These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2025

From watermarking generative AI content to a greener way to make fertilizer, the World Economic Forum’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025 report explores the technologies that will have a significant impact on our lives.

The report, launched at the Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions (or Summer Davos as it is commonly known), shines a light on breakthrough technologies that are at a tipping point, where scientific advances are starting to have a real impact.

Each of the 10 technologies was selected this year for its novelty, level of development and its potential to deliver significant community benefits.

“By identifying technologies at their tipping point – where scientific achievement meets practical potential – we provide leaders in government, business and science with the insights needed to make forward-thinking decisions in a rapidly evolving landscape,” Jeremy Jurgens and Frederick Fenter explain in the report’s foreword.

Across the 2025 cohort of emerging technologies, four trends emerged:

The report also highlights a growing trend of technology convergence. For example, consider combinations of AI with biological systems or the role of new materials in promoting clean energy.

With these technologies expected to have real impact in the next three to five years, it won’t be long before they begin to address significant global risks, from misinformation to pollution and climate stress.

Where lithium-ion batteries are solid structures that require their own space, structural battery assemblies (SBCs) are a weight-bearing material—such as carbon fiber or epoxy resin—that can also store electrical energy. This technology could make electric vehicles lighter and more efficient and could also be applied to aircraft, as potential applications include fuselages.

SBCs have yet to achieve widespread adoption for a number of reasons, but if safety regulations and standards can be developed to support widespread use, this could have a significant environmental and economic impact.

What if you could generate power from the difference in salinity of two water sources? This is what osmotic power systems promise with the potential to generate clean, renewable, low-impact electricity.

Although first proposed in 1975, recent advances in materials and system designs have brought the idea closer to reality. There are two types of osmotic power systems: Pressure-retarded osmosis, which uses a semipermeable membrane to enable water to move from low to high salinity; and Reverse Electrodialysis which uses ion exchange membranes to move positive and negative charges between the two sides of the membrane, creating a charge in the process.

Bernard Meyerson, CIO Emeritus at IBM, put it more simply in a recent Radio Davos podcast: “Obviously the Earth is trying to reach equilibrium, which is a fancy way of saying, if you have a lot of excess water on one side and a lot of excess salt water on the other side, the water will go over to the side with the salt, until we get equal amounts of salt on both sides. Salinity By doing that, it generates pressure because water moves across the membrane.”

“A renewed wave of nuclear energy technological innovation is now underway,” write the authors explaining this technology. After a period of relative inactivity in terms of building new nuclear power plants, production is increasing.

From alternative cooling fuels to small modular reactors (SMRs), there are a number of technological advances aimed at lowering costs, simplifying designs and promoting power generation from nuclear power in countries around the world.

The ultimate goal is to achieve nuclear fusion – the fusing of hydrogen atoms to release large amounts of energy – something the international ITER project in France has been working on for years. If achieved, it would provide “a transformative solution to our global energy challenges”.

Scientists hope that by turning helpful bacteria into tiny medicine factories, they can treat diseases from within the body. The impact? Cheaper and more efficient long-term care.

This is done by introducing genetic code, which contains instructions for the production of therapeutics, into living probiotic systems, such as microbes, cells and fungi. The systems can also be programmed with switches to control production on demand.

Bypassing the need to manufacture medicine in a laboratory means a 70% reduction in production costs. What’s more, the approach provides a stable and long-lasting supply of treatment for patients who would normally need a regular injection – as in the case of diabetes treatment.

“Imagine if you designed living therapeutics, these little bio-factories inside you, and they could supply that glucose as needed by the body,” said Mariette DiChristina, a dean at Boston University, on the Radio Davos podcast. “It will be more like what your body would naturally do if you didn’t have that disease.”

A newly developed class of drugs originally made to manage type 2 diabetes and obesity – technically known as Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists or GLP-1 RAs – is showing promise in treating brain-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

GLP-1 RAs have been shown to reduce inflammation in the brain and encourage the removal of toxic proteins. Left untreated, both are linked to the development of the above conditions. More than 55 million people worldwide live with dementia, so there are significant social, as well as economic, benefits for such drugs. For example, as DiChristina says, “Think about the caregivers and the time they have to spend [on care] that they might also be able to spend on other types of life-affirming work.”

These devices detect and quantify specific biochemical parameters – for example consider disease markers or chemical changes in water to detect pollution – autonomously and continuously. With wireless communication and self-sustaining power supplies, it enables real-time, continuous monitoring.

The technology has already seen some success with specific applications, most notably a wearable glucose monitor for diabetes management. However, thanks to advances across a number of fields, the technology is now beginning to address other targets and applications, such as menopause care and food safety.

Nitrogen fixation turns nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia at scale. This is necessary for fertilizer production, which in turn supports around 50% of the world’s food production. New green nitrogen fixation aims to reduce the enormous environmental impact of the process, which currently consumes around 2% of global energy.

These new methods will replace existing systems with bio-based or bio-inspired systems, such as the use of engineered bacteria and enzymes to fix nitrogen, as well as sunlight or green forms of electricity to provide energy.

Nanozymes are laboratory-produced and engineered nanomaterials with enzyme-like properties. However, compared to enzymes, which are either produced by living organisms or produced synthetically at considerable cost and complexity, nanoenzymes are much more stable, as well as cheaper and easier to manufacture.

They act like catalysts and support the same chemical reactions as enzymes, but because they are more robust, they can be used in a much wider set of conditions. Applications range from therapeutics to water purification and food safety, and clinical trials are already underway for cancer and neurodegenerative disease treatment. But there are still technical and ethical hurdles to overcome before nanozymes can achieve widespread adoption.

Individual sensors are already widespread in our lives, but advances in technology – for example AI – offer new, networked opportunities. These connected sensors can change how cities operate and how organizations use data to make decisions.

Consider urban mobility. Connected traffic lights can adjust themselves based on traffic cameras and environmental sensors, enabling them to manage congestion and reduce pollution. Other use cases include mapping in mines, environmental monitoring and the analysis of storm systems.

In an age of deepfakes and synthetic media, this technology is a welcome addition. It adds invisible tags to AI-generated content, making it easier to identify what’s real and what’s not, and as a result will help fight misinformation and improve trust online.

Meyerson describes how the process can work with images. “At the level of pixels, which human eyes can’t resolve, but computers can … you write a signature in the image that says ‘Hello, I’m from AI’.”

A number of leading technology companies are increasingly integrating watermarks. However, the technology faces challenges, including uneven adoption and users trying to remove or forge watermarks. Ethical concerns also abound, such as falsely labeling real content as AI-generated.