McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook and the Frontier Technologies of 2025

Which frontier technologies matter most for companies in 2025? The global technology landscape is undergoing significant shifts, propelled by fast-moving innovations in technologies. 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. Our annual tech trends report highlights the latest technology breakthroughs, talent trends, use cases, and their potential impact on companies across sectors. 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.

Evolution of Artificial Intelligence and Software Systems

Generative AI (gen AI) has been a standout trend since 2022, with the extraordinary uptick in interest and investment in this technology unlocking innovative possibilities across interconnected trends such as robotics and immersive reality. The large foundation models that power generative AI, such as LLMs, are being integrated into various enterprise software tools and are also being employed for diverse purposes. In this context, an overarching artificial intelligence category replaces these four trends: applied AI, generative AI, industrializing machine learning, and next-generation software development. Furthermore, the agentic AI and application-specific semiconductors trends have been added since last year’s publication to reflect the evolution of technology trends.

Research Methodology and Tangible Measures

To assess the development of each technology trend highlighted in this report, we collected data on tangible measures of activity. These findings emerge from our analysis of quantitative measures of interest, innovation, equity investment, and talent that underpin each of the trends and explore the underlying technologies, uncertainties, and questions around them. For each measure or vector, we used a defined set of data sources to find occurrences of keywords associated with each of the trends, screened those occurrences for valid mentions of activity, and indexed the resulting numbers.

Key Data Sources for Trend Analysis

To provide a detailed overview of the metrics used, the following data points identify the sources utilized for each score:

  • Patents: Data on patent filings are sourced from Google Patents, which highlights data on the number of patents granted.
  • Research: Data on research publications are sourced from The Lens.
  • News: Data on news articles are sourced from Factiva.
  • Searches: Data on search engine queries are sourced from Google Trends.
  • Equity investment: Data on private-market and public-market capital raises across venture capital and corporate and strategic M&A are sourced from PitchBook.
  • Talent demand: The number of job postings is sourced from McKinsey’s proprietary Organizational Data Platform, which stores licensed, de-identified data on professional profiles.

Enterprise Adoption and Strategic Impact

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. Insights gathered from McKinsey expert interviews were utilized to assign enterprise-wide adoption scores for each trend. While the macroeconomic environment with elevated interest rates has affected equity capital investment and hiring, underlying indicators—including optimism, innovation, and longer-term talent needs—reflect a positive long-term trajectory. This research is intended to help executives plan ahead by developing an understanding of potential use cases, sources of value, adoption drivers, and the critical skills needed to bring these opportunities to fruition.