Except you spend your time in boardrooms and C-suites, there’s an honest likelihood you’ve by no means heard of the Future Today Strategy Group (FTSG). There’s additionally a greater than respectable likelihood you’ve encountered its affect. Yearly the consulting agency publishes an enormous tech traits report that maps rising threats, white areas, and alternatives early sufficient for corporations to behave on them. Previous editions have flagged shifts round artificial media, digital people, and generative AI earlier than they entered the mainstream dialog. And a few main establishments are clearly paying consideration: FTSG’s consumer listing consists of Mastercard, Ford, and NASA.
Which makes what’s taking place onstage inside a Hilton resort in downtown Austin fairly jarring. Clad in a black cloak, FTSG founder and CEO Amy Webb opens her SXSW discuss with a mock funeral for the development report. Somber music fills the ballroom whereas a slideshow performs behind her.
“We’re gathered right here immediately to have fun and bear in mind the lifetime of the development report,” Webb instructed the rhapsodic crowd of roughly 1,500.
She wasn’t kidding: An anthropomorphic cartoon model of the report appeared first in a hospital supply room, then in school, then sightseeing on the Eiffel Tower, earlier than finally arriving the place it spent most of its life: the company boardroom.
In an interview with Quick Firm forward of the discuss, Webb is characteristically blunt concerning the spectacle. “So long as we’re killing the factor we’re well-known for, why don’t we’ve got some enjoyable with it?”
The problem, she says, is the format itself. An annual development report captures solely a fleeting second in a panorama now shifting too rapidly to summarize annually. By the point an enormous PDF lands in executives’ inboxes, components of it are already outdated.
“The problem with that static report is it’s a snapshot of a second in time,” Webb says. “The underside line is, issues are altering extremely quick.”
As a substitute of cataloging traits, Webb now needs corporations to concentrate on what occurs when a number of of them collide. On this 12 months’s evaluation, probably the most consequential shifts in know-how arrive in clusters: AI, power infrastructure, robotics, biotechnology, and geopolitical competitors are smashing collectively in ways in which reshape total programs. These so-called “convergences,” the report argues, create structural modifications companies typically acknowledge too late.
As Webb put it onstage at SXSW, traits are solely the alerts. “Development tells you what’s altering,” she defined to the gang. “A convergence tells you what’s going to turn into inevitable.”
Her framework borrows from meteorology. If traits are particular person climate information factors, Webb instructed the SXSW viewers, convergences are the storm programs that type when these forces collide. Corporations that wish to put together for the long run, she argues, want one thing nearer to a storm tracker than a static report.
The report outlines a number of areas the place these convergences are already taking form. One instance is what Webb calls the “agentic economic system.” AI programs are getting higher at planning and finishing up duties on their very own, which may push the web away from immediately’s mannequin of search and looking and towards one constructed on delegation. As a substitute of trying to find the most effective deal or managing subscriptions themselves, folks would possibly depend on digital brokers to do it routinely. In that world, the businesses operating these brokers—and the infrastructure behind them—may turn into the brand new gatekeepers of financial life.
Automation, Webb argues, could not arrive as a sudden wave of layoffs a lot as a gradual erosion of sure jobs, as hiring freezes, attrition, and software program regularly take up workplace duties. On the similar time, AI instruments are more and more being framed as companions, advisors, and sources of reassurance, elevating questions on what occurs when folks start turning to software program first once they really feel careworn or want steering.
Onstage at SXSW, Webb warned that this shift may prolong far past productivity software program. AI programs, she instructed, may more and more place themselves as, say, therapists and relationship coaches. (Think about smart glasses quietly whispering solutions in your ear throughout a romantic dinner.) The chance, then, is that folks may turn into deeply depending on programs which can be finally constructed and ruled by profit-driven tech giants.
“As empowering as which will really feel,” Webb tells Quick Firm, the tradeoff is that “you might be relinquishing numerous the company and determination making capabilities that you just needed to a system the place you don’t know why the system is making these choices.”
There’s lots extra packed into the report’s 157 pages, from “polycompute”—a future the place classical, AI, quantum, and organic computing programs function aspect by aspect—to the rise of human augmentation applied sciences that blur the road between well being care and efficiency optimization. However a lot of Webb’s warnings revolve round a less complicated drawback: corporations typically see these shifts coming and nonetheless battle to behave.
“There are two guiding rules in nearly each firm proper now,” Webb says. “These two guiding rules are concern and FOMO.”
Again within the ballroom, the theatrical funeral rapidly gave option to one thing nearer to a rally. After the eulogy, Webb implored the viewers to face. Moments later, a College of Texas–Austin marching band snaked by the aisles, horns blaring because it marched towards the stage. The room erupted. Attendees laughed, cheered, and raised their telephones as Webb pivoted from satire to sermon.
Her message, beneath the spectacle, was about so-called artistic destruction. “Capitalism is sort of a perpetual storm,” Webb instructed the gang. “To outlive the storm it’s important to acknowledge that solely new applied sciences could make you irrelevant in a single day.”
Webb additionally used the stage to lob a number of criticisms on the AI business itself. She singled out OpenAI for what she described as inconsistent messaging round surveillance and its Pentagon partnership. “Decide a lane, Sam,” she mentioned, referring to CEO Sam Altman.
However each onstage and in her dialog with Quick Firm, Webb’s bigger warning was about the place the know-how ecosystem itself is heading. “The subsequent web is being constructed not for folks,” she says. “It’s being constructed for machines.”
