Exploring the frontier: Technology trends in Asia

**Gautam Kumra** (0:06)
I am Gautam Kumra, Chairman of McKinsey Asia, and you are listening to the Future of Asia Podcast Series. The Asian Century has begun. The region is now the world's largest economy. As Asia's economies evolve further, the region has the potential to fuel and shape the next normal. In each episode, we are going to feature conversations with leaders from across the region to discuss what Asia's rise means for businesses across the globe. Join us.

**Debbi** (0:44)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new episode of the McKinsey Future of Asia Podcast. My name is Debbi, and I am your host for today. We have the pleasure of being joined by three very distinguished guests. That is Lareina, Michael and Vinayak. Before we dive into questions proper, perhaps each of you can introduce yourself to our audience. Maybe Lareina, you could start with you first.

**Lareina** (1:06)
Thanks, Debbi, it's great to be on the podcast. I am podcasting from San Francisco. I'm a senior partner, and I lead our McKinsey Global Institute research on technology.

**Michael Chui** (1:18)
Debbi, it's great to be here as well. I'm also coming to you from San Francisco. It's Michael Chui. I am a senior fellow in QB in QuantumBlack, and I get to collaborate with folks like Lareina and Vinayak on some of the research on technology.

**Vinayak** (1:30)
And good to meet you, Debbi, and terrific to be here with Lareina and Michael. Always a pleasure. So my name is Vinayak. I am a senior partner at McKinsey as well. I am usually based in Singapore, but joining you today from Jakarta. I lead a practice on AI technology and digital across Asia Pacific. So excited to be here.

**Debbi** (1:47)
It's great to have you all here with us today. So a couple of you have actually co-written a report on technology trends outlook in 2025 And this report basically explores several transformative trends driving innovation with the potential to revolutionize certain global businesses. So I think I'm directing this question to both Lareina and Michael. Either of you start us off by sharing some of the key tech shifts you've observed, especially compared to last year's findings. Now, for everyone on the podcast, this is an annual report. So this is the 2025th edition. So I was wondering whether either of you have seen shifts this year that wasn't present last year.

**Michael Chui** (2:29)
Debbi, thank you for acknowledging this is something that we've been doing year to year. It's been really fun to collaborate with Lareina and folks around the firm as we bring some of these insights together.
First of all, you asked for some of the differences. One of the things that I think we would have done a really bad job if all of the trends changed from year to year, we seek to find trends, which while they're on the technology frontier, are really impactful and rare is it true that a trend will only be impactful for one year. And a lot of the trends that we're seeing are multi-year. And so from year to year, many of them, at least the categories stay the same. But each time we try to bring to life some of the ways in which that technology continues to move and evolve and be adopted by enterprises around the world including in Asia. With that said, did we find some things that really popped this year that we, for example, added agentic AI? Again, we don't think this is just going to be a one-year thing, but I think all of us have been talking about agents a lot quite recently. And we think we're just starting on that journey and many of our clients are just starting on that journey. So certainly while AI has been with us all the years that we've been studying trends, this year the idea of agents, this idea of foundation models acting in the world, doing things that are more autonomous and more multi-step, that's something that clearly came to the surface here as well. Something else that we identified, which we highlight again this year and has become perhaps even more relevant is advanced semiconductors. And again, Moore's law has underpinned all of these technologies for decades. But at some points, it felt like you can easily become used to Moore's law, but that's still remarkable. But really now we're seeing particularly with AI and application specific semiconductors, these chips that are for inference or training of AI or all kinds of other applications, they're really coming to the fore. The most valuable company in the world now is a semiconductor company, for instance. And so we're seeing some of those things happen as some of the things that have popped this year.