New advances in technology, such as gen AI, agentic AI, and quantum technologies, are developing at breakneck speed, leaving C-suite leaders little time to determine which ones can deliver value at scale and which will leave them searching for a business case. Choosing the wrong technological solutions could lead to wasted investment, stalled innovation, and missed opportunities for securing a competitive advantage.
Despite the drawbacks, leaders must decide quickly to identify the technologies that will enable their organizations to capture impact at scale. Additionally, this imperative is applicable to industries such as tech and digital, as well as to traditional industries such as banking, retail, and automotive.
To track the next wave of technology, we convened more than 100 executives from 22 countries at the annual McKinsey Technology CIO Conference in Kitzbühel, Austria. This year, attendees addressed a pressing question: How can businesses move beyond the hype and ensure emerging technologies drive real impact at scale?
In this post, we discuss five major takeaways that emerged from the conference, including AI’s effect on leadership, emerging technology’s central role, the importance of seamless execution, resilient digital infrastructures, and tech for all industries.
AI is redefining leadership
AI is no longer just an additional tool in the tech stack; it is fundamentally redefining leadership, IT operations, and talent development. As AI agents become increasingly capable of executing intricate workflows, organizations must ensure they have a solid data foundation in place. Without it, they risk adding unnecessary complexity to workflows rather than driving efficiency.
The advent of gen AI also is inherently changing how we understand leadership. Many decisions C-suite leaders make will be informed by or delegated to AI, giving leaders more freedom to make critical strategic choices. To strategically leverage AI in the decision-making process, leaders will need to embrace a mindset of lifelong learning and approach AI with a clear purpose for the future of their organization.
Despite the exciting potential of these technologies, we often see that many companies are slow to shift away from the traditional mindset of leadership, which signifies a major threat to companies and their ability to adapt and evolve with the speed of technology. In a multidisciplinary and technology-driven environment, it is imperative that leaders embody this change by challenging traditional perceptions of business to ensure senior leadership and the organization itself can embrace and drive change.
Emerging tech exploration is accelerating, but large-scale adoption remains limited
The emergence of AI has made many executives pay closer attention to new technologies and consider how they could create significant business value. The potential of agentic AI, for example, is a major new theme that promises to transform ways of working across many areas of business. Hyperscalers have rapidly adopted gen AI–enabled agents and quickly developed low-code tools.
As we recognize 100 years of quantum in 2025,1 we continue to see significant breakthroughs in quantum technology, including quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communication. Massive advancements in error mitigation and correction and logical qubit demonstrations hold the most short-term potential for industries such as pharmaceuticals, mobility, chemicals, and finance. These leaps forward in quantum are supported by rising public investment, which totaled approximately $42 billion in 2023, signaling to leaders that they should start formulating their quantum strategies.
Execution determines the impact of today’s technology
Technology alone isn’t the differentiator—to set organizations apart, it must be paired with flawless execution. While AI, automation, and resilience were central themes at the conference, attendees discussed challenges (such as compatibility with legacy tech stacks, solid data foundations, human in the loop, and ethical and security considerations) with not only integrating these innovations into long-term business strategies but also ensuring organizations fully adopt tech solutions.
But building up an organization’s execution muscle requires the right combination of technology skills, talent management, and a targeted approach to sourcing new solutions. During many conversations, change management was the hot topic, which is particularly important for industries that have not yet experienced years of digital transformation, such as the public sector.
Resilience outperforms faster execution
The fast development of and significant investment in new digital capabilities have dominated C-suite leaders’ agendas in the years during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. But as cost pressure and expectations from customers and leadership increase, the theme of resilience has become crucial, particularly when considering how to develop and deploy AI responsibly and securely. Geopolitical uncertainties, such as tariffs and trade controls, and the growing complexity of large-scale operations demand that businesses respond by building robust, adaptable, and scalable digital infrastructures to sustain long-term growth. Data and cloud platforms continue to play a vital role in this effort, enabling agility across all business functions while helping organizations focus on sustainable transformation rather than short-lived trends.
Technology transformation is for all industries
Throughout the two days together at the conference, industry lines did not seem to exist. Technological transformations are no longer just for industries close to technology, such as banking, insurance, or telecommunications. Today, any sector or organization can think about how they could rewire their business, talent, data, and technology using a strategic road map and can determine how to ensure that technology can be scaled for impact.
Value from technology will require cross-disciplinary collaboration between both the business and the enterprise tech function. And as change continues to accelerate, the connection between different disciplines will be critical to unlocking impact. Close collaboration between chemists and technologists, for example, will be the key future enabler for pharma and chemical players, while the collaboration of hardware and software players is essential to realizing the power of quantum computing risks.
Across breakouts, conversations, and keynotes, we heard that the next wave of advancements cannot be achieved by technological excellence alone. These five takeaways demonstrate that technology could revolutionize industries and has the potential to deliver trillions of dollars in potential annual impact. We are already looking forward to what’s on the horizon and discussing the imminent surge of new technological advancements at next year’s event.
Anna Wiesinger is a partner in McKinsey’s Düsseldorf office, Henning Soller is a partner in the Frankfurt office, Sven Blumberg is a senior partner in the Istanbul office, and Martina Gschwendtner is a consultant in the Munich office, where Thao Dürschlag is an associate partner.
The authors wish to thank Hannah Hoehnke, Kimberly Beals, and Marie Heller for their contributions to this blog post.
1 See the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology website.