The shotgun is making a splash in the military as a way of giving soldiers more firepower. This article describes the XM-25:

Judge Dredd smartshell shotguns to hit Iraq in ’09

From the article:

Essentially, the idea is to have a gun which shoots special, extra-big 25mm slugs – sort of a cross between a normal bullet and a 40mm launched grenade. The projectile is thus big enough to put clever stuff in it, but small enough that a weapon carried by a normal person can shoot it a long way without the recoil knocking the user flat. (Everyone loves 40mm grenades, but they are so tubby that a shoulder launcher of reasonable weight and recoil can’t throw them very fast – hence not very far either).

What you put in your big fat .98-calibre** slugs is a small HE-frag warhead – but that’s not the clever bit. The clever bit is the electronic precision time fuse, which is set wirelessly by the gun’s systems at the moment of firing. This means that the slug will explode at exactly the distance from the muzzle you want.

You can see what this kind of “smart shell” looks like in the following video, which describes the AA-12 automatic shotgun: