AI-generated image for representation purpose
2025 was a year when technology didn’t just move forward. It accelerated in ways how people learn, work, and build. If the past few years were about the rise of smartphones and personal gadgets, 2025 was something more deeper – the emergence of AI – not just for professional usage but as personal assistants.Across industries, a new class of AI system known as Agentic AI developed from early experiments to real deployment. These systems didn’t just generate texts or respond to questions the way traditional chatbots did. Instead, they could take actions, manage tasks, make decisions and operate autonomously across business workflows. Enterprises began using agentic AI to process data, respond to customer queries, monitor systems, and resolve problems in real-time.For the first time, AI wasn’t just assisting humans. Instead, it was starting to work alongside them.At the same time, AI-generated photos and videos flooded the internet. Developing realistic photos and videos with just a simple prompt became a reality, with tools capable of producing full scenes, dynamic characters, and complex lighting without a camera. Brands, influencers and even media organisations began using AI-generated media in marketing, storytelling and production.While this triggered a wave of scrutiny and privacy concerns, the result was a new race not only among brands and organisations, but among consumers switching from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Google Nano Banana to other tools.
The rise of Agentic AI
Vivek Ganesh, Regional Vice President at OutSystems India said that the most important shift seen in enterprise technology in 2025 “is the rise of agentic AI, not as a concept, but as something organizations can finally operationalize at scale.”“This has unlocked a new level of productivity, with business tasks like data processing, customer query responses, and problem resolution now automated, enabling teams to focus on higher-value, strategic work,” he added. “With AI systems becoming increasingly autonomous and interacting with real-time data, governance, security, compliance, and auditability become just as important as innovation. Companies are no longer asking ‘How fast can we adopt AI?’ Instead, the question has shifted to, ‘How do we adopt it responsibly, securely, and in alignment with regulations and business integrity?’. The unprecedented efficiency enabled by AI agents is also driving a transformation in the types of AI tools organisations seek.”“However, it is crucial to note that agentic AI will not replace people; rather, it is re-humanizing work by removing the mundane and enabling developers and business teams to focus on strategy, creativity, and outcomes. It is this potential in bringing about scalable capability, business impact, and workflow transformation that makes agentic AI the defining technological innovation of 2025,” he stated.Amit Agrawal, President, Techno Digital believes that “Indian enterprises are re-architecting their digital foundations as AI becomes the dominant workload of 2025. What we are witnessing is a decisive shift in compute placement where performance, latency, and data sovereignty are forcing workloads to move closer to the point of creation. Advances in decentralized cloud infrastructure, edge inference, and real-time IoT analytics are collapsing the distance between data and decision-making. As a result, industries like smart manufacturing, logistics, telecommunications, and modern retail are achieving millisecond-level responsiveness, autonomous operations, and unprecedented continuity across distributed environments.”Pratik Shah, Managing Director, India & SAARC, F5 said that “as agentic AI integrates into workflows, APIs will become the primary control layer, requiring continuous behavioral security and real-time governance.”
“Preparing for long-term ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ threats will also accelerate post-quantum cryptography planning and early deployment in critical systems. This shift from reactive controls to a unified, platform-driven approach will be central to protecting digital infrastructure. In 2026, the organizations that lead will be those that strengthen API resilience and build security into every layer of their application ecosystem, turning resilience into a durable foundation for innovation and trust,” he told TOI.
AI moved from smartphone apps to OS
Integration of AI into smartphones picked pace, moving from app into operating system integration. From Google Gemini directly integrated into Android phones to Apple’s iPhone 17 line-up, and Windows devices running native AI assistants, these weren’t simple Q&A tools. AI is now used to edit photos, draft emails, summarize long reads, plan trips and much more – all with one hand access on smartphones. Chitranshu Mahant, CEO and co-founder of Primebook India, told TOI that 2025 marked AI’s transition from a tool users open to “an always-present layer across operating systems, devices and workflows.” He said:“One defining milestone of 2025 was the shift of AI from standalone apps and tools to deep system-level integration. AI moved beyond being something users actively opened to becoming an always-present layer across operating systems, devices, and workflows. This transition will shape the next decade by redefining the personal computing landscape. It will transform how people interact with technology, from manually issuing commands for each task to now having systems that can understand context, automate multi-step workflows, and proactively assist users across learning, work, and creation.”A Realme spokesperson echoed Mahant’s view who said “One of the defining tech milestones of 2025 was AI evolving from an optional feature to a core part of how smartphones work. Across the industry, intelligence has moved on-device, working quietly in the background to power smarter imaging, adaptive performance, and personalised experiences. At realme, this shift is reflected in innovations like our segment-first dual-chip systems and NEXT AI capabilities, which enable smoother gaming, advanced computational photography, and real-time optimisation based on user behaviour.”
Explaining how companies are making AI more practical and useful for consumers, the spokesperson said “Guided by the NEXT AI pillars, we focused on making AI practical, intuitive, and deeply embedded into everyday experiences. Instead of AI for novelty, we used it to remove friction across core use cases. Industry-first, on-device innovations like AI Edit Genie, AI Inspiration, and AI Party Mode enable effortless creation, while AI works seamlessly in the background to optimise imaging, gaming performance, thermal efficiency, and battery life across our GT, Number, and Narzo series.”
