AI, especially agents, are at the top of the list (unsurprisingly).
When we hear the word „technology“, most of us automatically think of hardware; the physical devices that have become such a conspicuously present part of many of our day-to-day lives. But technology is a much more expansive phenomenon, encompassing not only all the various tools and gadgets we can clearly see, but also a vast and mostly invisible digital infrastructure of software and code upon which our modern world is based.
When trying to understand technological change, therefore, it’s important to keep its multifaceted nature in mind: tech isn’t a single, homogenous thing, but rather an interplay of many different forces, some of them starkly visible, others less so. In that spirit, consulting firm McKinsey publishes a Technology Trends Outlook report each year highlighting some of the technologies that are having an outsized impact in business and commerce.
In the firm’s latest report, published Tuesday, artificial intelligence ranked at the top of the list (for a number of reasons, which we’ll get into below). But there were several other tech trends also included, which might surprise you — immersive-reality headsets, for example. (Remember the metaverse, anyone?)
Here are the 13 technological trends included in the report, which, according to McKinsey, „are driving innovation and addressing critical challenges across sectors.“Agentic AI
Again, few readers will be shocked that this made the top of the list. AI agents — systems that leverage foundation models to perform multi-step tasks on behalf of human users — have become something of an obsession in Silicon Valley, with nearly every major tech developer rolling out their own agentic tools in the past year or so. (Agents were also highlighted in market research firm Forrester’s Top 10 Technologies for 2025 report in May.) Job postings for agent-related roles surged by a staggering 985% between 2023 and 2024, according to the report.Artificial intelligence
In second place in McKinsey’s new report are AI systems broadly, which the firm describes as „computer systems designed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence.“ This encompasses agents, generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, predictive algorithms, and other systems designed to detect patterns across datasets and autonomously refine their performance over time.Application-specific semiconductors
Graphics processing units, or GPUs, have become the technological cornerstone of the current AI boom, propelling chipmakers like Nvidia to global fame and extreme wealth.
