The global technology landscape is undergoing major changes driven by rapidly moving innovations in technology. These are increasing demand for computing power, gaining attention from management teams and the public, and accelerating experiments. These developments are against the backdrop of rising global competition as countries and businesses compete to ensure leadership in the production and application of these strategic technologies.
This year’s McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook has 13 technology trends (“Baker’s dozen”) with the potential to transform global business. Today’s executives face increasing complexity, expanding emerging solutions and building trust in a world where the boundary between digital and physical and centralized decentralized and decentralized continues to blur. The insights in this report will help business leaders determine which of these frontier technologies are most relevant to their companies by showing how others are beginning to apply today. These findings arise from an analysis of quantitative measures of interest, innovation, equity investment, and talent that underpins and explores the underlying technologies, uncertainties and questions surrounding them. (For more information about our research, see the sidebar, Research Methodology.)
This outlook highlights transformational trends that drive innovation and address key challenges across the sector. Artificial intelligence stands out not only as a wave of powerful technology in itself, but also as a foundational amplifier for other trends. AI will become increasingly generated in combination with other trends, such as accelerating advancements within individual domains, unlocking new possibilities at intersections, accelerating robot training, advance scientific discoveries in bioengineering, and optimizing energy systems. The evolution of AI solutions in the market is increasingly combining aspects of trends that have been analyzed separately as previously applied AI and generated AI, so this year we will be examined together.
Even if excitement is built around AI applications and their use cases, we recognize that maximizing AI’s potential across sectors requires continuous innovation to manage computing strength, reduce deployment costs, and drive infrastructure investments. This requires a thoughtful approach to safety, governance and adaptation to the workforce, creating wider opportunities for industry leaders, policymakers and entrepreneurs.
Newly worthy of attention
In addition to AI growth, another new trend we chose to highlight in this year’s report is Agent AI. This is rapidly emerging as a major focus of interest and experimentation in business and consumer technology. Agent AI combines the flexibility and generality of the AI Foundation model with the ability to act worldwide by creating “virtual colleagues” who can autonomously plan and execute multi-stage workflows. Although quantitative measures of interest and stock investment levels are still relatively low compared to more established trends, Agent AI is the fastest growing in trends this year, indicating potentially innovative possibilities.
AI is also an application-specific semiconductor, a major catalyst for another trend we will highlight this year. Moore’s Law and the semiconductor layers of the technology stack have been a key enabler of other technology trends, but semiconductor innovations have skyrocketed as reflected in quantitative metrics such as patent counts. These innovations address the exponentially high demands for computational power, memory and networking for AI training and inference, and the need to manage costs, heat and power consumption. This has created a number of new products, new competitors and a new ecosystem.
Technology trends also have a variety of profiles along the dimensions analyzed. AI is a widely applicable general purpose technology with use cases in all industries and business functions, and therefore many innovations and interests, and is rapidly expanding across the business environment. Quantum technology profiles vary. Quantum computing can have a transformational impact on certain critical domains, such as encryption and materials science, and fundamental technologies continue to be developed. While the recent announcements by the tech giants in particular have sparked a growing interest, the real business impact requires more technological advancements to make quantum computing practical. Other trends and subtrends vary depending on the dimensions analyzed and wait for proactive development, providing business leaders with a variety of approaches depending on the industry and competitiveness.
From the rise of robotics and autonomous systems to the orders of responsible AI innovation, this year’s technology development highlights a future in which technology is more adaptable, collaborative and essential to solving global problems. This is illuminated by themes cutting across trends this year.
The rise of autonomous systems. Autonomous systems, including physical robots and digital agents, are moving from pilot projects to real applications. These systems don’t just perform tasks. They are beginning to learn, adapt and collaborate. Among other skills, autonomy is moving towards a wider deployment through tuning logistics for the last mile, navigating dynamic environments, and acting as virtual colleagues. A new human machine collaboration model. Human-machine interactions enter a new phase defined by more natural interfaces, multimodal inputs, and adaptive intelligence. From immersive training environments and tactile robotics to voice-driven copylots and sensor-enabled wearables, technology is becoming more sensitive to human intentions and behavior. This evolution transforms the story from human exchange to enhancement. This allows for more natural and productive collaboration between people and intelligent systems. As the machine improves the interpretation of the context, the operator-coctor boundaries continue to dissolve. Scaling challenges. The burgeoning demand for computationally intensive workloads, particularly from Gen AI, robotics and immersive environments, is creating new demand for global infrastructure. Data center power constraints, physical network vulnerabilities, and increasing computational demand expose cracks in global infrastructure. However, the challenge is not just technical. Supply chain delays, labor shortages, and regulatory frictions over grid access and permitting are slowing down deployment. As a result, scaling means solving troubling real-world challenges in talent, policy and implementation as well as technical architecture and efficient design. Regional and national competition. Global competition for critical technologies is intensifying. The country and businesses have doubled funding technology initiatives such as sovereign infrastructure, localized chip manufacturing, and quantum labs. It’s not just this driving force for self-sufficiency. It is to reduce exposure to geopolitical risks and own the next wave of value creation. As a result, there is a new era of high-tech-driven competition where the nation stakes key industries. Scale and specialization are growing at the same time. The growth of these vectors is possible through cloud services and advanced connectivity innovations. On the one hand, we see the rapid growth of general-purpose model training infrastructure in vast, power-hungry data centers, while on the other we observe that low-power technologies embedded in mobile phones, cars, home controls and industrial devices promote innovation “at the edge.” This creates an ecosystem that offers large language models with incredible parameter counts, and has increased the range of domain-specific AI tools that can be run almost anywhere. Leaders balance centralized scale with localized control. Consider a modular microgrid for custom robots for clean energy or niche manufacturing. Responsible innovation is essential. As technology becomes more powerful and personal, trust becomes more and more adopted gatekeeper. Companies are facing increasing pressure to demonstrate transparency, equity and accountability, such as AI models, gene editing pipelines, or immersive platforms. Ethics is no longer the right thing to do, it is a strategic lever in deployment, allowing you to accelerate or stall scaling, investment, and long-term impact.
The following diagram illustrates how frontier technology can work together to provide innovative solutions in the future.
A year after the macroeconomic environment and wider market debilitating caused a significant decline in technology stock funding across several trends in our frontier technology investment environment, and was often rebounded in 2024. Robotics was soaked in 2024 to recover to a higher level than was achieved two years ago. Two of the highest levels of stock investment, the future of energy and sustainability technologies, and the future of mobility, overall declined in 2023, while the former bouncing back in 2024 (exhibition).
Our Baker dozens of technology trends formed in 2025 highlight the great potential of emerging technologies and the need for strategic alignment in the future that drives AI. For executives, success depends on identifying high impact domains where they can apply these trends, invest in the talent and infrastructure they need, and address external factors such as regulatory change and ecosystem preparation. By fostering collaboration, filling ecosystem gaps and maintaining a long-term vision, leaders can accelerate adoption and drive organizations to the next wave of technological change. People who act with focus and agility will not only unlock new values, but will shape the future of industry and the future of today’s emerging frontier technology.
