Amy Webb

What tech trends should we monitor? When do we act? How can you distinguish between “trend” and “trendy,” and which long-term trends should your business be following? Most importantly, how can you prepare yourself and your business for what’s next in a world of constant disruption? In this custom, provocative presentation, Amy Webb curates the Future Today Institute’s data-driven longitudinal tech trends to reveal the forces shaping your future. She will connect trends from within and from outside of your field, showing a chain reaction of events and how they could result in different scenarios. Amy’s annual trend report, now in its 13th year, has 8.5 million cumulative views and her trend talks have are a mainstay on the world’s largest and most prestigious stages, including the South by South West (SXSW) festival. Her rigorous method for finding, tracking and monitoring trends is used by hundreds of organizations and is taught in MBA programs worldwide. This session can be developed as a 45 or 60-minute speech to your team.

The world’s most successful leaders must manage the present and innovate for the future. This requires a new kind of strategic thinking. Drawing from her bestselling, award-winning book, “The Signals Are Talking,” Amy Webb explains how leaders can harness a futurist’s strategic tools for the benefit of their organizations. In this presentation, you will learn how to think like a futurist, how to rethink risk, and how you’ll know when to act. As a backdrop, Webb will share future scenarios of emerging technologies from your industry and those adjacent to it: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, blockchain – helping you discover your own ability to not only forecast what’s on the horizon, but how to create your own preferred future today, in the present. This session can be developed as a 45 or 60-minute virtual speech to your team, or as a 2-hour virtual hands-on workshop.

Soon, technology will begin to intersect with our daily lives in weird and wonderful ways. We don’t often think about that intersection, and yet emerging technology will be used to design the future of humanity. In this mind-bending session, Amy Webb will offer a provocative series of snapshots from our near and far future. How will we communicate? Where will we live? Will sophisticated algorithms and artificially intelligent systems replace the relationships we have with other humans? What will our technology do for us? To us? The possibilities are exciting, inspiring – and a little scary. In this custom session, Amy will will draw from the Future Today Institute’s research to develop a set of optimistic, neutral and catastrophic scenarios that describe your organization or industry’s plausible scenes from the year 2030, and she will offer insights on how you can achieve your preferred futures. This session can be developed as a 45 or 60-minute speech to your team.

The most powerful technology of our lifetimes is now in the hands of just nine big corporations. That technology — artificial intelligence — is reshaping business, privacy, commerce, agriculture, warfare, healthcare, education, and even our relationships to each other, and the companies responsible for our futures are driven by competing forces. The American portion of the Big Nine—Amazon, Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Facebook—have big ideas about how to solve some of humanity’s most wicked problems, but their shareholders prioritize short-term returns over long-term challenges. The speed of technology dramatically outpaces the speed of policy, so lawmakers often find themselves in an antagonistic position as they try to play catchup. Meanwhile, China’s Big Nine members—Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent—are tethered to Beijing and the demands of the Chinese Communist Party. What about businesses, nonprofits, and everyday people caught in the middle, as our data are mined and refined in service of building the future of artificial intelligence? Drawing from her bestselling new book “The Big Nine,” which was longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award, won the 2020 Gold Axiom Medal, Amy Webb explains what your business needs to know now about AI. She will develop custom optimistic and catastrophic scenarios for your organization’s future as we advance from artificial narrow intelligence, to artificial general intelligence to artificial superintelligence. Importantly, Amy will show that you still have agency in what comes next. The future of AI doesn’t have to be bleak — you can set a different course for your preferred future. This session can be developed as a 45 or 60-minute speech to your team.