Speaking & Workshops
Exclusively represented by Leading Authorities speakers bureau, 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.
Amy's Speaking Engagements
Amy has spoken to numerous audiences all around the world, including at the World Economic Forum, the Milken Institute Global Conference, the Aspen Institute, SXSW and TED. She has also addressed teams at hundreds of companies, including Cisco, AT&T, Nokia, IBM, UBS, Microsoft, UnitedHealth Group, Fidelity Investments, MasterCard, AmericanExpress, Google and more. She is a frequent guest on television shows and podcasts.
Speech & Interactive Session Topics
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 2032 or 2042, 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.
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 15th year, is downloaded 1+ million times annually 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, which might include artificial intelligence, biotechnology, the metaverse, Web 3 and others – 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.
Single-Topic Tech and Science Talks Areas
The Futures of Gene Editing and Biotech
If you could enhance yourself, what would you choose? A new area of technology promises to dramatically extend the human lifespan and even allow us to live off-planet. That same technology will allow us to grow meat without raising livestock, bring agriculture indoors, and develop vast new ways to fight climate change. As exciting as this all sounds, it’s not without risk. Soon, we will program living, biological structures as though they were tiny computers. But who should decide how to engineer life? Whether engineered organisms should be planted, farmed, and released into the wild? Should there be limits to human enhancements? Is it wise for us to play God? This riveting examination of synthetic biology and the bioeconomy will introduce you to the most important technology you’ve never heard of — and will provide the background for thinking through the upcoming economic growth, business ecosystem, and governing challenges posed by redesigning life, as well as the vast opportunities waiting for all of humanity on the horizon. This session can be developed as a 45 or 60-minute speech for your organization.
The Futures of Artificial Intelligence
One of the most powerful technologies of our lifetimes is now achieving wild new milestones. That technology — artificial intelligence — is reshaping business, privacy, commerce, agriculture, warfare, healthcare, education, and even our relationships to each other. What’s on the horizon for AI? What can you look forward to –– and what should we be worried about now? 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 for your organization.
The Futures of Web 3 (DeFi, blockchain, cryptos)
We’ve entered the era of decentralization. Established, recognized authorities—financial institutions, government agencies, market regulators and more—are being disrupted by technology innovators. Meme stocks, NFTs, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and new forms of authority are challenging everything. But this is just the beginning. What’s on the horizon? In this riveting session, Amy Webb explains how decentralization trends across different industry sectors will soon influence every industry where transactions are involved, whether that’s real estate, banking or insurance. This session can be developed as a 45 or 60-minute speech for your organization.
The Futures of the Metaverse
Once a niche concept beloved of tech enthusiasts, the idea of a centralized virtual world, a “place” parallel to the physical world, seemed like an impractical utopian dream. Then, in 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta, the payments platform Square changed its name to Block (as in blockchain), and suddenly everyone was talking about mixed realities. The City of Seoul announced it was building the first city-scale metaverse, while NVIDIA’s CEO gave a keynote to shareholders inside a metaverse built for the occasion. It might feel like the metaverse is yet another trendy flash in the pan—but what if beyond the hype, the underlying foundations of the metaverse are real? If a new digital realm is being built today, what does that mean for business, governing, education and society in the future? And what happens when there are multiple, competing multiverses? Will some of us get locked out—or worse, potentially locked inside by a new breed of hacker? Amy Webb will lead your organization through an exploration of our metaverse future. Available as a 45 or 60-minute speech.
Workshops
If your organization is interested in hosting a futures workshop, Amy and her colleagues at the Future Today Institute would be glad to learn more. FTI’s workshops are hands-on and fully immersive, and FTI works with teams all over the world. Workshops are a proven way to gain concrete, strategic deliverables on a topic of interest. Workshops range from a few hours to a few days. Learn more about Amy's work at the Future Today Institute.
