The Top IT Trends Shaping 2025

Whether you work in an IT service management (ITSM) role or another part of the IT organization, staying current on the latest IT trends is important. Some IT trends seem to take a long time to gain mainstream traction, while others can quickly infiltrate the status quo. The latter of these trend types can catch one unaware – one minute, they are touted as “the next big thing,” and the next, they are part of the status quo.

The IT world is experiencing this with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-powered capabilities. Before the success of ChatGPT in 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) was a “watching brief” IT trend for many IT organizations. AI-enabled capabilities were being added to some IT management tools, but in 2024, most started adding GenAI capabilities. More importantly, their customers began to use and benefit from these GenAI capabilities. Unsurprisingly, GenAI dominates the IT trends shaping 2025.

The non-GenAI IT trends shaping 2025

These trends almost feel like “also-rans,” given the attention being paid to GenAI’s opportunities. However, they’re still important to IT professionals and their organizations in delivering against the needs and expectations of their organizations and business colleagues.

These trends, taken from 2025 ITSM.tools research (and as such have an ITSM bias), include:

• ITIL/ITSM “advanced” capabilities
• Value demonstration
• People (including attitude, behavior, and culture (ABC))
• Enterprise service management
• Employee experience management.

Each of these is covered in summary below before the top two IT trends shaping 2025 are covered:

• Governance (including AI governance)
• GenAI

The top non-GenAI IT trends shaping 2025

While AI is by far the hottest IT trend right now, it’s also important to recognize that GenAI, in particular, might potentially play a part in the other IT trends shaping 2025:

•  ITIL/ITSM “advanced” capabilities – IT organizations have long adopted what might be deemed “core” ITSM or ITIL capabilities. These usually relate to IT support operations and keeping IT services available. This trend’s lofty position (third behind the two AI trends) is indicative of IT organizations finally appreciating that they can and should do more across the much broader IT service delivery and support canvas. The inclusion of GenAI capabilities in ITSM tools will likely facilitate the adoption of additional ITSM capabilities with minimal people resource additions.
• Value demonstration – demonstrating an IT organization’s value to its parent business has long been one of the IT “Holy Grail” needs, even with the focus on value in 2019-20’s ITIL 4 guidance. IT organizations still struggle to articulate their business value, which is not helped by their traditional IT metrics focusing on operations rather than outcomes. Experience-level targets will help, but this is dependent on the success of another IT trend – digital employee experience (DEX) or employee experience.
• People (including attitude, behavior, and culture (ABC)) – people management continues to be a top IT trend, but how much is done to address the associated issues (including employee well-being)? The good news is that GenAI again offers capabilities to help – from performance management through career development to identifying well-being issues and recommending appropriate remedial actions.
• Enterprise service management – this is possibly the oldest IT (or ITSM) trend still on IT agendas. IT organizations were slow to adopt it before the global pandemic and the rapid need for digital transformation. However, the last five years have seen its continued growth and expansion. The “enterprise service management” name might do it a disservice because the reality is that the extension of ITSM capabilities to other business functions, facilitated by the corporate ITSM tool or platform, is really digital workflow enablement. This now includes the wider use of the GenAI capabilities in ITSM tools.
• Employee experience management – the origins of this IT trend are, believe it or not, already ten years old. However, the need to provide better IT capabilities (to employees) is actually older if the changes IT organizations started to make two decades ago (related to the Consumerization of IT) are considered. This will continue to be a priority IT trend for most IT organizations. However, their ability to progress will likely be limited without sufficient resources (people and the right tooling).

The GenAI IT trends shaping 2025

It’s not surprising that GenAI is a top IT trend shaping 2025; AI was the top IT trend at the start of 2024. However, the fact that governance (including AI governance) is the number one IT trend (for 2025) is.

This is likely AI rather than traditional IT governance, but it’s governance nonetheless. And it’s great to see that IT professionals and their organizations are seeking to ensure that their use of AI is effectively governed.

This SysAid blog, 10 Ways AI Improves IT Service Desk Operations and Outcomes, provides more information on many of the popular GenAI use cases in ITSM. However, very little has been written (by ITSM tool vendors) about the governance of AI capabilities. So, here’s a good start.

What AI governance needs to include

Effective AI governance needs to focus on some key areas, including:

•  Ethical guidelines and principles – these should articulate the acceptable uses of AI and help your organization navigate the issues of AI bias, privacy, security, and fairness.
• Transparency and explainability – for example, with GenAI capabilities, people need insight into how generative models are trained, the data they use, and how decisions are made.
• Accountability mechanisms – this involves assigning responsibility for AI oversight, compliance, and risk management within your organization.
• Risk assessment and mitigation – this includes evaluating and addressing risks related to disinformation, intellectual property infringement, data privacy, and security vulnerabilities.
• Bias and fairness checks – for example, bias detection and mitigation measures that include regular audits of model outputs, targeted data cleaning, and diverse training data sources.
• Privacy and data protection – this involves data anonymization protocols, secure data handling practices, and compliance with regulations.
• Regulatory compliance and standards alignment – your organization must align its AI practices with new legal and industry regulations and standards related to the corporate use of AI.

If you want to find out more about the top IT trends shaping 2025, take a look at the SysAid Mega Trends Report.