Top Trends Impacting Technology Providers Through 2025

Gartner highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers through 2025. These trends reflect three overarching themes: businesses increasing their reliance on technology, new opportunities emerging through technology, and the impact of external macro forces.

“The march of digitalization continues even amidst disruption, and technology providers have a leading role to play,“ said Rajesh Kandaswamy, Distinguished VP Analyst and Gartner Fellow. “In 2023, product leaders and technology executives must balance short-term planning with a long-term strategy to stay ahead of the immediate shocks to the economy and the underlying ‘permacrisis’ forces shaping business.“

Here are the trends Gartner identified that will impact technology customers, buyers, products, ecosystems, business models, and operating models worldwide for at least the next three years:

Democratization of Technology - The democratization of technology empowers non-IT workers to seek out, select, implement, and custom-fit their own technology. This trend offers opportunities to meet the needs of a new set of citizen developers and business technologists. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 55% of all successful emerging technology solutions will be delivered to “nontraditional“ buyers - for example, outside IT - within enterprises, enabling vendors to expand into new markets and forge new customer relationships.

Federated Enterprise Technology Buying - In a federated buying process, buying decisions are made by representatives across the business. Driven by the democratization of technology, federated enterprise technology buying is accelerating, with just 26% of technology buyers in a recent Gartner survey reporting that purchases are funded solely by IT.

Product-Led Growth - Product-led growth (PLG) is a go-to-market strategy in which users experience value through free product offers or interactive or automated demonstrations. Then, users are either converted directly to paid accounts or their advocacy and influence help to drive purchases. By 2025, 95% of software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers will employ a form of self-service PLG for new customer acquisition.

Co-Innovation Ecosystems - The co-innovation ecosystem approach is an emerging practice that enables the convergence of internal, external, collaborative, and co-creative ideas to create new value. Businesses are actively using technology to differentiate and succeed, so they are increasingly co-innovating with tech providers.

Digital Marketplaces - Technology buyers are embracing digital marketplaces to easily find, procure, implement, and integrate technology solutions. Non-tech buyers are also increasingly looking to marketplaces to meet their requirements for composable and easily consumable technology solutions.

Intelligent Applications - Intelligent applications will create value and disrupt markets by learning, adapting, and generating new ideas and outcomes. For example, generative AI is an emerging technology quickly gaining traction for commercial use within intelligent applications. Generative AI can produce novel media content (including text, image, video, and audio), synthetic data, and models of physical objects.

Metaverse Technologies for Marketing and Customer Experience (CX) - Metaverse technologies are rapidly gaining traction in marketing for creating unique experiences, impactful interactions, and novel engagement. By 2027, over 40% of large organizations worldwide will be using a combination of Web3, spatial computing, and digital twins in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue.

Sustainable Business - Technology providers must improve the sustainability of their products that enable sustainable business outcomes. A recent Gartner survey found that 42% of leaders are currently leveraging sustainability activities to drive innovation, differentiation, and enterprise growth through sustainable products. Gartner predicts that by 2025, tech providers that can quantify their offering’s positive contribution to customers’ sustainability objectives will increase their win rate by 20%.

Techno-nationalism - A trend away from globalization and into mercantilism is causing global markets to become increasingly local, impacting global technology ecosystems. Policy decisions are driving countries to implement digital sovereignty regulations, causing a divergence of technology stacks. In response to this trend, product leaders must balance meeting specific country-level localization needs and product profitability.