Tech trends: What to expect in 2025

India's tech landscape is evolving as people experiment with AI at home, paving the way for advancements in FinTech, healthcare, 5G, and cloud computing.

Technology can sometimes feel like magic—especially for those who aren’t neck-deep in gizmos and gadgets. Yet, whether we realise it or not, huge changes are brewing in India’s tech space. They promise to touch everyday life in ways as simple as paying for groceries and as complex as running entire factories.

Huge changes are brewing in India’s tech space.

A key insight comes from a recent conversation with D Shiva Kumar, operating partner at Advent International, and Ramesh Srinivasan of McKinsey. “Employees today are using AI on themselves before they use AI at work. That’s a very good thing because they have firsthand knowledge. With no other technology has this happened. We didn’t learn Excel on our own before we went to a company Excel sheet. For the first time, we are learning about AI on our data sets and then moving to a company data set,” said D Shiva Kumar.

This observation highlights a new trend: people are experimenting with AI in personal ways—such as checking how AI might draft an email—before ever deploying it in corporate environments. It’s a fundamental shift that sets the tone for how technology adoption might unfold in the coming years.

That said, here are the big things to expect next year.

1. FinTech and Health care

In 2018, who would have guessed that crisp currency notes might soon feel like relics of a bygone era? Yet that’s exactly what India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has achieved—making money transfers so effortless, even across borders, that it’s as ordinary as sending a text. Suddenly, everyone seems to carry a universal digital wallet, no matter where they go.

What’s next? The same core team, led by Nandan Nilekani, that brought the idea of digital payments to life is now hard at work on a “Health Stack.” This digital layer aims to make healthcare services as accessible to every Indian as digital payments have become. Aadhaar, the identity layer that paved the way for UPI and the “Finance Stack,” set the precedent by democratising finance. Now, there’s talk of using a similar playbook for healthcare, tying it all together with financial tools. A glimpse of how this might look emerged during the pandemic: real-time updates via smartphone, seamless vaccination appointments, and digital proof of immunization. The efficiency of that system is already well documented.

For now, specifics on the Health Stack remain sparse, with members of the founding team simply saying it’s “chugging along well.” Some early hiccups are to be expected, but 2025 is shaping up to be the moment when this visionary project could finally step into the spotlight.

1. 5G’s Big Leap (and Early Steps Toward 6G)

New networks are rolling out promised faster internet—think smooth video calls without buffering or devices that can communicate with each other instantly. Meanwhile, India is already eyeing the next horizon: 6G. But ambition meets reality when it comes to funding.

A recent article in the Economic Times highlights the hurdles. The government has allocated just 0.03% of the GDP ( ₹1,100 crore) of the FY2025 budget for telecom related research. But the actual will be just ₹400 crore. So, to imagine India will hold 10% of 6G patents is absurd. To place that in perspective, China has set aside $1.55 trillion. The US too isn’t lagging. Finger’s crossed, India will play catch up.

3. The Cloud and the Edge

In the past, software and data were mainly stored on bulky servers sitting in corporate offices. Today, “cloud computing” hosts most data online, making it accessible anywhere—from laptops, phones, and tablets. However, some tasks need instant, local processing; that’s where “edge computing” comes in. Think of a small data centre placed close to a farm or a factory. By processing data on the spot, it reduces internet bottlenecks and speeds up decision-making.

And all these take us back to where we started from: The biggest surprise is that many people in India are trying AI tools at home before using them at work. That’s a twist on how things used to be, when employees would first learn new software—like Microsoft Excel—through office training sessions. But now, like D Shiva Kumar said, people are tinkering with AI on their own. It means they already know the ropes, which could change how future technology gets introduced in corporate environments.

It’s helpful then to remember the spirit behind Shiva Kumar’s words: the more people experiment with AI and other new gadgets in their personal lives, the more informed and confident they become in using them at work. That kind of grassroots expertise could be a game-changer for the digital future.