Amy Webb: Futurist Speaker

A 10- and 20-Year Forecast of Your Industry. Technology continues to intersect with our lives in new, weird, and wonderful ways. With tech’s integration into our daily lives becoming second nature to so much of the world, we often overlook this intersection. And yet, emerging tech will play a key role in shaping the future of humanity.

In this mind-bending session, world-renowned futurist Amy Webb takes audiences on a captivating journey as she provides a thought-provoking series of snapshots into the near and far future of business and society.

Drawing from her work and research as founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, she develops a set of optimistic, neutral, and chaotic scenarios that describe your organization or industry’s plausible scenes 10 and 20 years into the future, offers insights for how your organization can achieve its preferred future, and puts forth probable answers to tomorrow’s most pressing questions about work, relationships, and our way of living.

• Which tech trends should we be monitoring?
• How can businesses distinguish between “trend” and “trendy?”
• And most importantly, how can you prepare yourself and your organization for what’s next in a world where constant disruption is the norm?

In this custom speech, futurist Amy Webb taps into her research of your organization and industry and links it to curated, data-driven longitudinal tech trends to reveal the forces shaping the future of your business. She connects trends from within and outside of your field to illustrate a chain reaction of events, the potential outcomes of those events, and the ways they might shake up your business, as well as provide tools and strategies for adapting.

This talk has been adapted from the world’s largest and most prestigious stages, including the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, to help organizations in any industry position themselves as the disruptors before being disrupted.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been the catastrophic catalyst for change that has reset our world and forced us to rethink the ways we live, work, and interact with one another.

As we collectively make the gradual return to not-quite normal, we’re faced with new challenges in global supply chains, inflation and economic decline, geopolitical conflict, healthcare, politics and governance, and human rights — all of which have the potential to stall innovation and disrupt businesses and society to a point of no return.

In this data-driven investigation into what the post-covid future entails, futurist expert and strategic forecaster Amy Webb outlines foresight tools and custom, easy-to-execute strategies organizations can implement to begin laying the groundwork for their desired futures. She draws from more than two decades at the forefront of modeling next-order implications to help organizations figure out how to mitigate risk and solve their future problems today.

We’ve entered the era of decentralization. Established, recognized authorities — financial institutions, government agencies, market regulators, and more — are being disrupted by tech innovators. Meme stocks, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), interactive virtual realms known as metaverses, and new forms of authority are reshaping the world as we know it. But this is only the beginning.

In this gripping session, Amy Webb explains how decentralization trends across different sectors will soon influence transactions in every industry — from real estate to banking and insurance — and explores the impact that metaverses and the other technologies that will be introduced in the digital future will have on business, governing, education, and society.

Rewriting Business and Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. Humanity’s ability to solve its existential challenges — from climate change and ending food insecurity across the globe to putting an end to the next viral outbreak before it becomes a pandemic — will potentially be determined by the most important technology that you’ve never heard of: synthetic biology.

But, this new technology is not without controversy and ethical dilemmas. Through a powerful technological platform combining biology and artificial intelligence, it will give humans the power to read, edit, and write DNA — thus allowing us to control our genetic destinies.

But who should decide how we engineer human life? Should there be limits to human enhancements? Is it right for humans to play God?

Sharing original research and insights from her acclaimed book, The Genesis Machine, Futurist and synthetic tech expert Amy Webb leads this riveting examination into the opportunities, risks, and ethics of synthetic biology, and how we as humans will make decisions on issues such as whether to program novel viruses to fight diseases, what genetic privacy will look like, and how companies should earn revenue from engineered cells.

In this talk, she provides the background for thinking through the upcoming economic growth, business ecosystem, and governing challenges posed by redesigning life, as well as the vast possibilities waiting for business and humanity on the horizon.