies went on aggressive hiring sprees, in some cases offering compensation packages worth millions of dollars to attract top AI experts and researchers.

For many organizations, this should be a signal that highly skilled AI and cybersecurity talent will become even more expensive and harder to retain in the coming years. As a result, organizations may need to rethink how they access expertise in key technology areas such as AI and cybersecurity.

Instead of building large in-house teams, they may have to outsource certain tasks to managed service providers who already have the expertise, tools, and scale in place. This shift allows organizations to access specialized skills without carrying the long-term cost and complexity of maintaining full internal teams. It also allows them to stay focused on their core business.

Key Takeaway

Like we anticipated earlier this year, AI was front and center throughout 2025. Big tech companies went all in on AI infrastructure investments, AI agents started becoming a reality, and AI browsers began disrupting a browser market that had been stable for years. Together, these changes make it clear where technology is heading over the next few years.

For leaders across organizations, this makes one thing obvious: AI now deserves close attention. It’s no longer just about experimentation, but about understanding how AI can be responsibly integrated into everyday workflows to drive economic value.

At the same time, AI is also changing the security landscape. Attackers are using AI to create more sophisticated phishing and social engineering attacks, which means organizations must respond with even more advanced, AI-driven cybersecurity measures. Just as importantly, teams also need to be trained to recognize and respond to these modern threats.

For many organizations, these technology shifts can feel overwhelming, and integrating them into existing workflows may seem like a big task. However, ignoring them is not an option, as doing so could quickly put the company behind their competition.

In many cases, the best approach is to work with reliable technology partners like RFA to help navigate these changes and ensure new technologies are integrated in a secure, practical, and compliant way. If your firm needs support in this area, please feel free to contact us.