Amy Webb – CEO, The Future Today Institute (FTI)

Key Achievements

One of the foremost futurists in the world, recognized as one of Forbes’ “Five Women Changing the World” and “50 Leading Female Futurists.”

With her dynamic and humorous style, Webb helps audiences unleash their ability to imagine the future to unlock growth and have greater purpose driven decision-making.

An advisor to Fortune 100 and Global 1000 companies, investment firms and government agencies, Webb adapts her strategic foresight methodology to each audience to share curated tools, frameworks, and action steps for any organization.

Author of the annual Future Today Institute’s Tech Trends Report, which is downloaded more than 1 million times every year.

Founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute (FTI), Amy Webb pioneered a data-driven foresight methodology that is now used within hundreds of organizations worldwide.

She built FTI into one of America’s fastest-growing companies –– FTI has been ranked on the Inc 5000 list for two consecutive years.

Amy helps CXOs of the world’s-admired companies achieve long-term growth, and she shows businesses how to spot disruption early enough to create new revenue or to mitigate risk.

Amy also advises the leadership of government, military and central banks on risk and opportunity.

Amy’s quantitative approach to foresight was built using her academic experience in economics and game theory.

Amy Webb advises CEOs of the world’s most-admired companies, three-star admirals and generals, and the senior leadership of central banks and intergovernmental organizations.

Founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures, Amy pioneered a data-driven, technology-led foresight methodology that is now used within hundreds of organizations.

Books

She is the author of several popular books, including The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, which was longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award, and won the 2020 Gold Axiom Medal for the best book about business and technology, and The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, which won the Thinkers50 Radar Award, was selected as one of Fast Company’s Best Books of 2016, Amazon’s best books 2016, and was the recipient of the 2017 Gold Axiom Medal for the best book about business and technology.

Webb was named by Forbes as one of the five women changing the world, listed as the BBC’s 100 Women of 2020, ranked on the Thinkers50 list of the 50 most influential management thinkers globally.
Her latest book, The Genesis Machine, explores the futures of gene editing, biotech and synthetic biology.

TOPICS & TALKS

Emerging Tech Trends.

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.

Imagining the Post-Covid Future.

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.

How to Think Like a Futurist.

The world’s most successful leaders are the ones with the ability to manage the present and innovate for the future.

As Amy Webb shares, this requires a new kind of strategic thinking.

Drawing from her bestselling, award-winning book, The Signals Are Talking, Webb demonstrates how leaders can harness a futurist’s strategic tools to ignite future-focused creativity and innovation in support of their organization’s strategic objectives. In this talk, she provides an adaptable framework for how to think like a futurist, rethink risk, and know when to take action.

She shares future scenarios for emerging tech in your industry and those adjacent to it — from synthetic biotechnology and artificial intelligence to metaverses and blockchain — and helps you discover your own ability to forecast what’s on the horizon and use that way of thinking to create your own preferred future today.

Web3, the Metaverse, and Your Organization.

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.

What’s on the Horizon for Artificial Intelligence? Artificial intelligence has been one of the most powerful technologies of our lifetime in the ways it has reshaped business, privacy, commerce, agriculture, warfare, healthcare, education, and even our interpersonal relationships.

What do we have to look forward to and what should we be worried about now as artificial intelligence continues to evolve beyond what we ever thought was possible? Drawing from insights from her bestselling book The Big Nine, Amy Webb provides a high-level overview of everything your business needs to know about AI.

She draws attention to custom optimistic and catastrophic scenarios your organization may face as we advance from artificial narrow intelligence to artificial general intelligence, and finally, to artificial superintelligence, and provides the tools needed to maintain agency of the future of our organizations.