The future of business: 13 tech trends that matter

During a McKinsey Live event, senior fellow Michael Chui, partner Roger Roberts, and senior partner Lareina Yee discussed the McKinsey Global Institute’s fifth annual report on tech trends, which focuses on a baker’s dozen of frontier technologies, grouped in three broader categories:

By far the biggest buzz is around agentic AI, which has emerged rapidly as a major focus of interest and experimentation in enterprise technology. Built on foundational AI models, the technology is potentially revolutionary, as these agents reshape how work gets done by becoming “digital coworkers” that are able to plan and execute multistep workflows. Although equity investment in agentic AI is relatively low ($1.1 billion in 2024), it is among the fastest-growing trends of this year. Organizations that learn to build teams composed of both people and agents will realize greater speed, scale, and innovation.

Artificial intelligence, systems designed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, are no longer a stand-alone trend; accelerating progress and unlocking new possibilities, it affects all sectors and amplifies the other trends.

Realizing AI’s full potential across sectors will require continuing innovation to manage computing intensity, reduce deployment costs, and propel infrastructure investment. As innovation accelerates, however, leaders must see that responsible practices—related to ethics, transparency, and governance—keep up with AI’s rapid integration into business and society.

Application-specific semiconductors, purpose-built chips optimized to perform specialized tasks, are critical to meeting the soaring compute demands resulting from AI’s success. Unlike general-purpose semiconductors, they are engineered to handle specific workloads while optimizing characteristics such as speed, energy efficiency, and performance. Few technologies are as critical to future business growth as semiconductors, which now shape innovation in multiple sectors. Equity investment in 2024 was $8 billion, up from $3 billion in 2020.

Exploring the underlying technologies, uncertainties, and questions around this baker’s dozen of tech trends heightens the vast potential of emerging technologies for productivity and innovation. But it also reveals rising infrastructure, talent, and geopolitical challenges. Scaling solutions now includes solving for trust, governance, and execution. It also demands thoughtful approaches to safety, governance, and workforce adaptation.

Much is at stake for company leaders, who must decide which frontier technologies are most relevant to their organizations, which capabilities to invest in, and how to move with agility while maintaining a united C-suite’s focus on top priorities. Those decisions will shape their own companies as well as the next wave of innovation.

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For more on these topics, see the report Technology Trends Outlook 2025 as well as the reports The Year of Quantum: From concept to reality in 2025, and Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential, and Shaping the future of 6G; read the articles “Why agents are the next frontier of generative AI,” “The new economics of enterprise technology in an AI world,” “Building AI trust: The key role of explainability,” “The missing data link: Five practical lessons to scale your data products,” “Unlocking cloud value: Achieving operational excellence through SRE,” and “Getting on board with shared autonomous mobility”; find additional cloud-related articles on the Cloud Insights page—all on McKinsey.com.