Last month the global consulting firm McKinsey released its 2022 Technology Trends Outlook.
We pay attention to McKinsey because they advise leadership teams from a wide range of organizations, including Fortune 500 firms, government agencies, foundations, nonprofits, and tech startups.
So their tech trends influence a large number of decision-makers around the world.
McKinsey groups their trends into two broad themes, which they describe as:
"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."
They rank the trends on three metrics:
- Innovation: based on related patents and research efforts
- Interest in the technology: based on recent news and web searches.
- Amount of investment in the technology in 2021 (size of bubble in the chart)
McKinsey also provides an adoption rate score for each technology but doesn't use that score in its ranking chart.
This approach leads to some interesting results.
As the McKinsey chart below shows (click to enlarge), applied AI is the leading technology with a very high innovations score, coupled with relatively strong interest scores and investment levels.
Tech industry darling, Web3 scores relatively low. This is due mainly to a low innovation score - despite many techies believing Web3 is the next big thing.
The McKinsey article provides a detailed analysis of the 14technologies in their list, and how it ranked in 2018.
We like McKinsey's approach because they go beyond just looking at the technology and include data on the drivers of adoption.
Anyone interested in tech trends will find McKinsey's list well worth reading.