Foresight Masterclass
This Foresight Masterclass offers a practical, hands-on learning experience for organizations who want to develop their capacity for strategic foresight. Teams learn the most essential tools of futurists and how to apply them within their organizations.
Based on the MBA course Amy Webb teaches at NYU Stern and The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream, Amy Webb's bestselling book, you and your team will learn the fundamentals of strategic foresight. In advance of the session, participants receive hard copies of course materials, a copy of Signals, and a short assignment.
Available as virtual or in-person individual sessions or as a comprehensive deep-dive into foresight. Participants will learn how to apply FTI's strategic foresight frameworks and will be positioned to build a culture of strategic foresight within your organization.
Scenario Mapping
Scenario mapping workshops use data from an organization and adjacent industries, as well as trend insights, to build narratives describing plausible futures. Participants learn how to map scenarios to understand next-order impacts, develop new product and service ideas, and create strategic visions for organizations. Scenario workshops are also used to test theories for strategic change within organizations, industries and on the geopolitical stage.
This workshop isn't like other scenario mapping activities. Participants learn the Future Today Institute's unique, proven methods for creating data-driven scenarios across different emotive framings. As a last step, they apply a probabilistic model to help them make decisions.
Available as a virtual or in-person full-day workshop.
Signals & Trends
How can you distinguish between “trend” and “trendy,” and which long-term trends should your business be following? FTI's rigorous, data-driven method for finding, tracking and monitoring signals and trends is used by hundreds of organizations worldwide. We work with your team to surface relevant trends and develop an escalation system so you know when to take actions on them.
In this workshop, participants learn the critically important first two steps of FTI's forecasting methodology: listening for weak signals at the fringe, and applying the CIPHER pattern recognition tool to surface emerging trends.
Available as a virtual or in-person half or full-day workshop.
Future Worlds
In which future worlds could your business need to operate? Discover multiple future states for your organization and see early how to grow and thrive. The purpose of this workshop is to help your team have strategic conversations that spark new ideas, potential threats, and generate discussion on topics related to social change, geopolitical shifts, and quality of life.
For organizations that have been directly impacted by the global Covid-19 pandemic, or for teams that are working on longer-range projects––those having to do with artificial intelligence, climate change, warfare, global population shifts, agriculture––a worldbuilding workshop offers rich strategic insights.
Available as a virtual or in-person half or full-day workshop. Organizations learn a set of tools to help them construct a world of the future, so that they can visualize and experience it as a team, in the present.
Available as a virtual or in-person half or full-day workshop.
Risk & Threat Mapping
This hands-on risk and threat mapping workshop teaches participants how to understand plausible threats using data-driven frameworks.
Before you can plan for the next disruption, you must radically rethink your approach to risk. Using a transdisciplinary approach, you and your team will consider adjacent and theoretical influences on your organization, find next-order risks, and know when to take action. If you can spot risk early enough, you mitigate it -- or even use it as a catalyst for innovation.
Available as a virtual or in-person half or full-day session. During the workshop, we will introduce a series of strategic foresight tools to help you identify plausible future risks and threats, as well as how to assess their seriousness. Participants will develop a system to make decisions given the associated risks, and to take incremental actions.
Strategic Backcasting
How can you plan for an uncertain future? Futurists use a process called "backcasting," a strategic process leaders can use to reverse-engineer their preferred future states. Participants will use backcasting to offset current challenges like the coronavirus. They will also use backcasting to make critical immediate, near and longer-term decisions.
In this session, we will use key FTI frameworks to analyzing new business opportunities and threats, calculate their likely demand in the marketplace, and determining potential risks.
Available as a virtual or in-person half-day or full-day workshop.
Moderation
Amy Webb “showed Comic-Con how it's done” declared the Los Angeles Times, describing the 2019 main stage Westworld session she moderated with the show's actors and show runners. Amy serves as a panel moderator, event host, and interviewer, from World Economic Forum panels to corporate events for companies like AT&T.