AMY WEBB: I was in Tokyo, and I had a phone in the early 2000s that was connected to the internet. So Japan and Korea, for a while, were much further ahead than everybody else in mobile.

JEFF BERMAN: That’s Amy Webb describing one of the first revelations that put her on a career path to being a futurist, an entrepreneur, and a popular author.

WEBB: It had a camera at the same time that Americans were basically using the old Nokia 5190, right? Very analog. You could play Snake. That was the most thrilling thing you could do with it. But my phone was really advanced, and all I could see was a future where everybody was going to have phones that had cameras that were connected to an internet where you could take pictures and share pictures. And therefore, given what I knew about technology and components and costs and everything else, it just seemed very obvious that the future of the internet was more distributed. The future of content was less one-to-many and more sort of many-to-many.

BERMAN: Being early to insights like this has established Amy Webb as a memorable public thinker and advisor. Her roster of clients includes global companies and governments. Amy’s also a highly sought-after speaker. People literally camp out to hear her annual talk at South by Southwest. It’s kind of like the tech entrepreneur’s version of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour. In this episode, you’ll get a front-row seat where you’ll hear her latest insights about what the future may hold and how to prepare for it.

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I’m your host, Jeff Berman. Our guest today has a job title that’s not something you’d encounter at a typical career day at a school. She’s a futurist. As the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, Amy is a global leader in strategic foresight. She teaches her craft at NYU Business School and is the author of several influential books and papers. Her latest work is all about the convergence of innovation that’s leading to what she calls a technology supercycle. We’ll dig into that in a bit, but first, I wanted to learn more about where Amy’s obsession with predicting the future began.

Amy, welcome to Masters of Scale.

Amy Webb’s journey to becoming a futurist

WEBB: Thank you.

BERMAN: I’m super curious about so much of what you do, but I want to start by asking how one becomes a futurist.

WEBB: So, there are many paths. You can go to school.

BERMAN: They’ll teach you to see the future?

WEBB: There are courses. I actually teach one at Stern, NYU Stern, in the MBA program. It’s an academic discipline, so you can study it. But a lot of people wind up in professions from different backgrounds. So, I actually did not study foresight in university.

BERMAN: What did you study?

WEBB: Game theory and economics. I thought I would be — actually, my dream job, which probably only you and nobody else listening to this podcast will appreciate, was Solicitor General.

BERMAN: Oh my God — of the United States of America.

WEBB: That was my dream job when I was in fifth grade. I was like, why would I want to be president? The president just manages things for a handful of years. I want to be the person that makes the laws that are here forever. So, from that point forward, everything was about law school.

BERMAN: So, what took you from game theory and economics away from law and into the world you’re in now?

WEBB: There is this thing called the LSAT, which is a fun test that you have to take to get into an American law school. And I got through the first two sections without a problem. As it turns out, I got a perfect score on those two sections, but I blacked out at the start of the third. I’d had a pretty massive panic attack. It was my first one. I didn’t know that’s what was happening.

You can retake the LSAT, but they average scores. And so, I was going to have two really good scores and a zero. So, if I played everything forward, I was going to have to figure out a different way to do what I wanted to do, which was shape the future, which I thought was intellectually stimulating and important and fun. I just had to figure out a different avenue for it.

I did not have a Plan B because this was the only thing that I had ever planned on doing. A professor of mine in college saw me agonizing and said, “I can connect you to a tiny town in northern Japan. And if you’re willing, you can go work for that town,” which I did.

I went, and I was kind of like the town foreigner. So, it’s a real thing. I taught some middle school English classes. I hung out with elderly people. I did some service work. I sat in town hall.

BERMAN: Did you speak Japanese?

WEBB: Not at the beginning. I put my head down and learned. So, I did that for a few years. I started stringing for The New York Times and for The Economist. I came back, went to grad school, wound up as a journalist for a little bit. And the type of reporting that I was doing was more data-driven, and ultimately, I got bored. It just wasn’t the right fit. It was reporting on what had already happened, but it wasn’t an opportunity to play things forward.

Founding the Future Today Institute

BERMAN: Amy left the news business and started a new company, the Future Today Institute.

WEBB: We are an organization that just does one thing, and that is strategic foresight. Strategic foresight is a data-driven way of seeing the future for the purpose of making better strategic decisions. So, our mission really is to empower businesses and governments to do long-range planning in a way that helps them grow but also makes sure that we all wind up in a good spot.

We’re also very, very good at disruption, so figuring out where there is risk. And we do that on behalf of organizations all over the world. We have no debt. There were never any investors. And I do not look — I come from a very modest background. There was no family money whatsoever.

BERMAN: For so many of our audience, there’s this cold-start problem. It’s, “Okay, I have the idea, but I don’t have the resources, personally. I can’t afford to go spend a year not taking a salary.” How did you even figure out who to go talk to, what to ask for?

WEBB: I think this is actually pretty important for this audience. I run across so many founders right now who — and I’m sure you already know what I’m going to say because you’re smiling — I run across way too many people whose sole desire is to exit.

If your desire in life is to exit, then you should be doing something else because your motivation is in the wrong spot. And that means you’re going to be making decisions that are never in the best interest of the one great thing that must be created. Your motivation is always going to be making a pitch deck, getting to the right VC, getting to the right private equity guy so you can get that exit done. That seems to me like a terrible way to go through life.

The three technologies that will shape the future

BERMAN: Among the things that you do to shape public discourse, but also to market your work, is you publish. You have a paper that just came out. Can you tell us about the paper?

WEBB: So suddenly, a decade later than they should have been talking about it, everybody’s finally aware of AI, and they’re certainly talking a lot about GPT.

There’s actually a different GPT that’s very important. That GPT is a general-purpose technology. And I bring that up because it turns out that artificial intelligence, while important, is actually not the only technology shaping the future. There are two others.

And if you were to look at each one in a silo, you could start mapping productivity. You could start mapping impact on GDP and things like that. But most businesses and governments would discount a lot of what’s happening because it feels too far away, which is the same story of what happened to AI.

So, it turns out, in the course of our research, artificial intelligence is a general-purpose technology, which is defined as something that has a profound and lasting impact on the economy. So if you go back in time, the steam engine is a general-purpose technology, electricity, the internet — and so artificial intelligence qualifies similarly.

Okay, there are two others. It’s advanced sensor technology and biotechnology. If you look at them and their impact and think about them as platforms, we’re starting to see some of the same patterns. The reason that all of this matters is because you might be an investment banker or have a digital media company and not think biotech has anything at all to do with you. It does.

Individually, these groupings of technologies, these general-purpose technologies, aren’t important. It’s the convergence we discovered that matters. And what’s happening is, improvements in one beget improvements in the other. So there’s this sort of flywheel effect.

BERMAN: Before we get into the convergence, I’m going to be Denzel Washington from the movie Philadelphia, and ask you to explain the biotech and the sensors as if I’m a five-year-old.

WEBB: So, advanced sensor technologies is all the stuff in your phone. We are surrounded by literally millions of sensors.

So for as much as everybody was talking about large language models, which you build using publicly available data to train — that only gets you so far. You don’t have any behavioral data or real-world data. For that, you need sensor data. There are more sensors now than there ever have been before. You can pull data from that, which leads us to a large action model, which predicts what we might do next, how we might behave next, and just creates a much richer tapestry.

BERMAN: And that sensor data is not publicly available?

WEBB: I mean, no, some of it is, but it’s mostly within the domain of the OEMs and the technology companies, right?

So there’s that. Within biotech, it’s synthetic biology and generative biology that matters. Just as with ChatGPT, you can type in a prompt and get out whatever — a LinkedIn post that’s been optimized for you, whatever you need. There’s a biological equivalent. You can type in a molecular structure you might want or a function you might want and get the formula on the other end.

Why does all of this matter? Because it gives us optionality for materials, and that matters to everybody. So it’s not just health.

I’ll give you an example. Nitrile. Nitrile is an alternative to latex. Nitrile gloves are sort of everywhere, but they’re always in demand, and that’s because post-COVID, restaurants were using them. Everybody needs these gloves.

Now, the problem is, all of the materials come from one spot. You’ve got supply chain issues, you’ve got shipping problems, all these different issues, which means there’s a shortage — not just because there’s not enough supply but because the means of production are all screwed up.

What if there was a way to formulate those gloves and print out that material in a much easier way, without having to extract it? That’s what can be done.

Now, I know that doesn’t seem all that thrilling, but you can do something similar with meat that we consume. Rather than having to have a giant chicken warehouse that’s unclean and requires a lot of hormones and things to keep those chickens alive, you could have something better. It’s not great for humans. It’s definitely not great for the chickens — or for the environment.

So instead, what if you had a small two-gram tissue sample? And instead of growing chickens, you grew that sample in a bioreactor, which is something like a giant pressure cooker, and yielded 250 tons of chicken meat.

BERMAN: As population explodes around the world and more and more areas become inhabitable and are not arable, sources of protein are going to be more critical.

