This year when the World Economic Forum spotlighted the technologies most likely to transform industries, economies, and everyday life, it offered up a mix of breakthroughs already making their way into the mainstream and moonshots on the edge of feasibility (WEF, 2025).
“The technologies in this edition reveal exciting patterns: combining energy systems with advanced materials, using biological approaches to improve human health, reimagining industrial processes for sustainability and creating new foundations for trust in connected systems,” the WEF said when it announced the rankings. “Each represents not just a technical advance, but a path towards more resilient and sustainable societies.”
Some are already in pilot projects, while others are moving out of the lab. All of them point to a future where the physical, digital, and biological worlds are far more entangled than we realize.
Climate forecasts have long been blunt tools: broad, slow to update, and limited in local detail. New AI systems are changing that, generating ultra-high-resolution simulations that can model, for example, how a single street will feel during a heatwave or when rainfall will hit a specific valley.
We’ve been losing the arms race against antibiotic resistance for years. Now, AI-driven molecule discovery is yielding compounds that target bacteria in ways they’ve never seen before. We are on a path to restoring our ability to treat infections that had become untreatable, and buying time to rebuild our medical arsenal.
Think of a city map where you can see every house and every neighbour’s relationship — now apply that to the molecular level. Spatial omics enables scientists to map not just which genes are active in a cell, but also exactly where they are located and how they interact. The result is a three-dimensional view of diseases like cancer, unlocking new precision treatments.
Perovskite-silicon tandem cells are smashing efficiency records while lowering production costs. They’re light, flexible, and can be built into windows, facades, or vehicle rooftops. For households and businesses, this means solar won’t just be something you put on a building, it will be part of the building itself.
Imagine sensors that monitor soil moisture or track wound healing — and then vanish. Made from dissolvable materials, these devices work for weeks or months before breaking down harmlessly. They solve two problems at once: data collection and e-waste.
These are materials that can change stiffness, shape, or colour on command. Picture clothing that adapts to the weather, or aircraft wings that morph mid-flight for optimal performance. They blur the line between product and machine.
Electric batteries have limits for long-haul shipping and aviation. Hydrogen fuel cells, fed by green hydrogen, could fill that gap: offering high-energy, zero-emission power for trucks, ships, and planes. The challenge is to scale production quickly enough to remain competitive with fossil fuels.
By exploiting quantum effects, these sensors can detect minuscule changes in gravity, magnetic fields, or time. That makes them perfect for navigation: in deep oceans, underground, or in space. They could also transform resource exploration and defence.
CRISPR is moving beyond crude edits to finely tuned adjustments, offering drought resistance without yield loss and higher nutrient content without trade-offs. By avoiding the addition of foreign DNA, many of these crops circumvent existing GMO regulations, potentially accelerating climate adaptation in agriculture.
These are dynamic, real-time replicas of entire urban environments. By feeding live sensor data into the twin, city planners can run “what if” scenarios (such as rerouting traffic, testing flood defenses, or simulating energy demand) before making costly real-world changes.
The Deeper Pattern
AI is a through-line, powering climate models, drug discovery, and material design, but it’s the combination of fields that’s revolutionary. A biodegradable sensor in a gene-edited crop. A programmable material informed by quantum sensing. For businesses, this means watching intersections, not just silos. For governments, it means governance that anticipates dual-use risks: a quantum sensor that guides a submarine can just as easily guide a missile. And for individuals, it means recognizing that the next big technological shift won’t always look like a revolution. It might arrive quietly, embedded in a city’s traffic system, a doctor’s treatment plan, or even the food on a plate.