Thomas Frey

FOUNDER & EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DAVINCI INSTITUTE.

Google’s Top-Rated Futurist Speaker. IBM’s Most Award-Winning Engineer.

Thomas Frey speaker, keynote, futurist

His work is not just restricted to advances in technology. Rather, he takes a much larger view of the playing field including shifts in governance, system changes, evolving attitudes and human conditions, and much more.

English

Over the past decade, Thomas Frey has built an enormous following around the world based on his ability to develop accurate visions of the future and describe the opportunities ahead. Having started seventeen businesses himself and assisting on the development of hundreds more, the understanding he brings to his audiences is a rare blend of reality-based thinking coupled with a clear-headed visualization of the world ahead. Predicting the future has little value without understanding the driving forces behind the trends, subtle nuances that can be leveraged, and implications for both the people directly affected in the industry as well as others farther down the technological food chain.

As part of the celebrity speaking circuit, Thomas Frey continually pushes the envelope of understanding, creating fascinating images of the world to come. His keynote talks on futurist topics have captivated people ranging from high level government officials to executives in Fortune 500 companies including NASA, Disney, IBM, Federal Reserve Bank and many more.

His long anticipated book, “Epiphany Z: 8 Radical Visions for Transforming Your Future” is captivating the attention of a whole new generation of forward thinking business leaders. Epiphany Z is a dynamic approach to envisioning, comprehending, and ultimately thriving in the radically different futures emerging around us at the speed of light. Frey’s unparalleled ability to detect emerging trends from the smallest of clues gives him an edge on other futurists.

Because of his work inspiring inventors and other revolutionary thinkers, the Boulder Daily Camera has referred to him as the “Father of Invention”. The Denver Post and Seattle Post Intelligencer have referred to him as the “Dean of Futurists”.

Before launching the DaVinci Institute, Thomas Frey spent 15 years at IBM as an engineer and designer where he received over 270 awards, more than any other IBM engineer. He is also a past member of the Triple Nine Society (High I.Q. society over 99.9 percentile).

Each year his talks touch the lives of tens of thousands of people with his unique brand of customized presentations designed specifically around the needs of each and every audience.

Future of Healthcare – “Is Death our only Option?”.

We all know that polluted water is bad for us, and that if we distill water and remove all of the so-called impurities, that it’s less than optimal. Somewhere in this entire water spectrum is “perfect water,” meaning it’s perfect for you as an individual, at that particular moment in time. With over 7 billion people in the world, this would mean there are over 7 billion formulations of perfect water. Complicating it even further, each of these formulations will change every second of every day as the metabolism of the human body changes. Somewhere in this line of thinking is the level of precision that will be needed for tomorrow’s hyper-individualized healthcare.

Future of AI – “Rethinking the Human Experience”.

It’s important to understand the symbiotic relationship, if the human economy collapses, so will the AI economy. While we’re not going to let the bots take over just yet, it’s clear that bots are going to be meeting many of our needs, offering proactive advice, and serving us in favorable ways. Since the best possible interfaces come from the inside out, working with AI will be far less about us trying to understand the technology and far more about technology trying to understand us. In the AI era, technology will slide further behind the curtain into more of an assistive role, one that is not meant to be all about shiny new gadgets and operating system updates. Over time, the gadget craze will subside, as we shift our collective attention to rethinking the human experience.

Future Industries – “100,000 new micro industries to be created over the next two decades”.

Every major industry today was started as a micro industry. Everything from steel, to photography, oil, airlines, electricity, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, and search engines all worked their way into existence from a tiny starting point. Over the coming two decades we will be witnessing an unprecedented wave of innovation and creativity driven by new tools of production. During this time we will see an explosion of over 100,000 new micro industries that will employ hundreds of millions of people.

Future of Banking – “Rethinking the Banking and Finance Industry One Transaction at a Time.”

According to a recent survey by Fiserv of 3,000 bank users, over the past 30 days, more than 80% said they logged into their bank’s website an average of 11 times. But 61% said they had also visited their bank during the same timeframe. Normally we would think that they made the trip to do something they couldn’t online, but that would be wrong. According to their research 53% of customers prefer online banking, but 44% still like to go there in person. As an industry, banks have studied their customers from thousands of different angles to determine if there are any cracks in their thinking. They all intuitively know that banking industry is in the second half of the bell curve, but so far haven’t spotted the fault lines they all know are coming.

Future of the 5G – “Beyond 5G, the great enabler for future industries”.

