Amy Webb: Futurist Speaker

Amy Webb is a world-renowned quantitative futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute, guiding organizations to anticipate disruption, harness emerging technologies, and shape the future with data-driven foresight.

Highlights:
  • Founder & CEO of the Future Today Institute, advising global corporations, central banks, and governments.
  • Renowned quantitative futurist and bestselling author.
  • Professor of strategic foresight at NYU Stern School of Business.
  • Recognized by Poets & Quants as one of the world’s most impactful professors.
  • Expert in AI, synthetic biology, metaverse, and long-term strategic forecasting.

Formats:

Keynote speaker (45–60 minutes), strategic foresight workshops, executive briefings, and innovation summits.


Audience:

C-suite executives, policymakers, strategists, and innovation leaders seeking to understand future trends and plan proactively for disruption.


Outcomes:
  1. Learn to anticipate and prepare for technological and societal disruption.
  2. Build a data-driven foresight strategy to guide long-term growth and innovation.
  3. Adopt a futurist mindset to balance immediate performance with future readiness.
Reviews: (0 reviews)
  • Travels from: New York City, New York
  • **Fee range: $35,001 - $50,000

Keynote Topics

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.

 

Talent Short Bio

Amy Webb is an acclaimed futurist, author, and tech strategist who helps organizations think more systematically about the future. As the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, she leads one of the world’s most respected foresight firms, advising Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and global institutions on navigating complexity and technological transformation.

A professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business and visiting fellow at Oxford University’s Säid School of Business, Amy has developed pioneering methodologies that combine data, technology, and trend analysis to help leaders identify risks and opportunities before they emerge. Her insights span industries—from AI and synthetic biology to quantum computing, augmented reality, and sustainability.

Recognized by Poets & Quants as one of the most impactful business professors in the world, Amy brings clarity, precision, and inspiration to her presentations. Her keynotes are equal parts intellectually rigorous and deeply engaging, empowering audiences to adopt a futurist mindset and take decisive action today to thrive tomorrow.

As organizations look to navigate today’s disruption while preparing for the complexities of the future, world-renowned quantitative futurist and tech leader Amy Webb provides the strategic foresight and forecasting that is crucial to businesses adapting and positioning themselves for sustained success in this era of unprecedented transformation.

Believing that the global challenges faced by business and society are interconnected across disciplines, Webb possesses expert-level knowledge of the industries critical to keeping the world moving and draws from her work and research to share insights on emerging trends and technologies that will revolutionize the ways we work and live. She is the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and organizations prepare for complex futures.

Amy Webb leads an extraordinary exploration into the emerging trends and technologies that will turn industries on their heads and reshape every aspect of our lives — from synthetic biology and metaverses to artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and more. Thought-provoking and visibly enthusiastic about the possibilities that lie ahead for businesses, Webb prepares organizations for what’s next in and outside of their fields, and shares actionable strategies for thinking like a futurist, getting out ahead of disruption, managing the present while innovating for the future, and enhancing purpose-driven decision-making.

In her work with the Future Today Institute, Webb is a trusted advisor to the world’s most admired companies, three-star admirals and generals, and the senior leadership of central banks and intergovernmental organizations. She has pioneered a data-driven, technology-led foresight methodology that has been implemented by hundreds of organizations to power their growth. Webb is a professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where she developed and teaches future-focused MBA-level courses, and is also a visiting fellow at Oxford University’s Säid School of Business.

She has been recognized by Poets & Quants as “one of the most impactful business professors in the world.” Webb’s influence can be felt in policy, government, and even the entertainment industry. She collaborates closely with Hollywood’s leading writers and producers to ensure the most accurate depiction of science, technology, and the future in blockbuster films and widely recognized TV shows and commercials. Prior to founding the Future Today Institute in 2005, Amy Webb began her career as a journalist, first covering technology and economics for The Wall Street Journal while based in Hong Kong and later relocating to Tokyo to report on emerging technologies for Newsweek.

A powerful voice on all things tech- and future-related, Amy Webb is the author of several bestselling books, including the critically acclaimed The Genesis Machine, which examines the future of synthetic biology — which she predicts will be the most important technology of our lifetime. Amy Webb has provided thought leadership as a columnist on the future and big data for Slate and a contributing editor and tech columnist for Inc, and her insights into the future are featured frequently in today’s top publications, including the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Wired, Fortune, and several others.

Previously, she served as a visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, as well as a U.S. Department of State delegate for the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, where she worked on the future of technology, media, and international diplomacy.

A visionary with extraordinary insight into what the future of business and society might look like, Amy Webb is a winner of the Thinkers50 RADAR Award, and has been named to the BBC 100 Women list and the Thinkers50 Radar list of influential management thinkers shaping the future of how organizations are managed and led.

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Talent Videos

Amy Webb | SXSW 2019 Keynote: The Big Nine – How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

In this 64-minute SXSW keynote, futurist and author Amy Webb explores the rise of artificial intelligence and the influence of nine major tech companies shaping the future of humanity, business, and society.

Summary

In her SXSW 2019 keynote, Amy Webb—renowned futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute—delivers a compelling and urgent analysis of how artificial intelligence is evolving and the immense power concentrated in the hands of a few global tech giants. Framed around her book The Big Nine, the talk breaks down the strategic choices, ethical implications, and potential outcomes of AI development across three dominant ecosystems: the United States (G-MAFIA: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Apple), China (BAT: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent), and government-influenced hybrid systems.

Amy argues that AI will determine the trajectory of humanity’s next century, influencing how we live, work, and govern ourselves. She illustrates how the race for dominance in machine learning and data control could lead to unintended consequences if left unchecked. Using data-driven foresight models, she outlines three possible futures for AI: optimistic, pragmatic, and catastrophic—each shaped by decisions made today about ethics, transparency, and governance.

