Innovations in 2025: The CTO’s Outlook

Usually, at the end of the year, it’s time to reflect, make resolutions, and summarize results. In the IT market, it’s no different. Big players save their most exciting announcements and findings for the year’s final stretch, making November and December packed with events—summits, workshops, conferences, and roundtables. Last week, I returned from one of the biggest, in my opinion.

AWS re:Invent is an annual premier learning event for the global cloud computing community. Held in Las Vegas, it’s a chance to explore the latest cloud innovations, dive into sessions on generative AI and other cutting-edge tech, participate in hands-on labs, network with industry experts, and enjoy plenty of engaging activities and entertainment.

The event’s vast scope makes it impossible to cover everything. So, I’ll focus on the main takeaways that will shape the first half of 2025 for businesses like Sombra. They are: 

Business trends 2025

Doing Innovation at Scale

To begin with, let’s start with whether you’ve ever wondered, “What is innovation?”. Basically, the keynote watch can be summed up in one phrase – innovation isn’t just about shiny new tech (like GenAI) being pushed into an organization for the sake of looking modern.

 At its core, innovation means solving specific problems for specific clients in better, more effective ways.

Take agile practices, for instance. They’ve been around for years, but if your client is still managing projects with a waterfall approach, introducing agile can bring significant value and feel like innovation in this particular case. Similarly, basic DevOps practices can seem groundbreaking to organizations still reliant on manual software delivery processes.

Talking to CTOs and VPs of Engineering from mid-size non-tech companies, common challenges emerged: cloud migration, automation, app modernization, agile transformations, and data analytics. 

Top challenges for non-tech companies

Thus, the next time you hear about the need for GenAI in every organization, consider this example: applying GenAI to an organization running on waterfall methods, lacking DevOps, and relying on an old tech stack is like hard-hitting a Tesla autopilot system in a 90s sedan. It simply won’t work.

The real goal of innovation is to guide clients from that “old sedan” to a “modern vehicle,” starting with essentials like ABS, cruise control, and better headlights. Only then it make sense to consider autopilot.

To those who want to start innovations, the first steps resonate with AWS’s core principles: 

First steps to innovation

1. Start with the client (Customer Obsession):
   Innovation begins with understanding the client’s value streams, problems, and customers’ problems. This aligns with Sombra’s “Client-Focus” value — putting the client at the center of everything.
   
2. Insist on the highest standards.
   Once you identify problem areas in your client’s processes, the focus should be on achieving the highest quality in those areas. For software-related challenges, this could mean eliminating tech debt to speed up development and reduce the workload on teams. It might involve fully adopting cloud-native practices, leveraging cloud platforms, or implementing API-driven designs to decouple frontends from backends, enhancing flexibility and reducing the cost of experimentation.

This principle particularly resonated with me because it aligns closely with what we do in Application Modernization. Our approach is about identifying inefficiencies, applying higher standards, and not just solving the problem but creating a foundation for ongoing improvements.

Continuous Management > Big-Bang Changes

The final key insight is emphasizing continuous management over big-bang modernization efforts. This took me back to my days as a software lead developer when I fostered a culture of continuous refactoring — embedding it into every sprint, into every user story implementation, even when we were pressed for time. It’s a philosophy best summed up by the quote:

 “Quality is not an action; it’s a habit.”

This is a lesson I see many organizations struggling with. When clients talk about quality issues, the root cause often lies not in the technology itself but in the People-Process-Technology triangle. The weak links are usually the people and processes. Instead of embracing continuous improvement, many opt for one-time “big-bang” projects to address quality issues or attempt to forcefully apply flashy code quality tools that promise instant results at the push of a button. In the end, it leads to a fallback into old habits just a few weeks later. True progress comes when organizations embed a culture of ongoing improvement, treating quality as a continuous journey rather than a one-time fix.

So, once you’ve identified the right areas for innovation and successfully introduced them to your clients, the next big question is: how do you scale this principle across the entire organization?

The AWS approach to this challenge is to empower autonomous teams to drive innovation. Instead of relying on top-down directives from headquarters, innovation should begin at the edges of the organization, where front-line employees face real, everyday challenges. These employees often have the best understanding of pain points but lack the authority to push solutions upward. By giving them the autonomy and tools to act, organizations can foster innovation from the ground up.

Talks with CTOs and VPs of Engineering

For the second time in a row (you can read some of my thoughts about the Gartner IT Symposium here), one recurring theme stood out in all discussions: the struggle to determine the ROI of GenAI investments.

Yurii Nakonechnyi, CTO at Sombra

While cloud providers like AWS actively push boards and C-level executives to adopt AI faster, many organizations are still trying to figure out how to make these investments genuinely impactful. From my observations, companies tend to fall into three main categories here:

1. Companies That Haven’t Found a Proper Application for GenAI

To be honest, I don’t fully believe this category exists. From what I’ve seen, even in organizations where GenAI isn’t officially adopted, employees are often experimenting with it informally. For example, there’s always someone curious enough to try tools like ChatGPT to simplify their day-to-day tasks. This was especially true when ChatGPT launched in early 2023. 

So, rather than these organizations not using GenAI at all, it’s more likely their leadership—CIOs, CTOs, or VPs of Engineering—are unaware of its unofficial use within their teams.

For this type, my advice is to revisit the first part of this piece and begin your AI innovation journey the right way—starting with a clear strategy.

2. Companies That Have Built Basic POCs 

These organizations are in the early stages, where their GenAI experiments have gained some traction with management or clients. However, they now face challenges in scaling their efforts. The hurdles include:

• Establishing mature data practices to continuously feed GenAI engines with clean, relevant data and ensure effective training.
• Optimizing costs as POCs scale to real-world applications, larger user bases, and complex data models.
• Securing client and organizational data when rolling out GenAI to internal teams or external stakeholders.
• Dealing with hallucinations—ensuring GenAI produces accurate and reliable outputs when deployed at scale.

In this case, everything depends on the specific situation, but I believe that 2025 will be a year focused on addressing the challenges mentioned above for these players.

3. Companies That Have Fully Implemented GenAI and Are Observing ROI

This is the rarest category. Of nearly 100 companies I’ve spoken with, only a handful have truly benefited from GenAI by optimizing their processes or reducing costs.

For many companies, the biggest “value” of GenAI has little to do with operational improvements. Instead, it’s about ticking the “AI” checkbox—adding “AI-powered” to their websites or marketing materials to signal innovation. While this may impress clients or investors in the short term, it doesn’t necessarily translate into meaningful results.

Closing Thoughts

The journey to innovation is complex. It demands more than a flashy POC or a checkbox on a marketing deck. At the AWS event, speakers and peers emphasized once again that true ROI comes from solving real business problems, scaling responsibly, and fostering the right culture across the organization.

The path forward requires deliberate effort, strategic thinking, and a relentless focus on value creation. And, of course, Sombra’s team is here to walk this path with you. Just drop us a line.