Cybersecurity has always been about staying ahead of technology, but since the late 1990s, however, technology has mostly been synonymous with Information Technology. Since then, the information age paved the way for emerging technologies that go beyond the realm of computers and are set to to reshape societal paradigms at a fundamental level.
The cybersecurity community now needs to widen its aperture to encompass the full range of these new technologies and adapt its role accordingly in this evolving landscape.
Artificial Intelligence:
A lot has been said and written about AI. Like many new technologies, it could be argued that AI is progressing through its classic hype cycle.
The slowdown in AI and tech stocks toward the end of 2025 could indicate that the field has entered the “Trough of Disillusionment” stage.
However, tangible productivity statistics tell a different story: the world is already experiencing substantial impact from AI adoption, and this is just the beginning. For example, AI’s influence on science and research is seen in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation. These figures highlight how profoundly AI will accelerate human progress in the coming years.
Beyond productivity, AI has significantly shaped geopolitics and the strategic positioning of global powers around this transformative technology.
In 2025, the United States released its AI Action Plan, while its BigTech companies started forming strategic and economic partnerships with countries including the UK, France, Canada, the UAE, and India.
China responded by releasing its own Global AI Governance Action Plan just days later. It also launched the BRICS AI Industry Cooperation Network in Shanghai and formed partnerships with nations such as Brazil, Nigeria, and Kenya.
The competition extended into the economic sphere. The US is prioritizing innovation through its BigTech sector, while China is expanding its influence via open-source models. There were mutual tariffs being imposed between the two countries, and a battle of export controls on GPU chips and rare earth materials used in building those chips.
Blockchain:
AI was not the only emerging technology influencing the global economy and geopolitics in 2025.
Blockchain-based digital assets experienced a major push toward mainstream adoption in the Western hemisphere, driven partly by their growing role in economic competition.
Under the new administration, the United States positioned itself as the “Crypto capital of the world.” Key steps included establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) and the Digital Assets Stockpile (DAS), which brought this strategy sharply into focus.
Bitcoin was framed and promoted as a digital alternative to gold, while internationally traded, dollar-backed stablecoins were positioned as a means to safeguard the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency.
In the US, the GENIUS Act and the Clarity Act introduced greater regulatory support and guardrails, enabling institutional investors to allocate more capital to various digital assets.
In the UK, the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act came into effect, providing provides legal certainty for digital assets and encouraging institutional investment.
As the global market capitalization of the digital assets economy approached $4 trillion, questions began to arise about the security of the overall ecosystem, and in particular, the resilience of its underlying encryption algorithms..
Quantum Computing:
In 2025, global annual investment in quantum technologies reached an unprecedented $33.28 billion.
IBM updated its quantum computing roadmap, advancing the target for a scalable fault-tolerant quantum computer (FTQC) to 2029, a full year earlier than the previous 2030 timeline.
The cybersecurity community has long recognized the disruptive potential of FTQC. NIST, the NCSC, and the European Commission have published post-quantum migration roadmaps, but these have not received meaningful updates to reflect an accelerated schedule.
Most existing roadmaps prioritize transitioning encryption algorithms in traditional IT systems to quantum-resistant standards. However, far less attention has been given to updating the digital signature algorithms that secure blockchains and digital assets.
This gap creates a concerning asymmetry, where the ECDSA algorithm, widely used in popular digital assets, is more vulnerable to quantum attacks than RSA.
Once scalable FTQC systems become a reality, ECDSA’s vulnerability could carry substantial economic and geopolitical consequences for the digital assets ecosystem and the broader domains it now influences..
Energy:
With these innovations increasingly embedding technology into every aspect of our lives, the demand for energy to support them is growing at a comparable pace.
Global electricity demand rose by an estimated 3.3% to 4.5% in 2025, driven in large part by the expansion of data centers and AI infrastructure.
Major tech companies started responding directly to these pressures. Google recently acquired clean energy developer Intersect to better support the energy needs of its data centers. Microsoft has pursued similar strategies, establishing partnerships with Constellation Energy for reliable nuclear power and with Helion for future fusion energy, while announcing its Community-First AI Infrastructure initiative to protect local residents from rising energy costs associated with AI.
From a cybersecurity perspective, cyberattacks targeting energy and utility organizations increased by approximately 40% year-over-year in 2025, underscoring the growing vulnerability of this critical layer.
Where does it all lead?
With all these developments, it is possible to conceptualize a future technology stack to look like the following; energy at the core as the foundational layer, quantum computers as the next generation of hardware and compute, AI as the operating system of the future, and a digital economy, built on blockchain and digital assets, running as the primary application on top of the entire stack.
With this speculative view of the future, it is easy to see how cybersecurity will have a critical role to play at every layer of this new tech stack.
If the cybersecurity industry is to defend against novel threats that will be targeting each layer of the stack, it must start looking beyond traditional IT frameworks and keep pace with this evolving technology landscape.
If you’re interested in exploring what this next tech revolution means for your organisation – and how cybersecurity leaders can stay ahead of it – we invite you to join the conversation. To learn more or take part, please RSVP via the CIO or CISO track.
