Amy Webb

FOUNDER OF THE FUTURE TODAY INSTITUTE.

FUTURIST; HARVARD NIEMAN FELLOW; NYU STERN FUTURES FORECASTING PROFESSOR.

Amy Webb speaker, tech trends, future today institute, keynote

Forbes called Amy “one of the five women changing the world.” She was honored as one of the BBC’s 100 Women of 2020 and was named to the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led.

Amy Webb may not be a superhero – but she does have a powerful ability to anticipate trends and emerging technology that will disrupt tomorrow. And she can envision and help prepare for the impact they’ll have on business and society. Now she’s teaching others, including corporate leaders, innovators and governments, to do the same.

Founder of the Future Today Institute, Amy Webb is a renowned futurist and strategist. For her, it’s not simply an interest; it’s a profession and a passion. Nor is “forecasting the future” about creating fantastical scenarios. Webb doesn’t simply make speculations or predictions; her work is evidence based, drawn from mapping and modeling quantitative and qualitative data collected in the present to understand what’s coming (5-20 years from now).

Named to the 2017 Thinkers50 Radar list of management thinkers most likely to shape the future – and winner of its 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award – Webb is already making an impact on today’s Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, government agencies, large nonprofits, universities and startups worldwide. Focusing on the intersection of technology, business and society, she takes a purposefully broad lens to her work. When thinking about the future, most only look at their industry and direct competitors. Webb is adamant about looking at multiple, adjacent landscapes. “You have to be able to see the top of the forest in order to see where all the trees are and how they connect,” she says.

Webb’s “clear, insightful and humorous” style, in writing and in speaking, makes it easy to understand why audiences are drawn to her and her work.

 

The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream–  Webb’s most recent best-selling and award-winning book – delves deep into her forecasting methodology.

 

Numerous mainstream media, including the Wall Street JournalHarvard Business ReviewMIT Sloan Management ReviewNew York Times and Fast Company, have featured Webb’s forecasting methodology and her work as a futurist. Her viral TED Talk, based on her memoir, “Data, A Love Story,” has been viewed more than six million times and was translated into 32 languages.

Every one of Webb’s engagements – from keynotes to hands-on workshops – is highly customized. She uses original research and insights specific to an organization, industry or conference. And attendees typically receive a digital folder full of resources, tools, and actionable ideas to help them think like a futurist and prepare and plan for the exciting changes on the horizon.

The Future of a COVID-19 World.

Speech or Interactive Virtual Session: Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve experienced social, economic and political shocks unlike any other generation. What we’re living through is less like a war and more like an alien invasion: attacks are difficult to understand, seem indiscriminate, and the enemy continues to find vulnerabilities in us we never saw ourselves. The virus has challenged our critical systems: our global supply chains, communications infrastructure, healthcare, education, transportation, and even our ways of governing. It is reshaping our economies in real time, and it is shifting the geopolitical balance to create new tensions and alliances. The global coronavirus pandemic will lead to downstream implications we’re only beginning to see. Now is the time to create recovery scenarios for your company and industry.

In this bespoke session, Amy Webb offers essential advice specifically for your organization. Drawing from nearly two decades of modeling next-order risks, Amy will share two practical, accessible foresight tools that you can use now to model Covid-19’s next-order impacts on your organization, mitigate near-future risk, and find ways to thrive in a post-coronavirus world. She will research and develop data-driven scenarios describing your organization’s plausible futures and challenge your teams to get to action on their preferred futures, today. 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.

Emerging Tech Trends.

A bespoke speech featuring custom research for your organization or industry: 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.

How to Think Like a Futurist.

Speech or Interactive Virtual Session: 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.

Scenes from the Year 2030.

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 Future of Artificial Intelligence.

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.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity.

A call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head.

We like to think that we are in control of the future of "artificial" intelligence. The reality, though, is that we -- the everyday people whose data powers AI -- aren't actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we can't see and have no input into -- one largely free from regulation or oversight. The big nine corporations -- Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple--are the new gods of AI and are short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain.

In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI -- the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself -- is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.

Much more than a passionate, human-centered call-to-arms, this book delivers a strategy for changing course, and provides a path for liberating us from algorithmic decision-makers and powerful corporations.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity.

Data, A Love Story: How I Cracked the Online Dating Code to Meet My Match.

A lively, thought-provoking memoir about how one woman "gamed" online dating sites like JDate, OKCupid and eHarmony - and met her eventual husband.

After yet another online dating disaster, Amy Webb was about to cancel her JDate membership when an epiphany struck: It wasn't that her standards were too high, as women are often told, but that she wasn't evaluating the right data in suitors' profiles. That night Webb, an award-winning journalist and digital-strategy expert, made a detailed, exhaustive list of what she did and didn't want in a mate. The result: seventy-two requirements ranging from the expected (smart, funny) to the super-specific (likes selected musicals: Chess, Les Misérables. Not Cats. Must not like Cats!).

Next she turned to her own profile. In order to craft the most compelling online presentation, she needed to assess the competition--so she signed on to JDate again, this time as a man. Using the same gift for data strategy that made her company the top in its field, she found the key words that were digital man magnets, analyzed photos, and studied the timing of women's messages, then adjusted her (female) profile to make the most of that intel.

Then began the deluge--dozens of men wanted to meet her, men who actually met her requirements. Among them: her future husband, now the father of her child.

Forty million people date online each year. Most don't find true love. Thanks to Data, a Love Story, their odds just got a whole lot better.

Data, A Love Story: How I Cracked the Online Dating Code to Meet My Match.

The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream.

Amy Webb is a noted futurist who combines curiosity, skepticism, colorful storytelling, and deeply reported, real-world analysis in this essential book for understanding the future. The Signals Are Talking reveals a systemic way of evaluating new ideas bubbling up on the horizon-distinguishing what is a real trend from the merely trendy. This book helps us hear which signals are talking sense, and which are simply nonsense, so that we might know today what developments-especially those seemingly random ideas at the fringe as they converge and begin to move toward the mainstream-that have long-term consequence for tomorrow.

With the methodology developed in The Signals Are Talking, we learn how to think like a futurist and answer vitally important questions: How will a technology-like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars, biohacking, bots, and the Internet of Things-affect us personally? How will it impact our businesses and workplaces? How will it eventually change the way we live, work, play, and think-and how should we prepare for it now?

Most importantly, Webb persuasively shows that the future isn't something that happens to us passively. Instead, she allows us to see ahead so that we may forecast what's to come-challenging us to create our own preferred futures.

The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream.