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Looking at 2025 and beyond: the trends we will uncover for AI, cloud and emerging tech

  • Writer: Liam Dodd
    Liam Dodd
  • Jun 30
  • 6 min read

Updated: Jul 11

The developer landscape is shifting faster than ever. AI agents are moving from buzzword to reality. Cloud deployment has become universal. Security threats are multiplying alongside AI's expanding attack surface. At SlashData, we don't just track these changes; we decode what they actually mean for the companies building developer tools and platforms.


For our 30th wave of Developer Nation, we're expanding our focus areas, refining our intelligence gathering, and improving our methodology to ensure our research remains the most relevant and actionable in the industry. Professionals across the full breadth of the development sector — CTOs, product and program managers, engineers and DevOps teams, and more — rely on that intelligence. 


Moschoula Kramvousanou, CEO talks about our research focus for 2025

Why now? Because as the technology landscape evolves, vendors are finding it increasingly challenging to understand what their developers truly need and how they truly work. We're introducing new research areas and enhanced methodologies based on direct feedback from leading technology companies who depend on our insights to make critical product and strategy decisions.


The result is our most comprehensive survey yet, designed to give you the intelligence that actually drives business outcomes.


Why This Intelligence Matters Now

The technology sector is experiencing its most significant shift since the mobile revolution. AI capabilities are reshaping every development workflow. Cloud infrastructure has become invisible but critical. Security requirements are evolving faster than security practices.


Companies making decisions based on outdated intelligence – or worse: vendor marketing – are missing the real opportunities and risks. Our H2 2025 research cuts through the noise to deliver the insights that actually drive successful developer products and strategies.


Whether you're deciding where to invest AI development resources, how to position cloud tools, or which developer segments to prioritise, this intelligence gives you the foundation for decisions that matter.


Core Intelligence: AI Agents and Security Reality Check


AI Agents: Cutting Through the Hype

Everyone's talking about AI agents, but who's using them? We're asking over 10,000 developers worldwide about their real experience with agentic architectures. Not the marketing promises, but the ground truth. Which platforms are gaining genuine traction? What specific tasks are developers successfully automating? How well do developers understand core concepts like Model Context Protocol compared to how well vendors think they do?


We're asking over 10,000 developers worldwide about their real experience with agentic architectures. Not the marketing promises, but the ground truth.

This intelligence emerged from conversations with major AI platform providers who need to understand whether their educational and marketing efforts are translating into adoption and where the genuine market opportunities lie. We're also investigating developer familiarity across the full spectrum of agentic AI platforms and frameworks, providing comprehensive competitive intelligence for this rapidly evolving space.


DevSecOps: The Security Gap Analysis

With AI agents expanding attack surfaces and security breaches dominating headlines, we're conducting a renewed investigation into DevSecOps. We're mapping the critical gap between developers' expressed security concerns and their actual implementation practices: examining the frequency of security checks, CI/CD pipeline ownership, and the implementation of security guardrails.


Previous SlashData research revealed security as a top developer concern, but practice consistently lagged behind stated urgency. Now we'll provide definitive insight on whether the industry is finally catching up, and what real-world implementations actually look like.


Cloud Intelligence Trends: Beyond Backend Specialisation


Universal Cloud Reality

Starting H2 2025, we're surveying all cloud users: not just backend specialists.

We're breaking down the artificial barriers in cloud research that have limited the breadth of understanding we can provide. For years, we limited detailed cloud questions to backend developers, but with over 90% of developers now using cloud services, that approach missed the full picture and critical insights.


Starting H2 2025, we're surveying all cloud users: not just backend specialists. This expansion gives you comprehensive insight from both the developers configuring cloud tools and infrastructure and those using cloud services in their daily development work. The difference in perspectives between these groups often reveals critical gaps in product positioning, user experience design, and feature prioritisation that can make or break adoption strategies.


Cloud-Native Deep Dive

We've significantly expanded our cloud-native development tracking to capture the real adoption patterns and preferences across emerging technologies and methodologies. With our survey scale spanning thousands of backend developers, you'll get unprecedented visibility into which cloud-native approaches are actually driving adoption versus which ones are generating buzz without substance. 


