I love think time. For every useful unit of actual hands-on-keys work time I spend writing thought leadership pieces, or time on briefing and advisory calls with innovative vendors, there must be a corresponding amount of time away from the computer to realign my thinking and grasp the connections between technology categories and their value to end customers.
From the inside of different software vendors over the years, I can recall several examples of founders and engineers, and even myself benefiting mightily from think time—through inspirations that arrive away from the computer—on dog walks, at dinner, or while listening to music. And I can recall tougher times, working for companies that were in a state of constant flight, pivoting wildly from one idea to the next with no time to think at all.
As humans, we never expected to be as fully engaged as we are now, with per-worker productivity at an all time high, a pocket supercomputer that constantly nags us for attention wherever we go, and some AI coming in to scoop up our ‘think time’ by repeating our collective thoughts back at us.
But I wouldn’t let that short-change my non-AI-generated think time for these predictions for 2025. Here we go!
Reflecting on Eric’s picks for 2024
As tradition indicates, first I will need to respond to my esteemed CTO-whispering analyst colleague Eric Newcomer’s predictions from last year. Here’s my take on those.
Database Convergence. Eric was 100% spot on here—just about every known database and data lake vendor rebranded itself with an assortment of once-specialized capabilities for transaction and analytics readiness, or vector capabilities, or distributed SQL, with massive scalability and/or cost savings advantages, in both licensed and DBaaS licensing models.
Walking the floor at AWS re:Invent you couldn’t help but notice how many vendors were now “the ultimate home for AI data” with AI query bolt-ons, in addition to AWS’s own RAG and ML offerings to maintain parity with other hyperscaler services from Azure and GCS. To make a decision in this confusing data environment, buyers will need to look closely at what active use cases customers are employing.
AI In the Enterprise – Rise of Best of Breed. Mixed bag, I’d say this prediction was about 50% right, as in 2024 the hype of generative AI was matched by the equivalently hyped rise of agentic AI (basically, a fancy new term for AI bots with some degree of autonomy). This is leading some end customers to basically continue to follow the bigger gen AI players and start allowing employees to use generative and agentic AI services to augment employee productivity.
However, Eric was correct about best of breed in the sense that significant enterprise ROI is being demonstrated among specially tuned AI models, i.e. for security threat hunting, or code copilots for modernization, or for industry-specific workflows like document processing or property insurance claims analysis.
Conversational AI will Disrupt the Analytics Market. This one almost felt inexorable, but since the degree of difficulty on this prediction was not very high I’d put it at 90%. The analytics market has been looking for an ideal interface to involve business stakeholders without data science degrees forever.
Since LLMs can speak the language of humans as well as the data they are trained on, conventional analytics vendors either faded away suddenly or repurposed with their own conversational models that can rapidly abstract variations of SQL and other query types with natural language queries and responses, beautifully written reports and relevant visualizations.
Speech to Speech Translation. 100% correct, it just started working right this year! I was able to conduct rather halting, but effective communications in Japanese, Polish and Dutch that really saved my travel bacon. I even tried using Google Translate in Iceland, but couldn’t get anyone there to talk Icelandic back into my phone, they’d just reply in English. This real-time translation is especially cool now that it is showing up in our video chat/meeting applications with captions too!
My predictions for 2025
Bespoke architecture is back
The commoditization of cloud native infrastructure is complete. With readily available open source and vendor-supported open-core infrastructure provisioning becoming ubiquitous, in Kuberntes clusters, containers and on bare metal in datacenters, cloud hyperscalers and on the edge, enterprises will start seeking out more opinionated stacks based on targeted business use cases.
These bespoke stacks will marry combinations of containerization, service-based infrastructure (serverless, microservices, and mini-PaaS) with specific application primitives, datasets and configurations tuned to the specific needs of a particular industry. Expect a resurgence in service delivery partner businesses with the skills and vertical business expertise to repeatably implement these bespoke architectures.
AI implementation will need to pick a policy lane
General-purpose generative and agentic AI vendors—and the data lake and pipeline offerings that repositioned themselves to serve them—soaked up most of the VC funding and tech headlines since 2023. Now they will suddenly find themselves up a creek without a paddle, as a number of high-profile failures of rogue AI usage will cause enterprise customers and employers to rethink their whole strategy around incorporating AI into their businesses.
We encountered precious few examples of solid AI adoption and governance policies going on at both vendors and enterprise end customers in the last two years. I expect that will change drastically, with most companies putting forth a clear AI mission statement, documented policies, and automated usage detection and change management and control tooling (sort of like a UEBA for AI). Wise companies will put these capabilities under the authority of an interdepartmental AI governance board (or similar).
Quantum computing will launch an arms race and break crypto
Quantum computing models, with their massive qubit arrays running on advanced chips such as Google’s new Willow, which can apparently run calculations 10 septillion times faster than the fastest previous semiconductor… as well as running on scalable GPU cloud farms, on new materials such as salt crystals, or over distributed networks, will utterly shatter today’s concept of cryptography. Like the WWII Enigma code machine, you will need a bit of quantum encryption technology on either end of each transaction to both decipher and truly secure any data passing through.
Quantum computing will be bad news for speculators and promoters of cryptocurrency, an unequitably distributed rent-seeking, criminal-enabling energy leech on global GDP. An endlessly patient AI may be able to hack some token protocols with some sort of meta-hack, aka a ‘Rosetta stone’ approach. Or, more likely, the quantum AI routine will get really good at digging for and guessing account passphrases and IDs on several custodian services, unleashing a massive orchestrated selloff. Either way, small-time marks will be left HODLing the bag.
The Intellyx Take
That’s all the thoughts I had time to think. One disappointing insight gained by sending out our monthly Intellyx Cortex newsletter, which is free to subscribe to, and our annual Intellyx Digital Innovator awards, is seeing how many emails bounce.
It seems that many companies are extremely short-sighted, and the average tenure of a new marketing or product management leader isn’t very long, maybe 6-12 months. Today’s investors are skeptical, capital and patience are scarce, and companies that are lifted up with the greatest expectations are given little time to attain the status of emerging gorillas in their spaces.
Luckily, we do get to work with some of the smartest people and forward-looking vendors who quite often buck this trend. Yes, those who survive and thrive in 2025 will likely be the ones with the benefit of think time.
Copyright ©2025 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI chatbot was used to write this article. Image source: Adobe Image Express
