IEEE’s newly released 2030 Technology Megatrends Report sketches a near-future in which artificial intelligence becomes the connective tissue linking advances in health care, energy systems, infrastructure, and even the physical world. Among its bolder forecasts: by 2028, gene therapy and other forms of genetic engineering will be used routinely to treat a range of diseases, propelled in part by rapid progress in AI.
“We are seeing a fundamental shift in how technology evolves,” said IEEE Fellow Dejan Milojicic, who chairs the Industry Advisory Board of the IEEE Future Directions Committee, the body behind the report. AI, he argued, is no longer a stand-alone tool but a foundational layer embedded across critical systems. Milojicic is also a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Fellow and a vice president at HPE Labs in Milpitas, California.
The report frames its outlook around five “megatrends”—AI, energy, health, space, and physical AI—each defined not as a single invention but as a cluster of mutually reinforcing technologies. To identify what belongs in those clusters, IEEE convened 166 experts from 38 countries spanning six continents, with representation from industry, academia, and government. Those participants selected 30 “breakthrough technologies” and then evaluated both the technologies and the megatrends using five measures: probability of success, benefit to humanity, technical maturity, market uptake, and the expected timeframe for adoption.
One conclusion runs through the entire assessment: AI is advancing at a pace the authors say exceeds earlier industrial, electrical, and digital transformations. Milojicic described the result as a shift toward AI functioning like general-purpose infrastructure—something society increasingly builds around rather than merely uses.
That momentum, however, comes with constraints. The report points to limitations in computing capacity and energy supply as major bottlenecks for scaling AI further. It also warns that widespread deployment will demand substantial workforce adjustments. Milojicic emphasized that adoption does not have to be absolute; organizations can choose targeted uses rather than treating AI as an all-or-nothing overhaul.
The experts argue that technical progress alone won’t determine whether AI-enabled systems spread. Long-term success, they say, will depend on the quality of the human–AI relationship—particularly factors such as security, trust, explainability, and effective policymaking. In a news release accompanying the report, Mary Ellen Randall, IEEE’s president and CEO for 2026, framed the document as a shift away from isolated hype toward a broader question: how overlapping breakthroughs will shape daily life. She added that safety, trust, and human connection should steer innovation over the coming decade.
Health care emerges as a standout domain. The report assigns its highest “impact to humanity” score—4.93 out of 5—to personalized medicine, citing AI-accelerated progress in individualized diagnostics and treatments, often driven by biotech startups. The timeline is aggressive: within about two years, the experts expect gene therapy and genetic engineering to become common tools across therapeutic areas. Over the next five years, they anticipate earlier detection methods moving from research settings into routine clinical use. The report also points to advances in building simple synthetic proteins—engineered molecules designed from scratch to carry out targeted tasks in the body, such as attacking tumors or replacing missing enzymes.
Energy, by contrast, is portrayed as a system under mounting pressure. The report notes that rising AI-driven electricity demand is outstripping the energy sector’s ability to respond. Today’s technology backbone—data centers, networks, and computing hardware—already accounts for an estimated 10 percent of global electricity use, according to the news release. To keep pace, experts predict that energy storage capacity in developed countries will double within the next two to three years. Milojicic also observed that the energy industry has seen relatively little breakthrough innovation in recent years, making the coming ramp-up especially challenging.
Why it matters
If the report’s timelines hold, patients could see faster diagnoses and more tailored treatments within this decade, while companies and governments confront the power and computing limits of AI growth. The projection that tech infrastructure already consumes about a tenth of global electricity underscores how closely AI’s future is tied to energy investment. Watch for whether storage expansion, workforce retraining, and rules around explainable and secure AI can keep up with the speed of adoption.