Her keynote weaves storytelling, visual forecasting, and hard data to engage both technologists and non-technical audiences. She warns that while innovation accelerates, ethical frameworks and global cooperation lag behind. Amy calls for policymakers, corporations, and citizens to work collaboratively to ensure that AI serves human interests rather than undermines them.

Throughout the session, she highlights examples of algorithmic bias, privacy erosion, and the cultural differences between U.S. and Chinese approaches to AI development. Yet she remains hopeful, emphasizing that foresight and intentional design can steer technology toward equitable and sustainable outcomes.

The presentation concludes with a challenge to leaders: embrace foresight, prioritize ethics, and commit to shaping an inclusive AI future before it shapes us.

Key Moments

  • 04:11–12:30 – The G-MAFIA and BAT ecosystems: power concentration and influence.
  • 12:31–23:00 – How AI decision-making impacts economics, politics, and human behavior.
  • 23:01–36:15 – Visual scenarios outlining three possible AI futures.
  • 36:16–48:00 – Ethical dilemmas and global competition for AI leadership.
  • 48:01–57:45 – The human side of AI: bias, privacy, and accountability.

In this 17-minute TED Talk, futurist and data scientist Amy Webb shares how she used analytics, pattern recognition, and algorithmic thinking to hack the online dating system—and find lasting love.

Summary

In her widely viewed TED Talk, Amy Webb—renowned futurist, author, and CEO of the Future Today Institute—transforms a personal story into a lesson on data, bias, and strategic thinking. Frustrated with traditional dating apps and algorithms, she applied her background in data analysis and foresight to reverse-engineer the system.

Amy begins by describing how her initial attempts at online dating failed spectacularly, leading her to realize that the problem wasn’t just her profile—it was the algorithms driving matches. Using a methodical approach, she created a detailed spreadsheet of more than 70 data points about her ideal partner and the traits she could offer. She then analyzed patterns among the most popular female profiles to identify what made them successful and adapted her strategy accordingly.

What started as a personal experiment soon revealed broader insights into how technology and algorithms shape human behavior. Amy demonstrates how the same analytical mindset she applies to forecasting global trends can also decode social systems. Through humor, candor, and data visualization, she explains how taking control of the inputs—rather than relying on automated outputs—can produce more meaningful outcomes.

Her story culminates with a satisfying twist: the data-driven strategy worked. She met her husband within weeks of implementing her new approach, proving that combining heart and science can create powerful results.

The talk balances entertainment with insight, highlighting Amy’s ability to humanize data while underscoring a central truth of her work—understanding systems, whether technological or emotional, gives us the power to shape better futures.

Key Moments

  • 02:46–05:10 – Building a data-driven model for compatibility.
  • 05:11–08:20 – Reverse-engineering top-performing profiles and strategy redesign.
  • 08:21–12:00 – Applying analytical thinking to emotional decisions.
  • 12:01–15:00 – How data transparency empowers smarter choices.
  • 15:01–17:27 – Conclusion: lessons learned, success story, and reflections on data and love.

In this 58-minute World Economic Forum panel, futurist Amy Webb joins global leaders and policymakers to discuss governance, ethics, and international cooperation in shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

Summary

In this in-depth discussion at the World Economic Forum, Amy Webb—quantitative futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute—participates alongside industry and policy leaders to explore the critical question: How can humanity set effective rules for the global AI race?

The panel examines the accelerating development of artificial intelligence across competing ecosystems and the urgent need for frameworks that ensure responsible innovation. Amy Webb contributes foresight-driven perspectives on how divergent strategies between major powers—especially the United States, China, and the European Union—are shaping the global AI landscape. She emphasizes that AI governance must move beyond reactive policymaking to proactive design rooted in transparency, interoperability, and ethical foresight.

Throughout the conversation, Webb underscores that AI is not a single technology but a system of systems influencing every sector—from healthcare and education to defense and finance. She highlights the risks of fragmented governance, calling for multilateral cooperation that aligns technological advancement with human-centered values.

Panelists debate issues such as algorithmic accountability, data privacy, public trust, and the economic implications of AI deployment. Webb contextualizes these challenges through data trends and scenario modeling, warning that without shared principles, competition could erode global stability. Yet, she remains optimistic that strategic foresight, collective action, and interdisciplinary collaboration can guide AI toward equitable outcomes.

The session concludes with a consensus on the importance of inclusive policy design and international coordination. Webb’s closing insights remind leaders that the future of AI will not be determined by who builds it fastest, but by who builds it wisely—with foresight, ethics, and humanity at the center.

Key Moments

  • 04:11–14:30 – Amy Webb’s overview of AI ecosystems and policy divergence.
  • 14:31–26:15 – Ethical considerations and the pace of AI innovation.
  • 26:16–38:20 – Global regulatory frameworks and geopolitical implications.
  • 38:21–48:30 – Collaborative approaches to transparency and accountability.
  • 48:31–55:00 – Public trust, misinformation, and data governance.

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Talent FAQ's

She works across sectors technology, healthcare, finance, energy, and public policy helping each anticipate the forces shaping their future.

Through her proprietary foresight methodology, she translates emerging data and signals into clear, strategic next steps for organizations.

She combines deep data analysis with storytelling and visual forecasting, helping audiences see the future in practical, relatable ways.

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Talent FAQ

She works across sectors technology, healthcare, finance, energy, and public policy helping each anticipate the forces shaping their future.

Through her proprietary foresight methodology, she translates emerging data and signals into clear, strategic next steps for organizations.

She combines deep data analysis with storytelling and visual forecasting, helping audiences see the future in practical, relatable ways.

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