WEBB: And that’s actually already been done in Singapore. This meat has already gone on sale. It’s a chicken cutlet. It’s $17.

So, you might be able to get a frozen chicken cutlet for $1, so the margins are a little off, right? However, Singapore is a tiny nation-state that is densely populated. It’s not like they have space for chicken farms, so they’re growing chicken inside of an office building.

Singapore could become a net exporter of chicken to Malaysia or other places around Southeast Asia. That is really interesting because it means that the local economy there changes. It changes the geoeconomic dynamics. All these countries now don’t have to rely on China, for example, or some other place for their chicken, right?

It shortens the cold chain. So just imagine that tiny example on a planetary scale.

The reason that all of these things are connected is because this year, some of these new tools became available. DeepMind just released a new equivalent of a large language model but for biology, right? And with the advanced sensors that are coming to market, you now have options for creating the technology to support the creation of synthetically produced or cultured meats, for example, or new materials.

We may not have to have plastic going forward; we could have something different. We have been set on this other course, and as advancements happen in one area, they beget advancements in the other. So they really are connected, and the convergence is what everybody is missing.

BERMAN: What’s an example where the sensors come into play as well? The sensor data?

WEBB: Yes, I can use myself as an example. This will, I’m sure, come as a shock to you — I track everything.

I am a competitive cyclist, so — and I was also in college. After saying I was not a college athlete, I wasn’t really competing for the university that I went to, but back then, you were just on a bike and trying to figure out how out of breath you were.

Today, I race on gravel and road. My gravel and road bikes are full of sensors. I’ve got computers on both. Those are connected to heart rate monitors, and I’m looking at my levels while I’m riding.

But I also have my coach, who lives in a different state. We’re looking at all of these different data points. And it’s not like I’m going to ride the Tour de France. I’m just a lady who likes to ride her bike, you know? But I have access to all of that now.

Interestingly, I don’t know if this is actually going to happen, but the enhanced games have been proposed. Have you heard about this at all?

BERMAN: No.

WEBB: So, this is meant to be an alternative to the Olympics and to accusations of professional athletes doping. There’s a group of people who were like, “Look, we can track data on everything now. Everybody is starting to experiment with different types of dosing, different types of nutraceuticals or pharmaceuticals — whatever. Why don’t we just allow people to push themselves to the absolute extreme limits and see what happens?”

So, there are the enhanced games coming out where you are actually encouraged to do all of this. That’s like a contradiction, right? But in my world, contradictions are very important. It’s one of the ways that we track signals and start to think about what are trends. And I think it’s interesting that that’s on the horizon. All of these weight loss drugs — that is also a product of AI and biotechnology. So that’s another convergence.

I should backtrack a little bit. The work that I do is very much in the commercial sector. So, we publish a lot of thought leadership. We make that available for free. I run a very for-profit company, though, and the work that we do is primarily with the world’s largest corporations and governments.

We’ve been looking a lot at health and changes to health for the past several years because as this technology supercycle spins up, I think that’s one of the places we’re going to see the most impact because it’s the most vulnerable to disruption.

This is the right time for healthcare to really think through: What does growth look like? Where are we vulnerable? How are we going to be disrupted? And for people in the start-up space, to be looking very carefully at these convergences, to start thinking through what the new businesses could be coming up.

BERMAN: Once you have a vision of the future, what do you do with it? We’ll have more actionable insights from Amy Webb in just a minute.

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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this interview and more on our YouTube channel.

How to act on future developments today

We have a broad range of audience, a lot of early-stage founders and a lot of people who work at big companies who are — or aspire to be — intrepreneurs. I’m imagining them listening to you and going and reading your paper and then trying to figure out, “What do I do with this?” What’s your advice to them about how they take what you’re putting out there and actually make it actionable?

WEBB: Sure. So, there’s a framework in the last page of the — it’s like a 30-page paper describing this phenomenon of what we’re actually calling “living intelligence,” which we think is what comes next.

There is a framework that can be used within an organization to start tracking convergences and also to sort of benchmark yourselves. But being aware of the technology supercycle isn’t enough.

You have to start developing capabilities in foresight. Having the idea isn’t enough because the idea can be wrong or influenced by bias or recency phenomena. You need to make sure that you’re heading in a good direction.

So, for that, it’s a matter of tracking signals, knowing the difference between what’s a trend and what’s trendy, and opening yourselves up to uncertainty — which means: What are all of the things that your organization can’t control?

Signals and trends are what we can know. Uncertainties are what we cannot know. And then using that information to map out scenarios.

