McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2022

You’ve reached an archival page. Please see our 2023 technology trends report here.

McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2022

Technology continues to be a primary catalyst for change in the world. Technology advances give businesses, governments, and social-sector institutions more possibilities to lift their productivity, invent and reinvent offerings, and contribute to humanity’s well-being. And while it remains difficult to predict how technology trends will play out, executives can plan ahead better by tracking the development of new technologies, anticipating how companies might use them, and understanding the factors that affect innovation and adoption.

To that end, we have worked with the external and internal experts on the McKinsey Technology Council to identify and interpret 14 of the most significant technology trends unfolding today. This study builds on the trend research we shared last year, adding fresh data and deeper analysis to provide a more granular assessment of trends in two thematic groups: Silicon Age, which encompasses digital and IT technologies, and Engineering Tomorrow, which encompasses physical technologies in domains such as energy and mobility.

Research methodology

To assess the development of each technology trend, our team collected data on five tangible measures of activity: search engine queries, news publications, patents, research publications, and investment. For each measure, we used a defined set of data sources to find occurrences of keywords associated with each of the 14 trends, screened those occurrences for valid mentions of activity, and indexed the resulting numbers of mentions on a 0–1 scoring scale that is relative to the trends studied. The innovation score combines the patents and research scores; the interest score combines the news and search scores. (While we recognize that an interest score can be inflated by deliberate efforts to stimulate news and search activity, we believe that each score fairly reflects the extent of discussion and debate about a given trend.) Investment measures the flows of funding from the capital markets into companies linked with the trend. Data sources for the scores include the following:

Patents. Data on patent filings are sourced from Google Patents.
Research. Data on research publications are sourced from the Lens (www.lens.org).
News. Data on news publications are sourced from Factiva.
Searches. Data on search engine queries are sourced from Google Trends.
Investment. Data on private-market and public-market capital raises are sourced from PitchBook.

The associations shown on the industry heat map were derived by reviewing the news reports on each trend for references to specific companies within each of the 20 industries.

In addition, we updated the selection and definition of trends from last year’s study to reflect the evolution of technology trends:

Trends added since last year’s study: industrializing machine learning, Web3, immersive-reality technologies, future of mobility, and future of space technologies
Trends not carried over from last year’s study: next-level process automation and virtualization (now considered an implication of several trends) and next-generation materials (partially represented by other trends)
Trends with adjusted definitions: next-generation software development (partly covered under future of programming in 2021), trust architectures and digital identity (partly covered by trust architecture in 2021), future of sustainable consumption (disaggregated from future of clean technologies), and future of clean energy (disaggregated from future of clean technologies)
Trends with minor changes to definition: applied AI, advanced connectivity (previously called future of connectivity), cloud and edge computing (previously called distributed infrastructure), quantum technologies (previously called next-generation computing), and future of bioengineering (previously called Bio Revolution)

Our analysis examines such tangible factors as investment, research activity, and news coverage to gauge the momentum of each trend. We also conducted dozens of interviews and performed hundreds of hours of research to learn which industries are apt to benefit most as they absorb these technologies. And, recognizing that trends can shift, we examined the uncertainties and questions that surround each of them. (For more, please see the sidebar, “Research methodology.”)

Below, we lay out these considerations for all 14 technology trends, so that you can better understand them and consider how they relate to your organization. At the bottom of this page, you can download detailed profiles of all these trends or download a customized PDF containing profiles of the trends you choose.

Download detailed trend profiles

The research overview offers summaries of all 14 technology trends. You can also create a custom document containing detailed profiles of trends you choose: check the boxes in the list below to select trend profiles, and then click the “Download your custom report” button at the bottom to generate a PDF.