World Economic Forum Unveils Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025

These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2025

Technological convergence is shaping a more integrated, systems-based approach to technology, tackling some of our biggest challenges. 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.

How our Top 10 Emerging Technologies are chosen

This year's selection shows how technology is responding to some of the central concerns affecting people today, from making industry more sustainable to the need to increase trust and safety in our connected world. What makes some new technologies take off, while others show potential but fail to get off the ground? The factors at play are multiple, and they clearly reach beyond the functionality of the technology itself. The timing of its arrival and market readiness matter - an innovation must respond to people's unmet needs or concerns, as innovations as diverse as burglar alarms and MRI scanning have shown. The presence of a supportive environment is pivotal too, in terms of everything from infrastructure to government support - as electric vehicles are finding out. But that list barely scratches the surface, and any true interrogation of a new technology's potential requires much deeper analysis - one that the scientists, researchers and futurists who help put together the World Economic Forum's Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025 report have rigorously undertaken. Their methodology is explained in full in this year's report, which is produced in collaboration with Frontiers. It's the 13 in a series that has consistently picked out advances that have gone on to make a huge mark on the world, from the 2015 listing of CRISPR gene editing - which enabled precise vaccine development during the COVID-19 pandemic - to anticipating mRNA vaccine platforms back in 2017. The report's methodology broadly defines "emerging technologies" as entirely novel innovations or established technologies that are being applied in transformative new ways, and it is guided by three central criteria: The 10 technologies chosen for this year's report have made it through repeated evaluations under this methodology. They emerged from an initial list of 250 entries and faced assessments by scientific publisher Frontiers' AI Trend Analyzer - a tool that demonstrates the power of open science in action. By analyzing patterns across millions of openly published research articles over a rolling 10-year period, it can identify which innovations are gaining genuine scientific momentum versus fleeting hype. The technologies were also evaluated against the World Economic Forum Resilience Consortium's Resilience for Sustainable, Inclusive Growth framework, which focused on each technology's potential to address systemic challenges and contribute to building adaptive capacity for future generations. The Forum's new "ecosystem readiness assessment" was also used to gauge how prepared today's societal infrastructure is for these technologies to scale and achieve their projected impact. This stage was overseen by the Top 10 Emerging Technologies Steering Committee, Frontiers' network of chief editors, and futurists from the Dubai Future Foundation. It evaluated readiness across five key dimensions, commonly known as STEEP analysis: Each dimension was rated on a four-point scale from "no readiness" to "high readiness", and the results are shown in the report in the form of radar charts, some of which are included below. The final list for this year's report reveals a series of profound innovations powered by the convergence of different technologies - synthetic biology and AI; materials science and energy systems; biotechnology and digital developments. It shows the emergence of four major trends and how technology is responding to the central concerns affecting people in today's world: These breakthrough technologies are nearing the inflection point where scientific progress tips over into real-world impact. They reflect not only advances in science and technology, but also new strategies for building resilience in a world of accelerating change. Our list of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025 includes: Generative AI watermarking technologies embed invisible, immutable markers in AI-generated content - including text, images, audio and video - to verify authenticity and help trace content origins. As AI-generated content becomes increasingly hard to differentiate from that created without AI, this technology can help combat misinformation and promote trust in digital content - two of the key concerns highlighted in the Forum's Global Risks Report 2025 - as well as protect intellectual property and counter academic dishonesty. Leading AI companies are increasingly integrating watermarking into their platforms following a breakthrough in 2024 when Google DeepMind open-sourced SynthID. Google is now embedding this into AI-generated images, text and videos across its services, and watermarking is becoming a cornerstone of responsible AI deployment. But challenges remain around forging and certification, showing a need for governance and usage guidelines just as sophisticated as the technology itself. The EU and China are among those making progress, and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, made up of leading media generators in the AI space, is leading the development of technical standards for certifying the source of media content. Scientists are turning probiotic systems such as microbes, cells and fungi associated with human health into tiny medicine factories that can live inside the body and treat diseases. This is made possible by advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering, with several companies now developing this technology for commercial use. US firm Chariot Bioscience is exploring microbial platforms that release therapeutics into the bloodstream following a single dose, significantly reducing the need for repeated injections, while Japan's NEC is trialling the use of a weakened strain of Salmonella to activate the human immune system and fight cancer cells. Safety is clearly a key concern, and developers are actively addressing potential problems such including unintended immune responses. Regulatory frameworks - such as the Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products in Europe - also need to be developed to allow health authorities to evaluate efficacy and safety. If successful, engineered living therapeutics could make long-term care significantly cheaper and more effective. Structural battery composites (SBCs) combine the load-bearing mechanical components of a vehicle or building with rechargeable energy storage. In the case of electric vehicles, the lithium-ion battery can be built into the frame of the car, making it lighter and more efficient. SBCs could eventually enable all rigid vehicle body panels to store energy. Airbus is already experimenting with SBCs for use in aircraft, while elsewhere innovations around drone frames are being looked at. SBC technology has yet to achieve widespread adoption due to technical challenges such as achieving high energy storage density, long-term stability, safety, durability and cost-effectiveness. Regulatory hurdles also remain. But real progress is evident and the impact of SBCs could be substantial both economically (cutting manufacturing costs by reducing the amount of structural materials needed) and environmentally (more energy-efficient designs with lower material requirements that make reuse and recycling faster and cheaper). The full list can be read in the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025 report, and like the three examples above, all of the developments chosen for inclusion are grounded in science and have been scrutinized by a global network of over 300 trusted academics and researchers. So what makes some new technologies take off while others fail to get off the ground? The answer, as this year's selection reveals, is that they solve urgent problems at exactly the right moment, and that they emerge when the supporting infrastructure is ready, when regulatory frameworks can adapt and when society actually needs what they offer. But identifying which technologies have this winning combination requires rigorous methodology. The AI Trend Analyzer that helped create our top 10 list draws insights from millions of published research papers, mapping patterns that reveal which technologies are gaining sustained scientific interest. Alongside this, the global expert network ensures diverse perspectives shape the selection, while the ecosystem readiness assessment reveals whether the world is actually prepared for these technologies to succeed. This transparent, evidence-based approach reflects something fundamental about why this report works: trust. The Top 10 Emerging Technologies report has credibility not because of who publishes it, but because of the rigorous methodology behind the results. That methodology has repeatedly identified technologies that have gone on to create system change. The innovations in this year's report may not be household names yet, but they represent the next wave of breakthroughs already gaining momentum in labs around the world.

