Letter from Editor
Technology no longer merely assists us—it supercharges us. This is transforming industries, economies, and customer expectations. Consumers today expect instant, always-on experiences, whether
they’re streaming from a remote trail, interacting with an AI agent to negotiate a better rate, or communicating via satellite when terrestrial towers aren’t available or fail. Enterprises now
delegate real decision-making authority to autonomous agents that can close sales, reroute freight in real time, and restore networks faster than humans could. Society itself is being rewired:
rural clinics instantly summon surgeons using holographic and surgical robots, factory floors operate with sub-millisecond robotic coordination, and entire economies swing on microseconds shaved
from high-frequency trading algorithms.
The gift delivered to the end user is seamless and manifests itself as some kind of invisible technological magic. But the burden falls entirely on service providers and enterprises who must deliver that magic while hiding the complexity, cost, and risk from the customer who simply wants it to “work.” That paradox—supercharging human capability while insulating people from the heroic engineering required—defines 2025 and threads through every contribution in this year-end Top Technology Trends edition of Pipeline.
A year ago, in our last Top Trends issue, we predicted 2025 would be the breakout year for agentic AI, quantum-ready networks, and ubiquitous satellite-direct connectivity. The predictions arrived faster and louder than expected: T-Mobile and Starlink delivered nationwide satellite texting months ahead of schedule, AST SpaceMobile launched its first commercial 5G satellites, Google’s Willow chip demonstrated error rates low enough to make fault-tolerant quantum computing a reality, and EPB flipped the switch on the nation’s first commercial quantum network in Chattanooga. Just to name a few.
Yet 2025 also delivered two chilling wake-up calls on the security front: the Salt Typhoon campaign, in which Chinese state actors lived undetected inside at least nine major U.S. carriers for months stealing location data and wiretap traffic, and the world’s first large-scale cyberattack executed entirely by AI, when Chinese threat actors hijacked Anthropic’s Claude Code chatbot to autonomously conduct espionage against thirty global entities—performing 80 to 90 percent of the work with almost no human input. Acceleration without security, we learned again, can be devastating. We must proceed and transform very carefully.
Pipeline’s own 2025 coverage tracked the arc in real time: Cybersecurity Assurance unpacked the European Union’s regulatory mandates, the push for zero-trust architectures in 5G cores, and AI-driven threat hunting amid rising supply-chain vulnerabilities; Mobile & Wireless chronicled the arrival of non-terrestrial ubiquity; the AI, Automation, and Analytics issue dissected the leap from generative to truly agentic systems; Network Transformation mapped the road to intent-based network operations; and Digital Customer Experience insisted none of it matters if the customer feels friction.
Agentic AI moved from curiosity to core infrastructure. Where generative models merely answered questions, today’s agents take action—negotiating contracts, resolving complex tickets, and even defending networks autonomously. Gartner predicts 80 percent of customer-service interactions will be handled by autonomous agents by 2029, cutting costs by 30 percent while raising satisfaction scores. The same autonomy that delights customers can also be weaponized at machine speed—witness the Claude Code incident that proved agentic systems can replicate entire hacker teams with little effort.
Edge inference has quietly become the largest architectural shift since the cloud itself. A year ago, running trillion-parameter models required hyperscale data centers and terawatt-hour power budgets. Today, inference engines and specialized silicon push those models onto commodity, edge hardware, delivering single-digit-millisecond latency while keeping sensitive data on-premise. Privacy, regulatory compliance, and raw performance all improve simultaneously—turning the edge from a simple relay
