Sure! Here’s the translation of the provided text into American English:
—
The design and manufacturing of specialized chips for key sectors of the economy is emerging as one of the main technological trends for 2025, according to the scientific team at the Eurecat technology center. Additionally, it is expected that generative artificial intelligence will continue its expansion, disruptively integrating with technologies such as robotics and quantum computing, thus broadening its scope and applications.
Another highlighted area will be precision fermentation, which will gain importance in sectors such as agrifood, biomedicine, and environmental sustainability. At the same time, in the realm of sustainability, a rise in technologies designed to protect and enhance natural capital is anticipated. These solutions will be driven by tools like artificial intelligence, blockchain, satellite imagery, and the development of new sensors, marking a significant advancement toward a more sustainable future.
“Eurecat gathers annually the technological trends that will set the course in its areas of specialization, which encompass digital, industrial, biotechnological, and sustainability fields, to provide references to the business and innovation ecosystem, helping it identify the axes where opportunities can arise to anticipate and differentiate itself,” emphasizes Eurecat’s scientific director, Daniel Casellas.
According to the scientific director of Eurecat’s Industrial Area, Ricard Jiménez, in 2025, we will have to face “a significant technological challenge marked by the European Chips Act, which aims to bolster the continent’s competitiveness and resilience in this critical sector, essential for the digital and green transitions.”
Ricard Jiménez states that over the next year, the innovation system “will need to collaborate and work intensively to position a broad range of technological fields in microelectronics at the cutting edge, as a significant opportunity emerges for our country to develop a robust ecosystem around semiconductors.”
In his view, “we will see initiatives aimed at designing and manufacturing the specific chips required for key sectors of our economy, such as automotive, industrial electronics, the Internet of Things (IoT), medical devices, and wearables, among others.”
Additionally, according to Ricard Jiménez, next year will also see initiatives focused on improving the efficiency of these devices to make the industry much more sustainable. Examples of this will be “technologies for semiconductor cooling or materials for chip encapsulation,” he states.
In the digital realm, generative artificial intelligence “will continue to be an expanding technological area throughout 2025, and we will see how applications based on this branch of AI will impact sectors or business processes where creativity is a central element and, in general, will help improve productivity across almost all economic verticals with disruptive applications, new models, improved algorithms, and greater integration with other technologies such as robotics or quantum computing,” notes the scientific director of Eurecat’s Digital Area, Joan Mas.
Business Interest in Investing in Fermentation Technologies
“The evolution in the functional foods sector, new proteins, and new ingredients with technological and health functions is transforming business interest in investing in fermentation technologies,” elaborates the scientific director of Eurecat’s Biotechnology Area, Francesc Puiggròs.
As he explains, “the scientific and technological evolution of this ancestral technology, now a leader in the sector, allows for improvements not only in the functionalities and nutritional value of food products but also provides new distinguishing features in flavor, texture, and food safety, while being compatible with better efficiency in these processes.”
From his perspective, there should be a “special mention of the development of directed fermentation processes using genetically edited microorganism strains, known as precision fermentation, which has enormous potential in the agro-food, biomedicine, and environmental fields in the short term.”
Technologies to Protect, Conserve, and Enhance Natural Capital
According to the director of Eurecat’s Sustainability Area, Miquel Rovira, “there is a growing interest in investing in natural capital, so we will soon see how omics sciences, artificial intelligence, satellite imagery, the use of drones, and the development of new sensors, alongside typically environmental technologies such as ecological restoration and site decontamination, will become prominent to make a challenge that is also an emerging business opportunity a reality.”
In this regard, he emphasizes that “natural capital is the available stock on the planet of renewable and non-renewable resources that provide essential goods and services, including the essential conditions for human existence and from which we derive benefits, such as food, water, wildlife, or forests, among others.”
Therefore, Miquel Rovira asserts, “natural capital must be protected, conserved, and enhanced, and it is here that Eurecat plays a relevant role, as the role of innovation and technology is key.”
Agentic AI, a Small Step Towards General Artificial Intelligence
From the perspective of the scientific director of Eurecat’s Digital Area, 2025 will see the development of a new branch of artificial intelligence, starting to be identified as Agentic AI, which combines different techniques, models, and approaches of artificial intelligence that “lead to a new generation of autonomous agents capable of analyzing data, setting goals, and taking actions to achieve them, all with minimal human oversight.”
This variant of artificial intelligence “will lead to autonomous agents with a degree of cognition in some areas, almost at the level of human cognition, with the ability to autonomously solve dynamically changing problems,” thus, “this new generation of agents will not only capture and analyze contextual data but will also be able to define hypotheses, test solutions, and make the best decisions,” notes Joan Mas.
In some ways, he explains, “agentic artificial intelligence can be seen as a small step towards a higher stage of AI, known as general artificial intelligence or AGI, which is still distant today due to the difficulties machines face in understanding the context in its entirety and learning and reacting following human patterns.”
In parallel, over the next year, the industry will receive support from mobile manipulators (MoMas), which is “a robotic technology that is scaling well from the stages of applied research,” according to the scientific director of Eurecat’s Industrial Area.
Specifically, the mobile manipulators are expected to combine the mobility of autonomous mobile robots with the dexterity of robotic arms, achieving widespread adoption in various industries, such as automotive, logistics, and aerospace. Their ability to navigate complex environments and manipulate objects will continue to automate tasks such as material handling, inspections, and maintenance.
From the digital standpoint, another trend expected to emerge in 2025 comes from the enforcement of the European AI regulatory framework (AI Act), a regulation that will require the certification of AI systems marketed in Europe.
According to Joan Mas, “for those applications where self-certification is not possible, we will see the emergence of notified bodies deploying the corresponding certification procedures to obtain approval from certifying entities, such as the recently created Spanish Agency for Artificial Intelligence.”