IFI CLAIMS Patent Services: Fast Growing Technologies Look For Circular Economy – “The big 2025 technology story was a recurrence of what we saw in 2024 and 2023: artificial intelligence, and all the ways AI is changing (and will surely transform) the way the world does business and the structure of society. So you would think IFI CLAIMS’ ninth annual list of fastest growing technologies would be filled with the know-how going into the most scorching technology we’ve seen so far in the 21^st century. But it’s not. Those AI building blocks—machine learning, computing based on biological models—have appeared on our list in previous years as the technology was emerging and gaining steam. But AI has pretty much arrived and is currently in its stages of iteration. Now we look to other emerging technologies that we’ve detected in the patent codes; they’re the ones that tend to grow quickly. IFI’s 2025 list is a particularly interesting one because the technologies are so thematically linked. Previous years have surfaced more disparate tech collections. This year, five of the fastest growers relate to batteries or the electrolytic processes around them. Metal also figures heavily with three categories relating to increasing the efficiency around producing it. Two cover the reduction of waste (including one of the aforementioned metal advancements). Just one deals with a medical topic. In fact, most of our fastest growers correlate to the overall idea that the world needs to keep finding ways to produce goods and materials in a more supportable fashion. In fact, sustainability is even more imperative as the machinery of AI hyperscales and its power-hungry data centers consume ever more energy. Simply put: the patent applications are pointing to the fact that the world economy is looking for more circularity. What follows below are IFI’s Top 10 Fastest Growing Technologies for 2025, based on publicly disclosed applications (not grants) put forth by the USPTO. Applications are the better proxy for technologies to come because of the long time lag between patent submission to grant, which is often years. Applications must be published within 18 months, so they serve as a more current indicator for where future technology is headed. Scroll on for the countdown…”