The global technology landscape is undergoing significant shifts, propelled by fast-moving innovations in technologies. These are exponentially increasing demand for computing power, capturing the attention of management teams and the public, and accelerating experimentation. These developments are occurring against a backdrop of rising global competition as countries and corporations race to secure leadership in producing and applying these strategic technologies.
This year’s McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook provides in-depth perspectives on 13—a “baker’s dozen”—frontier technology trends with the potential to transform global business. Executives today face a mandate to navigate rising complexity, scale emerging solutions, and build trust in a world where the lines between digital and physical and centralized and decentralized continue to blur. The insights in this report can help business leaders decide which of these frontier technologies are most relevant to their companies by demonstrating how others are starting to apply them today. These findings emerge from our analysis of quantitative measures of interest, innovation, equity investment, and talent that underpin each of the 13 trends and explore the underlying technologies, uncertainties, and questions around them. (For more about our research, please see the sidebar, “Research methodology.”)
To assess the development of each of the 13 technology trends highlighted in this report, we collected data on six tangible measures of activity: search engine queries, news articles, patents, research publications, equity investment, and talent demand. For each measure or vector, we used a defined set of data sources to find occurrences of keywords associated with each of the trends, screened those occurrences for valid mentions of activity, and indexed the resulting numbers of mentions on a 0–1 scoring scale relative to the trends studied. The innovation score combines the patents and research scores; the interest score combines the news and search scores. (While we recognize that an interest score can be inflated by deliberate efforts to stimulate news and search activity, we believe that each score fairly reflects the extent of discussion and debate about a given trend.) Investment measures the flows of funding from the capital markets to companies linked with the trend. Data sources for the scores include the following:
In addition, we updated the selection and definition of trends from last year’s report to reflect the evolution of technology trends:
The data sources and keywords have been updated. For equity investment insights into the future of space technologies and quantum technologies, we built on research from McKinsey’s Aerospace & Defense Practice and the Quantum Technology Monitor.
Insights gathered from McKinsey expert interviews were utilized to assign enterprise-wide adoption scores (on a 1–5 scale) for each trend, defined as follows:
This outlook highlights transformative trends that are driving innovation and addressing critical challenges across sectors. Artificial intelligence stands out not only as a powerful technology wave on its own but also as a foundational amplifier of the other trends. Its impact increasingly occurs via a combination with other trends, as AI both accelerates progress within individual domains and unlocks new possibilities at the intersections—accelerating the training of robots, advancing scientific discoveries in bioengineering, optimizing energy systems, and much more. The evolution of AI solutions in the marketplace increasingly combines aspects of trends we previously analyzed separately as applied AI and generative AI, so this year, they are examined together.
Tuesday, July 29th
10:30 – 11:00 a.m. EDT / 4:30 – 5:00 p.m. CEST
Join McKinsey’s Lareina Yee, Michael Chui, and Roger Roberts as they share our latest research on how leaders can capture value from the 13 technology trends that are potentially reshaping industries and creating new growth opportunities. They’ll explore how AI is powering innovation across industries, how technologies like agentic AI and autonomous systems are gaining momentum, and what leaders can do to stay ahead.
Tuesday, July 29th
10:30 – 11:00 a.m. EDT / 4:30 – 5:00 p.m. CEST
Join McKinsey’s Lareina Yee, Michael Chui, and Roger Roberts as they share our latest research on how leaders can capture value from the 13 technology trends that are potentially reshaping industries and creating new growth opportunities. They’ll explore how AI is powering innovation across industries, how technologies like agentic AI and autonomous systems are gaining momentum, and what leaders can do to stay ahead.
Even as excitement about AI applications and their use cases builds, realizing AI’s full potential across sectors will require continued innovations to manage computing intensity, reduce deployment costs, and drive infrastructure investment. This will also demand thoughtful approaches to safety, governance, and workforce adaptation, creating a wide range of opportunities for industry leaders, policymakers, and entrepreneurs alike.
In addition to the growing reach of AI, another new trend we have chosen to highlight in this year’s report is agentic AI, which has rapidly emerged as a major focus of interest and experimentation in enterprise and consumer technology. Agentic AI combines the flexibility and generality of AI foundation models with the ability to act in the world by creating “virtual coworkers” that can autonomously plan and execute multistep workflows. Although quantitative measures of interest and equity investment levels are as yet relatively low compared with more established trends, agentic AI is among the fastest growing of this year’s trends, signaling its potentially revolutionary possibilities.
AI is also the primary catalyst for another trend we highlight this year: application-specific semiconductors. While Moore’s Law and the semiconductor layer of the technology stack have long been key enablers of other tech trends, innovations in semiconductors have spiked as reflected in quantitative metrics such as number of patents. These innovations have come in response to exponentially higher demands for computing capacity, memory, and networking for AI training and inference, as well as a need to manage cost, heat, and electric power consumption. This has given rise to a slew of new products, new competitors, and new ecosystems.