AI PCs become mainstream
2025 also saw AI PCs becoming mainstream, driven by the need for faster processing, privacy and offline intelligence. Vineet Gehani, Senior Director – Personal Systems, HP India said that “2025 marked a pivotal moment where technology in India moved from adoption to acceleration. AI became deeply practical – powering how India’s workforce learns, creates, and collaborates at scale. We saw a strong shift toward AI personal computing, where intelligence lives on the device, enabling faster performance, better security, and more personalized experiences.”He continued “At HP, this evolution was especially visible. The rise of AI PCs helped redefine productivity for India’s hybrid workforce; whether it was a creator in a metro city, an SMB owner or a student in a Tier 2 city. On-device AI reduced reliance on constant connectivity, improved data privacy, and unlocked smarter workflows, making advanced computing more accessible and relevant.”“2025 reminded us that when innovation is built with local context and global intent, it makes a meaningful difference,” he concluded.Mahant, CEO and Co-Founder, Primebook India said:“The rise of AI-powered personal devices in 2025 reinforced a fundamental shift in user expectations: people no longer see AI as a feature, but as a default layer of interaction. Devices like those powered by Gemini or the latest iPhone capabilities showed that users now expect systems to understand intent, context, and continuity across tasks.”“This shift influenced our roadmap to design computing as a layered experience where AI is deeply integrated into the operating system alongside Cloud PC. AI simplifies everyday interactions by guiding users, reducing friction, and supporting workflows in real time, while Cloud PC extends computing power when tasks exceed local hardware limits and helps maintain continuity across tasks and devices, thereby preserving context as work scales or shifts. Together, they enable capable, future-ready computing, without depending on expensive devices, aligning with how users learn, work, and create over time.”Amit Luthra, MD, Lenovo ISG India said:”As the year draws to a close, Indian enterprises are entering a more exacting phase of their AI journey, one defined less by aspiration and far more by outcomes. As per the Lenovo CIO Playbook 2025, AI spending in India is increasing 2.7 times, yet 49% of organizations remain in pilot mode, constrained by the imperative to demonstrate sustained returns. This inflection point is sharpening CIO focus, accelerating a shift from isolated experimentation toward stronger governance, infrastructure readiness, and AI deployments that can withstand scale, scrutiny, and regulatory expectation.”Continuing further, Luthra said: “Equally consequential is where AI is deployed. With 63 percent of Indian organizations operating AI workloads on hybrid or on-prem environments, priorities around data sovereignty, compliance, and cost control are clearly shaping infrastructure strategy. As adoption deepens, limitations tied to power availability, transparency, and data locality will increasingly distinguish those that simply connect systems from those that fundamentally advance capability.”
A year of big hardware shifts
This shift coincided with a major leap in hardware. Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, unveiled earlier this year, became the defining symbol of AI acceleration. The AI chip race escalated with both traditional and new players joining in to build bigger, faster, more autonomous AI systems. While Intel seems to be struggling to compete with Nvidia, tech giant Google developed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for AI/ML as an alternative credible to Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI hardware.Mahant of Primebook told TOI that global investment in AI infrastructure “distorted the memory and storage ecosystem.” As large AI data centers absorbed high-end hardware, availability for consumer devices tightened.“Hardware costs increased without corresponding gains in everyday user experience, and affordability worsened, especially outside premium markets where price sensitivity is highest. It exposed a growing imbalance where cutting-edge hardware increasingly serves large-scale AI systems rather than end users.Addressing this will require better long-term planning across the industry, balancing the surge in AI data-centre spending with more thoughtful forecasting and capacity allocation for consumer devices, and using software and system design to deliver performance without pushing cost and access pressures onto end users,” he said.
Security takes centre stage
The year also changed how enterprises handle digital frauds and security threats. Vijender Yadav, CEO & Co-founder, Accops told TOI “The key lesson from 2025 was that fragmented security stacks and checklist-based compliance are no longer viable. Enterprises recognised the need for platform-agnostic, crypto-agile architectures that ensure absolute data residency while enabling hybrid work at scale”. “2025 marked a clear inflection point for digital advertising. Fraud and media quality risks no longer looked abnormal—they increasingly resembled genuine user behaviour, making traditional metrics like clicks, impressions, and even basic viewability insufficient,” Dhiraj Gupta, CTO & Co-founder, mFilterIt said. “This is why our focus was on building deep, full-funnel visibility—tracking users from first exposure through conversion, validating intent, attention, and outcomes, and using AI-ML to proactively make optimizing decisions with transparency and confidence. By combining event-level intelligence, behavioural analysis, and self-learning algorithms, we enabled brands to block low-quality and fraudulent traffic early, protect brand safety across automated environments, and optimize campaigns based on what truly drove value,” he added.“The broader industry takeaway is clear: brands that prioritised transparency, independent validation, and AI-led intelligence were better equipped to navigate uneven performance, identify gaps in traffic quality, and increasingly sophisticated threats.”Finally, the overlap of these developments — agentic AI taking over tasks, Blackwell chips redefining compute, generative media becoming ubiquitous, and AI assistants reaching every consumer device — created a year unlike any other. Technologies that once felt experimental suddenly became infrastructure. As 2025 closes, one thing is clear: the year will not just be known for the launch of new gadgets. It introduced a new era of computing – one where intelligence is embedded everywhere, acting as the engine that powers devices, industries, and everyday life.
