Sustainable Intelligent Ecosystems

Over the past year, the Sustainable Intelligent Ecosystems theme has moved from experimentation to mainstream adoption. AI now reaches over one billion users worldwide, with competitive advantage shifting from large foundational models to specialized vertical solutions. At the same time, the falling cost of ambient sensors is accelerating their widespread deployment, creating an invisible layer of intelligence.

Yet this rapid growth has exposed a critical paradox: while access to AI tools is expanding, the infrastructure needed to sustain them remains highly unequal. Energy has become a major constraint, with data-center and AI electricity use projected to double by 2030, outpacing clean-energy development. At the same time, disparities in access to computing power, semiconductors, GPUs, and other hardware are widening.

Consequently, current trends have shifted focus from democratizing AI systems to securing the foundational infrastructure and resources that make AI work: renewable energy, sovereign computing capacity, and trusted API-based frameworks for sharing unique datasets.

When it comes to emerging trends, the advances made in the last year in the “Deploying Autonomous Systems at Scale” trend have given rise to two separate axes of progress: the cognitive and physical autonomy of systems. These two dimensions, despite being closely intertwined, are progressing at different speeds each with its own research frontier, industrial ecosystem, and societal implications. Agentic AI is reshaping how digital systems process information and achieve cognitive tasks, while Generalist Robots are redefining how systems interact with, and transform, the physical world.