Deloitte Consulting Chief Technology Officer Bill Briggs opened a CES panel discussion on Tech Trends 2025 with the declaration that, “the pace of change in technical has never been faster and the magnitude has never been greater.” “How do we translate that into the investments we need to be making and how we think about products and customer experiences?” he asked. Much of what faces us, he stressed, is “more knowable than we feel it is.” In Deloitte’s 16th annual Tech Trends report, the company lists six tech trends, with artificial intelligence as the common thread.

In addition to “AI everywhere,” Briggs identified spatial computing taking center stage; what’s next for AI, the renewed importance of hardware; IT, amplified; solving cryptography in an age of quantum and the Intelligent Core. Briggs asked panelists to comment on the trends from the perspective of their industries.

Regarding AI, Adobe SVP of Experience Cloud Products Amit Ahuja said every brand experience they work with wants to know what it means, whether it’s how to make search better or more interactive experiences. “I’ve heard people say AI is the new UI,” he said.

Deloitte Chief Innovation Officer Deborah Golden noted that spatial computing will enable “productivity and operational efficiencies … and discovery of how to operate in virtual environments.”

Worldwide Head of GTM for Spatial Computing at Amazon Web Services David Randle is particularly excited about the potential of AI powering spatial computing. “We’ll be able to intimately understand how we function with the world,” he said. “We’re now seeing new form factors for wearables that people will don. For the first time, we’ll have the killer app for spatial computing — and something miraculous will happen.”

Toyota Motor North America Group VP of Information Systems and CIO Holly Walters addressed the issue of the Intelligent Core. “There is no front end and back end in this space,” she said. “It’s about customer and team member experience. The business of IT has to change; we can have brilliant tools and data platforms, but if we don’t have an operating model to run IT as a business, how do we make sure that customers are at the focus and team members function in a better way?”

The shift to quantum and quantum encryption is a new paradigm — “frighteningly different” from the faux-threat of Y2K, suggested Golden. “It could be very disruptive,” she said. “A lot of people may know where their important systems are — the crown jewels — but may not know how long they need to be secure.”

She added that cyber criminals are stealing data now with the hope it will be unencrypted “in a day, a month or a year” when quantum comes into play. “Quantum is the gasoline on the fire for AI,” explained Golden. “And it will be here sooner than we expected. Waiting for that to happen is a fool’s errand.”