Top Trends in Emerging Technologies: A McKinsey Report

The global technology landscape is undergoing significant shifts, propelled by fast-moving innovations in technologies that are exponentially increasing demand for computing power and capturing the attention of management teams and the public. This year's McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook provides in-depth perspectives on 13 frontier technology trends with the potential to transform global business.

Research Methodology

The report highlights transformative trends that are driving innovation and addressing critical challenges across sectors. The insights emerge from an 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.

Artificial Intelligence: A Powerful Technology Wave

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands out not only as a powerful technology wave on its own but also as a foundational amplifier of other trends. Its impact increasingly occurs via a combination with other trends, such as accelerating the training of robots, advancing scientific discoveries in bioengineering, optimizing energy systems, and much more.

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.

New and Notable Trends

In addition to the growing reach of AI, another new trend highlighted 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.

Thirteen Frontier Technology Trends

The report identifies 13 frontier technology trends, including application-specific semiconductors, quantum technologies, robotics and autonomous systems, human-machine collaboration models, and more. Each trend has a unique profile along the dimensions of innovation, interest, and equity investment.

Themes That Cut Across Trends

This year's technology developments underscore a future where technology is more adaptive, collaborative, and integral to solving global problems. Themes that cut across trends include:

• The rise of autonomous systems
• New human-machine collaboration models
• Scaling challenges
• Regional and national competition
• Scale and specialization are growing simultaneously
• Responsible innovation imperatives

Investment Climate for Frontier Technologies

After a year in which the macroeconomic environment and broader market weakness provoked significant declines in equity financing for technology across several 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.

Conclusion

The McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 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.