Posey's Tips & Tricks
My 2025 Tech Predictions -- How Did I Do?
Time to revisit my five major predictions for last year -- from AI adoption and Windows Recall to automation and Teams extensibility -- to see which calls landed, which missed and what the results say about 2025.
Every year, I like to use my last Posey's Tips and Tricks column of the year to make technology predictions for the upcoming year . I also like to write a separate column to take a look back at the predictions that I made the previous year to see how I did. My track record seems to vary widely from one year to the next. Some years nearly all of my predictions have come true, while at other times I have gotten next to nothing right. So with that said, let's take a look back at last year's predictions.
Prediction 1: AI Adoption Takes a Brief Pause
Last year, I predicted that because AI was being deployed so rapidly, organizations would take a step back and question whether the frantic pace of adoption made sense from a business standpoint.
Needless to say, I got this prediction very, very wrong. AI adoption accelerated in 2025 and companies continue to invest heavily in AI.
Prediction 2: Microsoft Pulls Windows Recall
The second prediction that I made last year was that because of the backlash against Windows Recall, Microsoft would scrap the feature. For those who might not be familiar with Windows Recall, it is a Windows 11 feature that takes a screen capture every five seconds and uses AI to figure out what was on your screen. A search engine allows you to search for previous activity. As you can imagine, this feature has raised serious privacy concerns.
Unfortunately, Microsoft did not abandon Windows Recall. Instead, Microsoft has made Windows Recall optional and has introduced encryption for Recall data, but recall itself is alive and well. Score 0 for this prediction.
Prediction 3: Microsoft Goes Subscription Only
My third prediction was that Microsoft would completely move away from perpetual licenses and go the way of Adobe and so many others by making its products subscription only. Thankfully, this particular prediction did not come true.
Microsoft is continuing to expand its subscription models and it is becoming increasingly difficult to purchase perpetual licenses, but those licenses are still available if you look hard enough for them.
Prediction 4: Microsoft Makes a Renewed Push to Automate Everything
This prediction centered around the idea that Microsoft would place a heavy emphasis on task automation. I tend to think of these efforts as being "Digital Transformation 2.0." My prediction was based around some of the work that Microsoft was doing around Copilot and Power Platform and it also took into account Microsoft adding Python capabilities into Excel.
This is prediction came true in a big way. One of the biggest themes of Microsoft's 2025 Ignite conference was that of using agentic AI to automate practically everything.
Prediction 5: Teams Becomes a Platform
Each year, I like to wrap up my list of predictions with one prediction that is plausible, but that is also a longshot. My longshot prediction for 2025 was that Teams would become less like an application and more like an operating system. I was envisioning Microsoft making Teams super extensible through low code / no code. I was also expecting a Teams app store and even a GitHub repository consisting of Teams automations and extensions that others had developed.
Even though this one didn't play out in quite the way that I was expecting, I think its fair to say that my longshot prediction mostly came true. Teams is indeed more extensible than it once was, and Microsoft has given us the ability to add things like apps and workflows.
For those who are keeping track, I got two of my five predictions right, for an accuracy score of 40 percent. It will be interesting to see if I do better with my 2026 predictions.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.