Technological innovation has been integral to the development of tissue engineering over the last 25 years. Future advances will require the next-generation of tissue engineers to embrace emerging technologies. Here, we discuss four key areas of opportunity in which technology can play a role: biological manipulation, advanced characterization, process automation and personalized medicine. This encompasses key developments in transdifferentiation, gene editing, spatially-resolved -omics and 3D bioprinting. Taken together, we can imagine an idealized future in which computational predictions made by machine learning algorithms are used to programme cells and materials to create personalized tissue constructs within an automated culture system.