How technology will reshape our world in 2025 and beyond

As 2025 has started, I’d like to share my insights on how technology will continue to reshape our world in 2025 and beyond, providing the opportunities in the challenges we face. There has never been a more important time to build a secure digital society. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence and other advances, I believe that digital transformation will have a greater impact on society in the next 5 years than it has in the past 15.

Successful technologies have the ability to make common people feel and act like kings and gods!

Impact on everyday life

AI integrated into everyday life

Artificial intelligence is being integrated into the tools we use every day at work and in our personal lives. Microsoft, Apple and Google are integrating AI into their ecosystems to help us work smarter and faster. In 2025, we will see the beginning of essentially everyone having access to a personal assistant.

Imagine booking a meeting with 20 colleagues: AI will handle it all; finding the right time to schedule, sending personalized invitations, and managing updates.
This automation will improve efficiency, but jobs that rely on repetitive tasks will decline, creating new opportunities for those willing to adapt. The key to thriving in this shift is to stay agile and continuously learn.

Data driven individuals and society

There are already systems that can monitor, analyze and evaluate our real and virtual lives. The amount of data, the ease with which it can be analyzed, and the intelligence that can be assessed will rapidly increase. Soon, AI systems will know individuals better than they know themselves, predicting individual behavior, societal trends, and eventually even future decisions with remarkable accuracy. AI will know you better than you know yourself!

By analyzing individuals, groups and sociality there will be immense predictive capabilities. This predictive power has enormous potential. It could revolutionize problem-solving at the societal level, from addressing resource shortages to mitigating crises caused by poor planning and poor leadership. Yet, it also presents risks. Predictive data could be weaponized to manipulate or control individuals and groups, threatening democracies and making ethical oversight critical.

Healthcare

AI driven healthcare

Your doctor can’t know every disease and symptom. Your pharmacist can’t know all the medications and their interactions, but AI can. AI will transform healthcare by improving diagnostics, personalizing treatments, and accelerating drug development. Unlike humans, AI can process massive amounts of data to identify symptoms, recommend therapies, and predict outcomes with remarkable accuracy.
This will lead to earlier detection of disease, tailored treatments, and rapid development of new medicines, ultimately having the potential to make healthcare more efficient and accessible.

Human enhancement and Genome editing

I believe that genome editing technologies such as CRISPR will radically transform healthcare and humanity. Correcting genetic mutations and significantly reducing inherited diseases, improving cancer treatment and preventing cancer effects, providing personalized medicine based on genetic makeup, creating new vaccines, and even enhancing humans to make them smarter, stronger, and more resilient.

While these changes are still years away from being fully realized, in the short term we will see more impact in healthcare thanks to peptides. An example of a peptide that is already impacting healthcare is semaglutide (branded as Ozempic or Wegovy), which is already helping to reduce obesity and opening the door to a much wider use of peptides in medicine.

Human interaction

Less humans in customer service

When it comes to customer service, I generally see two mindsets. Organizations that see customer service as a way to build a relationship, and organizations that see it as a cost.

AI is changing customer service in two ways.

1. For customer-centric organizations: Organizations that prioritize customer relationships will use AI to improve interactions. By analyzing customer data and streamlining support processes, AI can reduce wait times and deliver highly personalized service, fostering brand loyalty and trust while increasing the efficiency of customer support.
2. For cost-conscious organizations: Organizations looking to cut costs may turn to AI-powered chatbots and real-time voice assistants to replace human agents. While this reduces operational costs, it risks alienating customers if not executed thoughtfully.

Over the past few years, more and more organizations have incorporated AI into their customer service processes, and we will see rapid improvements in AI and adaptation by organizations in the coming years.

Social media will be less social

Social media will become AI-driven. We are already seeing an increase in AI generated models and accounts on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. This will accelerate so fast that the majority of social media will be AI driven.

Articles, images and videos will be generated by AI. The number of AI accounts and bots will increase, flooding platforms with content and reactions. It will be hard to tell if the ‘influencer’ you are following or the stranger you are talking to is real or not. This will open up new revenue streams for AI-driven ‘influencers’ and AI content creators, but it will also change social media as we know it today. I believe that (authoritarian) politicians will use this opportunity to force control by making identification mandatory to use social media and the internet.

Other parts of our lives

Personalized education

AI will have the potential to provide everyone with a personalized learning program and individual virtual teachers. While AI has a lot of potential in education, I believe that the outdated, slow-to-adapt, change-averse school system is not where AI will have the biggest impact in 2025/2026. The impact will be outside the traditional school system.

Recruitment will not be the same

Analyzing resumes and LinkedIn profiles to find the right candidates for the job is something that AI can do faster, more cost-effectively, and more accurately. While companies have been experimenting with AI tools for recruiting for the past few years, I believe 2025 is the tipping point for companies and candidates to use AI to transform the recruitment process.

The interesting question is how it will affect the quality of candidates. I remember a Dutch company that used AI to filter out candidates, and some within HR filtered it to automatically reject people with foreign names and exclude them from the list of candidates seen by hiring managers. I know of another case where a company used AI to analyze micro facial changes of candidates during interviews.

Personally, I think AI can do a better job at sourcing than some (inexperienced) recruiters, but good ethical oversight is needed if you want to use it for more other parts of the recruitment process.

Final thoughts as we start 2025

As we start 2025, one thing is clear: technology will not only shape our world, it will redefine it. Success will depend on adaptability, ethical leadership and a commitment to learning. The future is both exciting and uncertain, but one thing is clear: the future is full of opportunity.