The Future of Technology: A Strategic Analysis

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.”)

Frequently Asked Questions

• What are some of the key technology trends driving innovation?
• How can companies navigate the evolving technology landscape?
• What role does artificial intelligence play in shaping the future of business?
• What are the implications of regional and national competition in the tech industry?

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.

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.

New and Notable Trends

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 the 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.

Conclusion

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 rise of autonomous systems. Autonomous systems, including physical robots and digital agents, are moving from pilot projects to practical applications.
• New human–machine collaboration models. Human–machine interaction is entering a new phase defined by more natural interfaces, multimodal inputs, and adaptive intelligence.
• Scaling challenges. The surging demand for compute-intensive workloads is creating new demands on global infrastructure.
• Regional and national competition. Global competition over critical technologies has intensified.
• Scale and specialization are growing simultaneously. Growth on these vectors is enabled by innovation in cloud services and advanced connectivity.
• Responsible innovation imperatives. Trust is increasingly the gatekeeper to adoption as technologies become more powerful and personal.

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.