McKinsey’s 2025 Tech Trends: what they really mean for People, Work, and Leadership
- Ana Inés Urrutia
- hace 8 minutos
- 5 Min. de lectura
McKinsey’s Technology Trends Outlook 2025 maps out 13 technologies shaping business. The takeaway is simple: AI is the centre of this decade (surprised? not), pulling everything else like infra, trust, talent, governance into its orbit. I agree with much of their analysis on agentic AI, digital trust, scaling infrastructure, but HR, IT, and workforce governance? They’re moving faster and messier than the report suggests, but that is my opinion.
Keep reading so you can tell what lands, what I see differently, and what it actually means for leaders and makers building the next chapter of work.
About Agentic AI
McKinsey puts agentic AI in the “experimentation” phase, with a ranking of 2/5 adoption. I’m not convinced. In people and process heavy functions, it’s already moving faster than that. We’re not talking about lab projects, we’re talking about AI starting to show up as actual co-workers that can run tasks from start to finish - screening, onboarding, to name a few.
Here is the reality check:
+985% (this is not a typo, you can check the source) growth in job postings mentioning agentic AI between 2023–24.
$1.1B were invested into the AI space last year.
Real deployments already live, from security agents to sales, proving this works in practice.
So what does that mean for companies and people that actually make things? It means functions like HR and IT are about to change fast. These areas are full of rules, compliance checks, and repetitive requests, the kind of work agents are built for. Think: a “virtual HR generalist” who manages onboarding, answers benefits questions, and only flags the tricky stuff for a human, this is an Ask HR agent from the book.
That’s not “experimenting.” That’s the near future of how work gets done.
About AI and Automation
McKinsey’s numbers tell the story: 78% of orgs are already using AI somewhere, and 92% of execs say they’ll spend more in the next three years. Yet only 1% feel they’re “fully mature”. That gap, lots of enthusiasm, little maturity, is exactly where governance, talent, and change management decide whether AI sticks or not.
The money is moving: $124.3B invested in AI in 2024 (up 35% YoY), including a record $40B round for OpenAI. Generative AI adoption is going crazy fast, most companies using AI now use gen AI, but the real payoff won’t come until orgs reskill, rethink operating models, and put governance in place.
Where I part ways with McKinsey: they keep the focus on tech readiness. But the real bottleneck is people readiness. Without workforce retraining, deliberate change management, and some ethical guardrails, companies risk widening the maturity gap instead of closing it.
About Infra
McKinsey calls out semiconductors, cloud/edge, and connectivity as the backbone of the AI shift. Fair enough. The numbers are big, well... huge actually:
$7.5B went into AI-specific chips in 2024, with patents exploding faster than any other trend.
By 2030, 70% of data centre demand will be AI-ready, growing 33% a year.
In Europe, the push for sovereign cloud is slowing some adoption but doubling down on local data compliance.
So what does this actually mean for orgs? Infrastructure isn’t just "set up my email address" anymore. The chips you buy, the clouds you choose, and the power you can access directly determine:
Where employee and customer data lives.
How secure and compliant your systems are.
Whether HR and IT platforms are trusted internally and externally.
For HR/IT leaders, that’s a shift. You’re no longer just consumers of infrastructure, you’re stakeholders in the decision. How you scale AI in your org is now tied to infrastructure choices that used to sit quietly in the back room.
About Trust and Governance
One of the tougher takeaways: unsurprisingly public trust in AI has dropped, from 61% in 2019 to 53% in 2025. If this continues, the business case for scaling AI falls apart. People won’t use what they don’t trust.
Some context:
$77.8B went into digital trust and cybersecurity in 2024.
AI-driven cyberattacks are increasing as we speak, alone jumped +442% in the second half of 2024.
Regulations are tightening: the EU AI Act (2025) and California’s AI Transparency Act (2026) now mandate transparency, detection tools, and disclosure labels.
Let's translate it into how would affect you. AI governance is no longer optional, it never was, but now it’s the adoption gatekeeper. For HR especially, this is personal: recruitment, performance management, payroll, none of it works if employees don’t trust the systems. The risk isn’t only technical bias; it’s cultural pushback.
That’s why I see ethics not as a compliance checkbox but as a competitive edge. The companies that treat explainability and fairness as part of their employee value proposition will build trust, and they’ll move faster than the ones that just “comply and hope.”
About People + Tech
Looking across McKinsey’s analysis, a few patterns stand out when you see them through a people and tech lens:
Human–machine collaboration: This isn’t about replacing humans, it’s about augmenting them. AI copilots, and agentic systems are turning operators into co-creators. Job design, performance metrics, and engagement will all change.
Scaling challenges: Sure, there are tech bottlenecks but the bigger blockers are talent gaps, regulatory friction, and organizational inertia. HR leaders need to act as workforce architects.
Regional competition: Sovereign AI, local chip fabs, and patchwork regulations mean global HR has to navigate fragmented compliance.
Responsible innovation: Trust isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the license to operate. Transparency, fairness, and accountability accelerate business, they don’t slow it down.
My perspective
Where McKinsey nails it:
Agentic AI is the real shift—moving from outputs to autonomous action.
Infrastructure matters more than ever; it’s now about power, sovereignty, and employee trust.
Trust is the bottleneck. Without it, adoption stalls.
Where I see it differently:
Adoption in people-centric functions is already ahead. HR, IT, and compliance will scale agentic AI faster than most.
Jobs aren’t disappearing; tasks are being re-architected. Orchestration, governance, and contextual judgment are the new premium skills.
Ethics isn’t compliance, it’s competitive advantage. Companies that embed responsible AI in their employee systems will see adoption soar.
The real story of 2025 isn’t “AI vs humans” or “tech vs regulation.” It’s about building trusted, human centered systems where people, AI, and infrastructure work together.
Agentic AI won’t just automate, it will reshape work.
Trust won’t follow technology; it must be built in from the start.
Infrastructure isn’t a back-end problem—it’s a workforce strategy lever.
For HR and IT leaders, this isn’t the time to sit back. It’s the moment to step up as architects of a trusted, AI-powered future of work.