A Look Ahead to Technology Trends in 2025 with Hughes Thought Leaders
Artificial intelligence took center stage in 2024, with business and technology leaders across all industries discussing its potential to revolutionize work processes. As AI, machine learning, and generative AI mature, enabling more efficient and productive business and network operations, enterprise organizations must prioritize safeguarding themselves against the misuse of these innovative technologies by malicious actors.
In 2025, Hughes thought leaders predict AI will see practical applications that benefit the business and its workforce, cybersecurity will tap AI to defend against bad actors, and AI will empower people with intuitive self-help capabilities, real-time insights, and problem-solving assistance.
AI Gets Real
AI will significantly improve digital signage in 2025 through personalization, dynamic content adjustments, voice integration, and augmented reality integration.
“AI will begin to transform digital signage by adding personalization that was previously unimaginable. Through machine learning algorithms and real-time data analysis, AI-powered digital signs will adapt content dynamically based on audience demographics, behavior patterns, and environmental factors. The integration of AI into digital signage not only maximizes the relevance and effectiveness of displayed content but also creates a more engaging and customized user experience.”
— Mike Tippets, Vice President of Marketing, Public Relations, and Communications
The growing role of AI across various industries will enhance network strength, cut operational costs, and boost user engagement.
“AI will be key to improving network robustness and reducing network implementation and support costs. GenAI specifically opens opportunities to improve support frameworks by using intelligent machine agents to identify issues, recommend corrective actions, and perform said actions when appropriate and trusted to avoid impact to IT operations. AI will continue to detect performance and fault patterns to propose and/or implement corrective or optimization activities.”
—Frank Kelly, Vice President and CTO of North America
Managed service providers (MSPs) and other vendors will begin to use AI as a competitive differentiator with customers, benefiting enterprise organizations looking for the most advanced capabilities.
“AI will become a point of differentiation for MSPs/MSSPs. AI will enable MSPs to improve the quality of their offering while reducing costs. MSPs will be judged on their ability to use AI effectively. Effective application of AI will require access to the right data at the right time. In many cases, new streams of real-time IoT data will be required to unlock the MSP’s ability to detect and resolve problems. Automation tools will allow MSPs to detect and respond to problems much faster.”
—Tim Tang, Director and Business Technologist
Cybersecurity Strengths and Weaknesses
By 2025, cybersecurity is expected to become a top priority across all industries due to the increasing threat of AI-enabled cyberattacks.
“As criminals creatively leverage technologies such as AI to increase the subtly and effectiveness of their cyberattacks, the enterprise will turn to IoT for expanded visibility into their communications infrastructure to identify indicators of compromise. IoT will provide the increased granularity needed to understand and identify abnormal behavior. As cyber criminals get craftier, organizations will layer GenAI into existing cybersecurity technology to reduce the risks tied to easily infiltrated, legacy systems.”
—Tim Tang, Director and Business Technologist
As criminals hone their craft using AI, enterprise organizations will also have to accelerate their security know-how to prevent AI from being used against their environment.
“Bad actors and their army of machines, literally, are getting smarter every day, finding ways to penetrate your enterprise. Simply relying on your traditional EDR/MDR services is not enough. There are gaps in your threat plane that need to be addressed. Utilizing technologies such as SASE, NDR, and autonomous deep learning at the edge can help you close those gaps.”
—David Floyd, Vice President of Cybersecurity Sales and Service
Enterprise organizations must create sophisticated security strategies to combat the advances in malicious activities from hackers.
“Enterprises should be prioritizing a layered approach to cybersecurity that meets their needs and provides comprehensive coverage. We all know that AI has been rapidly maturing, and cybercriminals are relying on it just as much as the cybersecurity industry. They use AI for writing malicious code and crafting fake websites, phishing emails, and even deepfakes of video and voice to manipulate people into divulging sensitive information. Although the methods may change, one constant remains: cybercriminals are always trying to gain access and extort. They want access to your data and files so they can sell information on the dark web and lock down your files, systems, and network to get a ransom payment from you.”
—Calvin Carpenter, Product Marketing Manager
Advances in AI will keep the technology front and center in 2025, but the human workforce must keep pace with AI’s evolution to capitalize on it to protect and advance their business.
“AI has been hot for ~2 years, and we know that AI continues to expand—including expanding itself. We see bots creating ransomware faster than humans can. While AI helps prevent ransomware and malware, fraudsters are using AI to create these faster than they can be detected. I heard at a recent conference, ‘Humans will not be replaced by AI. Humans that do not use AI will be replaced by those that do.’”
—Carl Udler, Senior Marketing Director
Strides in Self-Help IT
Thanks in part to advances in AI, 2025 will also see a shift toward self-help IT capabilities, allowing end users to monitor and address IT issues independently, and even through mobile devices.
“For issues not resolved automatically via remediation engines built into the AIOps architecture, it will also be key to move to a self-help model so that the end user is able to easily get issues resolved without escalating to a call desk or an MSP, which results in improved time to repair, as well as reduced support costs. In 2025, the expectation will be for end users to have self-help IT capabilities available on their mobile device for quickly gaining visibility into simplified IT insights and approving corrective actions without involving a helpdesk.”
—Frank Kelly, Vice President and CTO of North America
The nature of GenAI lends itself to equipping end users with access to and insights from sophisticated data without years of training or expertise on all technology domains.
“Innovative organizations will leverage self-help IT tools built into employee devices, enabling real-time insights and problem-solving without relying on a helpdesk. The emergence of GenAI, the maturity of data visualization, and an escalating need for support despite a lack of talent availability has created a perfect storm for self-help IT. The value of GenAI is the ability to lower the technical skill required to extract business value from data.”
—Tim Tang, Director and Business Technologist
Industry thought leaders across Hughes agree the power of AI will spread its strength throughout enterprise organizations to drive efficiencies, boost productivity, and enhance protections—letting business leaders focus on growth in the future.