Tech talk: What’s coming up in 2025

Dominating the conversation and making ripples across marketing, education, and culture – to name a few – 2024 was the undeniable year of AI.

For the first time ever, everyday people in everyday homes were discussing its merit, its purpose, and its potential. Now, with 2024 officially history, we're looking ahead to the future of digital customer experience. These are the 2025 tech announcements that have got our tech team buzzing and busy.

It’s SASE, not sassy

SASE is a cloud-native architecture that combines several cloud technologies into a single, unified solution.

With the ongoing shift to cloud computing and mobile workforces, the SASE architecture was created to address any potential security challenges posed by evolving enterprise standards. The new architecture now places users, devices, applications, and data outside of the enterprise data centre and network. In turn, this enables organisations to support remote and hybrid users automatically, connecting them to nearby cloud gateways.

The most common use cases for SASE include:

• Augmenting or replacing VPNs for modernised secure access
• Simplifying contractor (third-party) access
• Threat defence for distributed offices and remote workers
• Data protection for regulatory compliance

The new architecture's potential to reduce risk and cost and deliver improvements to operational efficiency and the hybrid user experience makes it the enterprise solution to watch in 2025.

Sitecore Stream enters the chat

The digital experience platform is taking the leap into AI-assisted marketing. Positioned as a ‘marketing secret weapon,’ Sitecore Stream is the latest product in the company’s customer experience management ecosystem. It brings AI workflows, generative copilots, and brand-aware AI to the content-experience lifecycle and is designed to equip marketing teams with end-to-end content creation and delivery.

Stream is trained on your organisation’s brand, learning everything from its visual identity to messaging, from policies to onboarding. You can even ‘chat’ with Stream’s generative AI chatbot to discuss potential market opportunities, trends, and ideas – all while keeping your brand’s assets secure.

On the project management side, Stream introduces AI-enhanced workflows and generative copilots to power content creation, web page design, briefing, campaign planning and roll-out, and A/B testing for CTAs (calls-to-action). Promising to make things faster, easier, and more efficient than ever, we’re curious to see how quickly and how far marketing teams embrace this end-to-end experience.

Generative AI pushes on

Great State is no stranger to the potential of Gen-AI. In 2024, we partnered with Bristol Airport and Voxly Digital to deliver the UK’s first airport chatbot powered entirely by generative AI. Less of a prediction and more of an inevitability, the conversation and momentum around generative AI isn’t slowing down anytime soon. And neither are the companies and products trying to make a name for themselves.

But it’s not without its detractors and controversy. With new updates expected from the biggest names in the industry, and ongoing legal and ethical battles taking centre stage, the future of AI is only just being written.

At the very least, you can expect greater access to native multimodal LLMs (large language models), like ChatGPT. The software is quickly becoming a household name – a fact likely to be boosted by its most recent launch on WhatsApp. And with models getting faster and cheaper, home seems to be the next frontier for the technology. Get ready to see possible integration into the most popular home devices, like Alexa.

And speaking of tech with a human name, would you trust an LLM if it was more human-like? The biggest developers are eager to do just that, hoping to bring models to life with faces, voices, and personalities. Are you ready for a new AI companion?

Here’s what’s up ahead for Generative AI in 2025:

3D world building

Google Genie 2 is a foundation world model, capable of generating endless 3D environments from a single prompt. Controllable and playable by human or AI agent, the worlds are navigated using keyboard and mouse inputs.

Augmented computer use

Microsoft Copilot introduces AI-assisted browsing, while Claude 3.5 allows automation of, well, anything your computer needs. We may just start ‘asking’ our computers to help perform tasks in a more streamlined way.

Video generation

With OpenAI Sora launching in the US – with a $200 monthly subscription – and the open-source Hunyuan Video boasting high-quality video generation, expect more experimentation with AI-generated video content.

Next generation customer experiences

Whatever 2025 brings, unpredictability is almost the only certainty. The biggest tech trends might just fizzle while sleeper innovations and audience behaviours may surprise. The brands that embrace a flexible and fluid approach to marketing and strategy are likely to reap the biggest wins. Next generation customer experiences don’t just prepare for uncertainty, they’re built to respond faster than ever before. If you want to talk to us about an upcoming digital project you have planned, then get in touch.