If you're a Zoomer, this one's for you: Everything Gen Z needs to know about the 2025 tech landscape

Here's the lowdown on all the tech from 2025 that you, dear Zoomer, should know about.

January 14, 2026

If you're a Zoomer, this one's for you: Everything Gen Z needs to know about the 2025 tech landscape

Here's the lowdown on all the tech from 2025 that you, dear Zoomer, should know about.

If you are a person who exists on the internet—which, if you’re reading this, you are—you’ve probably experienced the same influx of “wrapped” marketing and commemorative digital artifacts that the rest of us have. While the campaigns have reached every generation of internet users, I personally feel it’s as Gen Z a thing as anything could be—I mean, it was originally ideated by a Gen Z intern at Spotify. And what’s not to love about it? It wraps everything you’d want to know about your year in one neat, aesthetic, easy-to-access place.

I spend a decent part of my workday at Stack Overflow writing for and thinking about the Gen Z perspective. So as Spotify Wrapped day came and I started to flip through the endless Instagram stories of people’s questionable but valid music taste, I got to thinking—what if I made a Gen Z wrapped for Stack Overflow? So here it is: everything a Zoomer needs to know about the 2025 tech landscape—from the AI bubble, to agents, vibe coding, and the job market—wrapped perfectly just for you. And if you’re like, “Congrats or sorry, I’m not reading all that,” don’t worry, I’ve added a TLDR; and links at the end of every section. Let’s get into it.

The concept of an AI bubble...

This was the question of 2025: is AI a bubble? And if it is, when will it pop?

If, like me, you are not old enough to remember the dot-com boom, let me give you just a quick rundown of what they mean by a “bubble bursting.” In the late 90s/early aughts (hey, that’s when I was born!), people started getting really excited about the internet. Brand-new companies started springing up everywhere, attempting to profit from the gold rush, and investment firms were dumping absolute bucketloads of money into them.

They called this the dot-com bubble—a pretty cool name if you ask me. At its peak in 2000, the hype around the internet resulted in $300 billion dollars being poured into these companies. And, oh boy, let me tell you, these companies were overvalued—Pets.com raised $82.5M in an IPO and went bankrupt nine months later. When the hype bubble burst and their seed money dried out, many of them went under, leading to a 77% drop in the Nasdaq index just two short years later.

This is the exact thing many folks worry about with the new influx of money around AI. Just this year $1.5 trillion dollars was invested into AI worldwide. I mean, that’s a lot of pennies. Plus, people are concerned about the circular nature of some of these investments, since all of the big guys are sort of just passing the same $100 billion back and forth through deals and investments. And the stocks are growing, but at what cost? Some are saying the U.S. is making one big bet on AI that we better hope we win.

So, is AI a bubble or what? Well, your intrepid Gen Z writer may not have the answer about if and when the bubble will pop—if I did, I’d be way more famous—but it is something to watch out for if you’re a young person early in your career. If and when the bubble pops, the following recession will be everyone’s problem. However, one of the important things to note for early-career professionals is that many AI startups are becoming merger and acquisition targets much quicker than they would have been in the past. According to Crunchbase, there’s been a 13% increase in global startup acquisitions this year. And they’re getting their pennies: the dollar volume for these deals has increased 115% in 2025.

For you, my dear Zoomer reader, this means working at a startup may lead to a shakeup pretty quickly in your career when the acquisitions come in—faster than they did in the past, if the above numbers are to be believed. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (it can be quite exciting, actually, and my GenX colleague says cashing in equity is nice), with the general uncertainty around the AI bubble and the job market for young people, it’s just something to think about as you’re looking at your next career move.

Ultimately, AI is the type of technology that’s readyset to disrupt everything, but most of all itself. We saw this pretty clearly when GenAI quickly moved into agentic AI in what feels like the span of a few months. What that means for us young people is yet to be seen, but I’m keeping my eyes peeled for that bubble pop, and you should too. If you’re looking for somewhere to start, we did a pod on whether AI is a bubble or a revolution with HumanX and Crunchbase earlier this year. Shoutout to our GOAT host, Ryan Donovan, for this one.

TLDR: A lot of money is being spent on AI in circumstances closely resembling the dot-com bubble. Startups are getting bought out quickly, and big chunks of money are moving in circles. When and how it will pop, no one knows, but Gen Z beware.

Articles:

• Whether AI is a bubble or revolution, how does software survive?
• Is GenAI the next dot-com bubble?
• Is AI a bubble or a revolution? The answer is yes.

Agents, iykyk

I would be remiss to move onto other things without first talking a bit about the word that’s been everywhere the last few months: agents. If you need the lowdown on what exactly an agent is, my fellow Stack Overflow writer Eira May (hi Eira!) wrote about it at length during the original agent boom in early 2025. The quick definition of agents are AIs that are focused on making decisions, not generating content. They operate like very advanced automation systems, able to work through a long list of complicated tasks towards a specified end goal for the user. And, you know, what’s cool about agents is they’re…just little guys, you know? They’re little helpers, trying to make your life easier. And ultimately they’ve beat out GenAI as the buzzword of the year, and for good reason (Ryan wrote an excellent blog on why, which you should check out).

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