From Safer Cities To Healthier Lives: The Top 10 Emerging Technologies Of 2025

For more information on the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2025, visit wef.ch/amnc25 and share on social media using the hashtag #amnc25, or #2025#. Tianjin, People's Republic of China, 24 June 2025 -As cities become more connected, collaborative sensing is enabling vehicles, traffic systems and emergency services to coordinate in real time - improving safety and easing congestion. This is just one of the World Economic Forum's Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025 that is expected to deliver real-world impact within three to five years and address urgent global challenges. In collaboration with Frontiers, the report spotlights breakthrough technologies at their inflection point where scientific progress meets real-world application. Chosen for their novelty, maturity and potential to deliver meaningful societal benefit, they reflect advances in both innovation and resilience. This year's cohort reveals four key trends: trust and safety in a connected world, next-gen biotechnologies for health, redesigning industrial sustainability, and integrating energy and materials. "Scientific and technological breakthroughs are advancing rapidly, even as the global environment for innovation grows more complex," said Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director, World Economic Forum. "The research provides top global leaders with a clear view of which technologies are approaching readiness, how they could solve the world's pressing problems and what's required to bring them to scale responsibly." This year's list builds on past themes, reaffirming health, sustainability and urban resilience as top priorities. Technologies such as collaborative sensing, autonomous biochemical sensing and green nitrogen fixation demonstrate ongoing innovation in these fields where urgent challenges persist. They also signal growing momentum to develop scalable solutions to chronic disease, environmental impact and infrastructure strain. The report outlines what is needed to bring them to scale: investment, infrastructure, standards and responsible governance, and calls on business, government and the scientific community to collaborate to ensure their development serves the public good. This year's edition highlights a trend towards technology convergence. For example, structural battery composites combine energy with storage design, while engineered living therapeutics merge synthetic biology and precision medicine. Such integration signals a shift away from standalone innovations to more integrated systems-based solutions, reshaping what is possible. "The path from breakthrough research to tangible societal progress depends on transparency, collaboration, and open science," said Frederick Fenter, Chief Executive Editor, Frontiers. "Together with the World Economic Forum, we have once again delivered trusted, evidence-based insights on emerging technologies that will shape a better future for all." Trust and safety in a connected world: 1. Collaborative Sensing Networks of connected sensors can help vehicles, cities and emergency services share information in real time. This can improve safety, reduce traffic and respond faster to crises. 2. Generative watermarking This technology adds invisible tags to AI-generated content, making it easier to tell what is real and what is not. It could help fight misinformation and protect trust online. Sustainable industry redesign: 3. Green nitrogen fixation New ways to make fertilizer using electricity instead of fossil fuels could cut pollution and carbon emissions. It also means a more sustainable way to grow food. 4. Nanozymes These lab-made materials act like natural enzymes, but are stronger, cheaper and easier to use. They could improve medical tests, clean up pollution and support safer manufacturing. Next-generation biotechnologies for health: 5. Engineered living therapeutics Scientists are developing new therapies using helpful bacteria that are carefully designed to deliver treatment from inside the body. This could make long-term care cheaper and more effective. 6. GLP-1s for neurodegenerative diseases Drugs originally used for diabetes and weight loss are now showing promise in slowing diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. These treatments could offer new hope where few options exist today. 7. Autonomous biochemical sensing These small, smart sensors can monitor health or environmental changes around the clock without needing wires or people to check them. They could help detect pollution or illness early, saving time and lives. Energy and material integration: 8. Structural battery composites Materials that store energy and support weight, like in cars or planes, can make electric vehicles lighter and more efficient. This helps reduce emissions and improve performance. 9. Osmotic power systems By capturing energy from where saltwater meets freshwater, these systems can produce clean electricity. They are a promising source of steady, low-impact power in coastal areas. 10. Advanced nuclear technologies New, smaller nuclear designs and alternative cooling systems offer safer, lower-cost clean energy. As energy demand grows with electrification and AI, these reactors could play a key role in building reliable, zero-carbon power systems. Each technology was evaluated through a rigorous process, including expert nominations, literature review, peer assessment and analysis of adoption conditions. The report also includes strategic outlooks, readiness assessments and pathways for real-world implementation. Now in its 13th edition, the Top 10 Emerging Technologies report provides trusted foresight to help leaders navigate scientific and technological change. Drawing on the expertise of scientists, researchers and futurists, the report identifies ten innovations expected to scale within five years and deliver wide societal benefits. The 2025 report was produced in collaboration with Frontiers and selected through a global process involving over 300 experts from the World Economic Forum's Global Future Councils, the University and Research Network, the Frontiers editorial network, and co-chairs Mariette DiChristina and Bernard Meyerson. The 16th Annual Meeting of the New Champions will take place from 24 to 26 June 2025 in Tianjin, People's Republic of China, under the theme "Entrepreneurship for a New Era". The meeting will convene over 1,700 leaders from business, government, civil society, academia, international organizations, innovation and media to explore entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges.