Primary source BusinessArticle·16 September 2026·7 min read

McKinsey: 13 Frontier Technologies, and the AI That Absorbs Everything

The fifth edition of the Technology Trends Outlook puts $223 billion on energy, $124 billion on AI — and reveals a far less discussed signal on the jobs front.

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Source : Lareina Yee, Michael Chui, Roger Roberts et Sven Smit — McKinsey & Company · www.mckinsey.comView original ↗

In brief

McKinsey has published the fifth edition of its Technology Trends Outlook: 108 pages, 13 "frontier" trends scored on interest, innovation, investment, and adoption level. AI becomes less one trend among others than an amplifier of all the others, with two new entries: agentic AI and application-specific semiconductors. Behind the rebound in investment — up in ten out of thirteen trends in 2024 — job postings decline in eleven out of thirteen cases.

🍺 Bar-stool version

McKinsey rolls out its big annual scoreboard of technologies that matter: thirteen trends, 108 pages, and an AI that's no longer just a line in the ranking but the highlighter run over all the others. The delicious detail is that money and noise don't go to the same place: energy pockets $223 billion in polite silence, agentic AI gets $1.1 billion but +985% in job postings, and quantum keeps making headlines with an adoption score of 1 out of 5. Meanwhile, in eleven out of thirteen trends, hiring is falling — investment goes up, jobs go down, which is an elegant way of saying we're buying machines instead of people. And since this is a consulting firm selling support across thirteen fronts at once, the real use of the document isn't to figure out where to charge in, but to quietly spot what you can afford to ignore.

Key takeaways

1
The 2025 report (108 pages, published July 22, 2025) covers a "baker's dozen" of 13 trends, grouped into three families: the AI revolution, compute and connectivity frontiers, and next-frontier engineering.
2
McKinsey merges applied AI and generative AI this year into a single "artificial intelligence" trend, whose interest score jumps from 0.16 in 2020 to 0.91 in 2024, and innovation from 0.43 to 0.89.
3
Two new entries: agentic AI, those "virtual coworkers" capable of planning and executing multi-step workflows, and application-specific semiconductors, driven by compute demand.
4
Equity investments rose in ten out of thirteen trends in 2024: $223.2 billion for energy and sustainability, $131.6 billion for mobility, $124.3 billion for AI, $80.8 billion for cloud and edge.
5
Agentic AI still only accounts for $1.1 billion in investment, but shows +985% in job postings between 2023 and 2024 — by far the strongest growth in the panel.
6
A rarely highlighted counterpoint: job postings decline in eleven out of thirteen trends, down to -17% for bioengineering, -15% for quantum, and -14% for advanced connectivity.
7
Six cross-cutting themes structure the year: the rise of autonomous systems, new forms of human-machine collaboration, obstacles to scaling, national competition, the coexistence of massive and specialized, and the imperative of responsible innovation.

A three-family reading framework

McKinsey is now on its fifth edition of this exercise, authored by Lareina Yee, Michael Chui, Roger Roberts, and Sven Smit.

AI is no longer a trend, it's a multiplier

The report's most important conceptual shift fits in one sentence: AI is presented as "a foundational amplifier of the other trends." Its impact increasingly runs through combinations — speeding up robot training, advancing scientific discovery in bioengineering, optimizing energy systems.

The two new entries: agents and custom silicon

Agentic AI combines the generality of foundation models with the ability to act: agents that plan and execute complex tasks, communicate with each other, and adapt to new information.

Where the money actually goes

After a 2023 marked by weak markets and declining funding, the investment climate stabilized and then rebounded in 2024.

The weak signal: jobs decline almost everywhere

This is the data point the executive summary doesn't highlight.

Six cross-cutting tensions

McKinsey identifies six themes running through the trends.

Why it matters

This report is valuable less for its predictions than for its dashboard: it's one of the rare exercises that maps, trend by trend, media attention, research effort, capital flows, and skills demand against each other.

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#ai #agents #semiconductors #investment #quantum #robotics

Original source

McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2025

Lareina Yee, Michael Chui, Roger Roberts et Sven Smit — McKinsey & Company

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McKinsey: 13 Frontier Technologies, and the AI That Absorbs Everything

In brief

🍺 Bar-stool version

Key takeaways

A three-family reading framework

AI is no longer a trend, it's a multiplier

The two new entries: agents and custom silicon

Where the money actually goes

The weak signal: jobs decline almost everywhere

Six cross-cutting tensions

Why it matters

This article is more than 30 days old

Put it to work on your sources.

The same machine, on your topics.

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