Using storytelling to convey complex issues

BERMAN: There are a lot of companies out there that make a ton of money, that have been making a ton of money for a long time. They do things the way they do them. They evolve really incrementally. And you were in it as a journalist, banging your head against the wall. Why won’t anyone pay attention to what’s coming and even have the conversation? What have you found to be effective in moving leaders who are stuck in the old way of doing things to open the door to your way of thinking?

WEBB: So, let’s go back to Herman Kahn.

Herman Kahn was early days at RAND Corporation, being tasked with helping advise the U.S. military — it was the Air Force specifically — on how to make decisions during the Cold War. So, he had all of this data. And at that point, his colleagues were saying, “Well, you’ve got a 90% chance of this and a 20% chance of that.” And these were sort of probabilistic mathematical outlooks that bored everybody to tears.

Herman Kahn decided to do something different. He imagined what would happen in the aftermath of dropping a nuclear bomb. Not like, “Here’s how the world — like, it’ll destroy 20 — you know, all these homes and all these people will die.” Not that.

He imagined what it would look like, let’s say, a year afterward. And so, he started telling these stories that were so visceral: every milk carton in every schoolchild’s lunch would have a list of how much radiation is in that milk container and how much you can — you know. And here’s how to keep track using arithmetic of how much radiation

BERMAN: Your recommended daily allowance of radiation.

WEBB: That’s right. So, these were stories that were immediately understandable and relevant to his end consumer, who were military leaders, right? And they were incredibly effective as a result.

Let me give you another example of where this is not effective. We’ve got climate change. As you and I are talking, recently, there have been annual climate COP 20-whatever-number-we’re-on-right-now, 29.

For the longest time, we’ve all been hearing the magic number: 1.5 degrees Celsius. The moment that things click over to 1.5 degrees Celsius we are all doomed. And then it became, I think, 2 degrees Celsius.

Question for you: How many Americans know what that is?

BERMAN: It’s around none.

WEBB: Right? So let’s put aside the fact that nobody in this country knows what that is. The other problem is, 1.5 is very small. So, there’s too much contrast between a tiny number, which seems insignificant, and this absolute catastrophic outcome.

What if you instead told the story of climate change through the app on your phone? So, everybody has a weather app, you know? And you’ve got sunny, 69, whatever.

We’ve had wildfires in New York City, right? So, imagine telling that story differently. People will understand that. That’s a different type of story.

So, my point is, the way to get past incremental change — and by the way, this does not mean that everybody should drop what they’re doing and totally change. You have to create a sense of urgency.

What creates that sense of urgency? It has to be immediately relevant to the consumer of that information.

BERMAN: I mean, what I hear you saying, and it’s so obvious as you say it, and yet a coin hadn’t dropped for me before, is you also have to be a student of behavioral psychology.

WEBB: So historically, in my world of strategic foresight, futurists have put together scenarios that present these interesting “The future could be really horrible. The future could be really great.” Or, “Here’s the future.” Awesome. What do I do about this?

You have to bring it back to, “What am I doing tomorrow morning that’s different?” Ultimately, people want to make decisions, and they don’t want to be wrong. They want to feel confident that they have made the correct decision.

And what qualifies as feeling confident these days? You have to come in with data. You can’t just come in with, “You know, I think these things,” or, “Here’s a couple of headlines I read.” That does not pass muster with any of our clients. And I would assume that anybody who’s listening — anybody you’re going to ask for something — you know, is going to require it, no matter how much they trust you.

So, it’s a matter of having data-backed examples or scenarios or strategies or whatever it is, and then believing in that so passionately that you are selling without actually having to sell. Does that make sense?

BERMAN: Yeah, makes perfect sense. I think it’s a terrific insight, and it’s actionable for people, which we love.

Should the government regulate AI?

Third thread. I got my start in the private sector at MySpace. Suffice it to say, I was super optimistic at the time about the power of social media, the democratization of access. Everyone’s got a platform, everyone’s got a voice.

Net — it hasn’t been great for the world.

There are so many reasons to be optimistic about not just AI, but the convergence that you’re talking about. And in the wrong hands, this is dangerous. And some of those wrong hands are actually well-intentioned but are going to do things that just have foreseeable consequences.

What’s government’s role in regulating this?

WEBB: So, this may come as a surprise to you — I don’t think regulation is the right way. And this is a tough pill to swallow, so let me try to explain what I mean by this.

If you use the heavy hand of regulation — and we’ve already seen this in Europe — you don’t get compliance. You get lawsuits. And part of the problem with regulation is that it’s inherently a reaction to something that’s already happened.

BERMAN: Historically, yes, that’s largely what it is.