Data Residency and CSP Intelligence

We're also introducing comprehensive tracking of data residency compliance requirements and how they influence cloud deployment decisions. Combined with our enhanced cloud service provider preference analysis and expanded cloud-native research, these three focus areas reflect the growing complexity of cloud decision-making. Our CSP clients have shown particular interest in understanding how developers navigate these interconnected challenges, as regulatory requirements increasingly shape technical architecture choices.


Developer Program Benchmarking: AI Integration and Sample Code

SlashData's developer programme benchmarking has become a cornerstone for leading technology companies understanding where they excel and where they need to improve. For years, our benchmarking has enabled clients to directly compare their developer programmes against competitors, providing critical insights into how they fit within developers' core workflows and decision-making processes. This established expertise allows us to speak with authority about industry-wide trends and pain points.


AI Assistant Integration

Building on our benchmarking foundation, we're now tracking the integration of AI assistants and tools as a core programme feature. The largest companies in our network are aggressively pursuing these capabilities, but questions remain: How important is this to developers? Which developer segments care most? Our expanded benchmarking will give you clarity on where to invest your AI support efforts and how to position these against competitor offerings.


Sample Code: The Industry's Biggest Failure Point

Our extensive benchmarking work has consistently revealed that vendor-supplied sample code is where the entire industry falls short of developer expectations. This wave, we're conducting our most comprehensive sample code analysis yet. We’re examining what features developers actually value, their biggest frustrations, and the specific scenarios where they turn to sample code versus other resources.

We're also having developers rate familiar vendors across multiple sample code dimensions: relevance, discoverability, production applicability, and currency. Combined with our curated understanding of developer preferences and pain points, this will provide a complete picture of how sample code impacts developer adoption and satisfaction. If you're not measuring up, you won’t know exactly where to focus your improvements.


Specialised Sector Intelligence


Gaming Industry Transformation

The gaming sector is navigating unprecedented change, but one thing remains constant: the quality of games continues to reach new heights. While the creative output has never been stronger, the developers and studios behind these exceptional experiences are facing significant challenges. Our upcoming State of Game Development report (coming November 2025) will provide comprehensive profiling of game developers to understand their current landscape, technology choices, and perspectives, with an additional focus on how AI tools are helping or hindering their work, adding crucial 2025 context to this analysis.


We've enhanced our profiling capabilities to distinguish between technical roles, creative roles, and non-technical support staff. These are critical segmentations for companies targeting different aspects of the gaming development pipeline. This granular approach allows engine providers, tool creators, and platform companies to understand exactly which roles are most receptive to their solutions and what specific challenges each segment faces in their daily work.


XR Reality Check

Despite major moves like the Apple Vision Pro, XR hasn't achieved mainstream presence. Our XR Landscape report will provide updated intelligence on who's actually working in this space, plus 10-year predictions from developers across all sectors. Are XR developers more optimistic than the broader market? Do younger developers see more potential? The answers will likely shape XR investment strategies.


AI at the Edge

Edge computing and AI/ML are converging rapidly, creating new opportunities and challenges for developers and the companies serving them. This has become a growing topic of interest that's increasingly important to many vendors with the proliferation of small advanced models that can run effectively at the edge. We're conducting comprehensive research into which edge AI/ML projects are gaining real traction beyond proof-of-concept stages, what specific frameworks and development approaches developers prefer, and where the current pain points create the biggest opportunities for better tooling and platforms. This research covers the technical requirements and the developer experience challenges that determine success in this emerging market.


IIoT Developer Journey

We're also investigating how Industrial IoT developers first entered the field, focusing on their initial development board experiences and early learning journey. This research helps companies in the IIoT space understand how they stack up against competitors in terms of developer onboarding and initial experience; critical factors for long-term ecosystem adoption.


That’s not all

In addition to these comprehensive research areas, we offer client-exclusive questions designed around your specific intelligence requirements. This bespoke research capability ensures you're not just getting industry-wide insights, but the targeted data that directly informs your unique strategic challenges and opportunities.

The 30th wave of Developer Nation is currently collecting responses from around the world. If you want to help shape these insights, have your say


You can be the first to know when these insights become available by subscribing to our newsletter. Or you can get in touch and we will make sure to get you all the intelligence you need. 


About the author

Liam Bollman-Dodd, Senior Market Reseach Analyst

Liam is a former experimental antimatter physicist, and he obtained a PhD in Physics while working at CERN. He is interested in the changing landscape of cloud development, cybersecurity, and the relationship between technological developments and their impact on society.


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