With the Internet being a multidimensional communications network, I like to think of it from the perspective of being inside a bag with people pushing on all of the outer walls simultaneously. The future of 5G is not any one thing, it’s many. For this talk, I’ve broken the transformative nature of 5G into eight causal dimensions that I use to expand our understanding of this next wave communication system.

Future of Education – “Future Proofing Education Today for Tomorrow’s Workforce”.

It is no longer possible to predict the educational needs of business 4-5 years in advance. In fact, we need to prepare students for jobs that don’t exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. With the average person entering the workforce in 2030 needing to reboot their career six times, we are entering a period of unprecedented opportunity for reskilling tomorrow’s workforce. By 2030 the largest company on the Internet will be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet.

Future Jobs – “Preparing Yourself for the Workforce of the Future”.

What are the odds that the job you’ll be doing 10 years from now doesn’t exist today? Turns out the odds are pretty high. Even though much of today’s technology is giving us super-human attributes and virtually everyone can now think-faster, know-faster, and do-faster than ever before, every new technology requires new skills, talents, and understandings that are hard to quantify. This talk takes audiences on a fascinating journey into the industries of tomorrow and the jobs they’ll create along the way.

Future of Transportation – “The Most Disruptive Technology in All History”.

In the future, our cars will know far more about us than we know about them. Each new vehicle will instantly know how to adjust the seats, what music we like, our favorite TV shows and where we left off in the latest series. It will also understand where we’re going, letting those we’re meeting with know when we will arrive. As transportation becomes faster, cheaper, and easier, we will simply do more of it. We’re moving towards a very fluid society, and all this movement will seem natural and effortless. It’s important to understand that driverless technology will not only be applied to cars, but also tractors, trucks, ships, lawnmowers, forklifts, water taxis, snowplows, submarines, drones, trains, and even airplanes. It will soon touch the lives of every person on planet earth.

Future of the Drone Industry – “Mini Airports: Coming to a city near you”.

When it comes to drones, we shouldn’t limit our thinking to their flying capabilities. Instead, the same drone that can fly may also be able to roll along the ground, jump onto a building, climb a tree, adhere to a piece of glass, float on the water or swim under it. In just a few years air taxis will be common in most major cities and along with them will come a new kind of infrastructure – mini airports. The speed of this evolution will largely depend on pricing. With private planes still costing many times the cost of a first class ticket, it’s never broken into mainstream consciousness. If flying drones can somehow be lowered to 2-3 times an Uber drive across town, it will grow quickly.

Your Business in 2030 – “Creating a Future-Resilient Organization”.

Unlike the study of macro or megatrends, situational futuring is a micro-futuring process that begins with a single invention, tiny idea, or what-if condition and expands from there. The process begins with an initial scenario and asking some of the standard who-what-when-where-how-and-why questions. Probing deeper, questions formulated around things like timing, monetary implications, disruptive effects, symbiotic partners, who-wins-who-loses, wild cards, policy changes, and strange bedfellows will help expand your thinking even further. This works particularly well in a brainstorming environment where thoughts and ideas can be quickly sketched out, described, or clarified so more can be added.

Epiphany Z: Eight Radical Visions for Transforming Your Future.

"Epiphany Z" is Futurist Thomas Frey’s dynamic approach to envisioning, comprehending, and ultimately thriving in the radically different futures emerging around us at the speed of light.
Frey’s unparalleled ability to detect emerging trends from the smallest of clues gives him an edge on other futurists. Now he’s sharing that edge with you.

What are tomorrow’s hottest industries?

What huge industries of today are doomed to extinction?

How will our lives be changed by advancements in robotics, in drone technology, in manufacturing and transportation?

How can education cope with the explosive new world of enhanced information, hyperactive business environments, cultural shifts that would have been unimaginable as recently as yesterday?

Who will be the masters of tomorrow’s universe and who will be left behind?

Above all, how can you not only protect yourself from the most disruptive aspects of the changes sweeping your way---how can you become one of the masters of those changes?

Distilling decades of research, experience, and proven success in correctly identifying and accurately extrapolating today’s trends and innovations into tomorrow’s realities, Thomas Frey gives you an advance ticket to the most explosive period of change in all of human history.

Those changes are taking place now. Thomas Frey shows where they will be taking all of us tomorrow. "EPIPHANY Z" your roadmap to the future.

Epiphany Z: Eight Radical Visions for Transforming Your Future.