WEBB: Right. So, the problem is, especially with trying to regulate using traditional mechanisms that we have for regulation, that we don’t entirely know how things are going to evolve.

So, I’m very good at this, right? My team — and I’ve got a team of 20 people — this is all we do. We are the best at it. But even we cannot tell you exactly what the world looks like 10 years from now.

In order for regulations to work, you have to have enforcement mechanisms. You have to have continual monitoring. You have to get it right, or you’re creating regulation language that’s so broad that it’s hard to implement or can be contested. Right? You tell me — validate if I’m wrong.

BERMAN: No, you’re 100% right.

WEBB: Okay. So now we’ve got AI, which is tricky. Advanced sensors. We’ve got the Chips Act. Maybe it’ll stay, maybe it’ll go — hard to tell you. Bipartisan — we’ll see. But now we’ve got generative biology, and biology doesn’t — you can’t geofence biology, right?

BERMAN: Right?

WEBB: Right. Biology tends to continue on regardless of what you want to do. You also have different frameworks, different countries, different levels of what’s okay and not okay, and strong economic incentives to play things forward. Isn’t now a good time to challenge our cherished beliefs and come up with alternatives to regulation that still compel companies to make the best choices on behalf of everybody?

BERMAN: I love this.

WEBB: This is also super tricky, and it would take us 37 hours to go through all of it. But in the United States, we govern product versus process. In other countries, the governance systems around the process for biology versus the product — we still need to maintain more harmonized regulations, so there needs to be more alignment, I think, on that.

I’ve written — I’m not intentionally plugging my books, but for anybody who’s actually interested in this, I wrote a book called The Big Nine about the future of AI. There is a framework that I proposed, and it really had to do with who owns what data.

And the idea was to put those data in a kind of trust. Basically, everybody who agrees to participate in the trust, they all benefit. And if you don’t agree to participate in the trust, then you are economically shut out. So, it was a sanction-adjacent framework.

BERMAN: Right. And part of the beauty of this is it democratizes the power so that it’s not just a handful of companies with all the data.

WEBB: That’s right. One of the cool things that you can do as a start-up founder or an intrepreneur — or if you’re interested in government, as a government person — often, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but we do have to look outside our existing bubbles to see what’s worked in other places.

Are there frameworks that already exist? Are there systems in place that could be analogous, if tweaked a little bit, to what it is that we’re doing? And the answer is almost always yes. The problem is that when people are looking for how to change or grow, they look at their peers, their direct competitive set. They are never looking at their near peers or even theoretical peers, right? Or those who are a couple of clicks away, or looking at totally different industries, which is a huge mistake.

That is one huge takeaway that everybody could get to action with, and it’s actually something that we encourage everybody that we work with to do anyways.

What Amy Webb is most excited about for 2025

BERMAN: Last question, and I’m asking you this as a human as much as a futurist: What are you most excited about for the year ahead?

WEBB: I’ll give you two answers. One is a personal answer, because why not? I got into something called Unbound, which is a very popular gravel race in Kansas, and you’re absolutely right. So, it’s a bunch of crazy people. And so I’m doing it.

BERMAN: The 100, or the 250, or 350?

WEBB: No, it’s my first at-bat on this, so I’m going to do the 50. I do between 50 and 80 miles anyways, every weekend. So, the distance is not a thing. It’s just I haven’t — I don’t —

BERMAN: It’s also a ride that’s notorious. You can have bad weather.

WEBB: Oh, yeah. It’s brutal. There’s no support either. But I will do the 100 if I get into the lottery again the following year. This is my test ride. I love this. So, very excited about that.

I would say the other thing I’m excited about is: we don’t know what the future is yet. I know it sounds kind of strange, but it’s been a tough year. It’s been a tough quarter, I think, for a lot of people, for many different reasons. The future is not set in stone. I don’t believe in fate or destiny or anything else like that.

So, the thing that gives me hope, and the thing that I’m looking forward to, is — in a lot of ways — it’s like somebody took the chessboard and shook up all the pieces, and now we get to play a new game. And we’ll see what happens. If you make good strategic moves and you’re thinking ahead, you’re going to be, next year at this point, looking back, feeling pretty great. So, that is what makes me excited.

BERMAN: Can’t think of a better place to wrap. Thanks for being on Masters of Scale.

WEBB: Thank you.

BERMAN: Amy Webb’s data-driven approach to making sense of our fast-changing world is both grounding and exhilarating. Her work provides an essential reminder that all of us inside businesses need to plan strategically for the future and be nimble enough to change when circumstances shift beneath our feet and our plans have to adjust accordingly. I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.