Technology trends also have a variety of profiles along the dimensions we analyzed. AI is a widely applicable, general-purpose technology with use cases in every industry and business function—and thus lots of innovation and interest—and it is scaling rapidly across the business landscape. Quantum technologies have a different profile. Quantum computing has the potential for transformative impact in certain critical domains, such as cryptography and material science, and the basic technology continues to be developed. Recent announcements, particularly by technology giants, have sparked increased interest, but real-world business impact will require even more technology advancements to make quantum computing practical. Other trends and subtrends vary across the multiple dimensions we analyzed, offering different approaches—from watchful waiting to aggressive deployment—to business leaders depending on their industries and competitive positions.
From the rise of robotics and autonomous systems to the imperative for responsible AI innovations, this year’s technology developments underscore a future where technology is more adaptive, collaborative, and integral to solving global problems. This is illuminated by themes that cut across trends this year:
The following illustrations show how different frontier technologies can work together to provide innovative solutions in the future:
After a year in which the macroeconomic environment and broader market weakness provoked significant declines in equity financing for technology across several of our trends, the investment climate for frontier technologies stabilized and, in many cases, rebounded in 2024. Levels of equity investment in trends such as cloud and edge computing, bioengineering, and space technologies increased despite the broader market dip in 2023, while investments in other trends, such as AI and robotics, dipped only to recover to higher levels in 2024 than they achieved two years prior. The two trends with the highest levels of equity investment, the future of energy and sustainability technologies and the future of mobility, declined overall in 2023, but the former bounced back in 2024 (exhibit).
Our baker’s dozen of technology trends shaping 2025 underscores the vast potential of emerging technologies and the need for strategic alignment in an AI-powered future. For executives, success will hinge on identifying high-impact domains in which they can apply these trends, investing in the necessary talent and infrastructure, and addressing external factors like regulatory shifts and ecosystem readiness. By fostering collaboration, bridging ecosystem gaps, and maintaining a long-term vision, leaders can accelerate adoption and position their organizations to drive the next wave of technological transformation. Those who act with focus and agility will not only unlock new value but also shape the future of their industries and the future of today’s emerging frontier technologies.
Lareina Yee is a McKinsey Global Institute director and a senior partner in McKinsey’s Bay Area office, where Michael Chui is a senior fellow at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and Roger Roberts is a partner at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey; Sven Smit is chair of the McKinsey Global Institute and a senior partner in the Amsterdam office.
The authors wish to thank the following McKinsey colleagues and alumni for their contributions to this research: Aamer Baig, Ahsan Saeed, Alex Singla, Alexander Sukharevsky, Alex Zhang, Alizee Acket-Goemaere, Amishi Bharti, Amy Silverstein, Andrea Del Miglio, Andreas Breiter, Andreas Schlosser, Ani Kelkar, Anna Heid, Anu Madgavkar, Arjita Bhan, Bernd Heid, Bharath Aiyer, Bill Gregg, Bill Wiseman, Brooke Stokes, Bryan Richardson, Charlie Lewis, Christian Staudt, Clint Wood, Daniel Herde, Daniel Wallance, David Naney, Delphine Nain Zurkiya, Diana Tang, Egor Kiselev, Eliza Spinna, Emily Shao, Erika Stanzl, Fabian Queder, Gabriel Morgan Asaftei, Giacomo Gatto, Godart van Gendt, Hamza Khan, Henning Soller, Ichiro Otobe, Jacob Achenbach, Jakob Fleischmann, Jawad Mourabet, Jeffrey Caso, Jenny Tran, Jesse Noffsinger, Jim Adams, Jim Boehm, Jonathan Tilley, Joshua Katz, Justin Greis, Karl Grosselin, Kersten Heineke, Kevin F. Lu, Kitti Lakner, Klaus Pototzky, Klemens Hjartar, Luca Bennici, Marc Sorel, Mark Patel, Markus Wilthaner, Martin Harrysson, Martin Kellner, Martin Wrulich, Matt Higginson, Medha Bankhwal, Mekala Krishnan, Michael Bogobowicz, Nandika Komirisetti, Naveen Sastry, Olivia White, Paolo Spranzi, Prasad Ganorkar, Ryan Brukardt, Sebastian Mayer, Sian Griffiths, Sonja Lindberg, Soumya Banerjee, Stefan Burghardt, Stephen Xu, Tapio Melgin, Tarik Alatovic, Thomas Hundertmark, Tom Brennan, Wendy Zhu, Yaman Tandon, Yvonne Ferrier, and Zina Cole.
Special thanks to McKinsey Global Publishing colleagues Daniel Eisenberg, Diane Rice, Janet Michaud, Juan M. Velasco, Kanika Punwani, LaShon Malone, Mary Gayen, Michael Goesele, Nayomi Chibana, Rachel Robinson, Regina Small, Stephanie Strom, Stephen Landau, and Victor L. Cuevas for making this report come alive.
