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 are set to 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's commonly known), shines a light on breakthrough technologies that are at a tipping point, where scientific progress begins to have real-world impact.

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

“By identifying technologies at their turning 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. Consider, for example, combinations of AI with biological systems or the role of new materials in advancing clean energy.

With these technologies expected to achieve real-world impact in the next three to five years, it won’t be long until they start addressing significant global risks, from misinformation to pollution and climate stress.

Where lithium-ion batteries are solid structures that need their own space, structural battery composites (SBCs) are a weight-bearing material – like carbon fibre 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 are yet to achieve widespread adoption for a number of reasons, but if safety regulations and standards can be developed to support widespread use, they could have a significant impact environmentally and economically.

What if you could generate power from the difference in saltiness of two water sources? That’s 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: "Naturally, the Earth tries to reach equilibrium, which is a fancy way of saying, if you've got a lot of excess water on one side and a lot of excess salt water on the other side, the water will migrate over to the side with the salt to dilute it, until we get equal amounts on both sides - equal salinity. In doing so, it generates pressure because water is moving across the membrane."

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

From alternative cooling fuels to Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), there are a number of technological advances aiming to lower costs, simplify designs and boost power generation from nuclear in countries around the world.

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

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

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

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

"Imagine if you had engineered living therapeutics, these little bio-factories inside of you, and they could supply that glucose as needed by the body," says Mariette DiChristina, a dean at Boston University, in the Radio Davos podcast. "It would be more like what your body would do naturally if you didn't have that illness."

A recently developed class of drugs, that were originally made to manage type 2 diabetes and obesity – technically known as Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists or GLP-1 RAs – are showing promise in the treatment of brain-related diseases, like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

GLP-1 RAs have been shown to reduce inflammation in the brain and encourage the removal of toxic proteins. Left untreated, both are related to the development of the above conditions. More than 55 million people globally live with dementia, so there are significant social, as well as economic benefits, for such drugs. For instance, as DiChristina says: "Think about the caregivers and the time they need to spend [on care] that maybe they could also be spending on other kinds of life-affirming work."

These devices detect and quantify specific biochemical parameters – consider for example disease markers or chemical changes in water to detect pollution – autonomously and continuously. With wireless communication and self-sustaining power sources, they enable real-time, ongoing 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 starting to address other targets and applications, such as menopause care and food safety.

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

These new methods would see existing systems replaced 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 lab-produced and manufactured nanomaterials with enzyme-like properties. However, compared to enzymes, which are either produced by living organisms or synthetically produced at substantial cost and complexity, nanozymes are much more stable, as well as being cheaper and simpler to produce.

They act like catalysts, supporting the same chemical reactions as enzymes, but because they’re more robust, could be used in a far 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 reach widespread adoption.

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

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

In an era of deepfakes and synthetic media, this technology is a welcome addition. It adds invisible tags to AI-generated content, which makes it easier to identify what’s real and what isn’t, 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 into the image that says 'Hi, I'm from AI'."

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