Amy Webb
Strategy cycles run on three-year horizons. The technologies reshaping markets operate on ten-year ones. Without a methodology for reading early-stage signals, organisations discover the future after competitors have already acted on it.
Amy Webb is the founder of the Future Today Strategy Group and the researcher who turned strategic foresight into a quantitative discipline, giving organisations a rigorous, data-driven method for identifying which emerging technologies demand a response, and when.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Amy Webb
- Webb’s foresight methodology applies quantitative modelling to emerging signals, which gives boards a defensible evidential basis for long-horizon technology decisions.
- Her annual Tech Trends Report tracks more than 700 emerging technology and science trends and is downloaded more than one million times a year; few advisory practices produce intelligence infrastructure at comparable scale or breadth.
- The Big Nine named the “G-MAFIA”, the six American corporations which, alongside China’s BAT, Webb argues hold structural control over AI’s trajectory. Audiences gain a durable analytical vocabulary for a problem most organisations are still describing in generic terms.
- Her advisory relationships with the White House, European Union, United Nations, and World Economic Forum are ongoing rather than project-based. Her understanding of how governments are approaching AI governance and technology risk is first-hand.
- Her latest concept, “living intelligence”, describes the convergence of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and advanced sensors into a single technology supercycle. It gives senior leaders a framework for thinking beyond current AI strategy before that convergence forces reactive decisions.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO, Future Today Strategy Group; ranked #3 most influential management thinker globally by Thinkers50 (2025)
- Adjunct Professor of Strategic Foresight, NYU Stern School of Business; Visiting Fellow, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School; former Nieman Fellow, Harvard University
- Author of The Big Nine (2019), longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year and winner of the 2020 Gold Axiom Medal, and of The Signals Are Talking (2016), winner of the Thinkers50 RADAR Award and the 2017 Gold Axiom Medal
- The Genesis Machine (2022, co-authored with Andrew Hessel) named by The New Yorker as one of the year’s best nonfiction works; books translated into 23 languages
- Life member, Council on Foreign Relations; founding member, WEF Strategic Foresight Advisory Board; member, WEF Global Risks Board; AI Governance Alliance partner
- Former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek; contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review; TED Talk “How I hacked online dating” viewed more than 8.5 million times
Biography
The gap between sensing that a technology will reshape a sector and knowing when to act on it is where most long-range strategy breaks down. Amy Webb’s work is built around closing that gap. As founder and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group, she pioneered a quantitative modelling approach to strategic foresight: one that applies the analytical rigour of economic forecasting to the identification of emerging technology signals, rather than relying on narrative scenarios or trend decks.
Her books have given organisations specific frameworks for understanding the structural dynamics of technology change. The Big Nine grouped the six American corporations Webb calls the “G-MAFIA” with China’s BAT, and argued that together they hold disproportionate control over AI’s development. It traced the geopolitical and commercial consequences of that concentration. The Genesis Machine, co-authored with biotechnologist Andrew Hessel, examined the organisational and governance implications of synthetic biology before the technology entered mainstream strategy conversations. Both were recognised externally: The Big Nine was longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year; The Genesis Machine was named by The New Yorker as one of the year’s best nonfiction works.
Her access to the rooms where technology governance is being decided is direct and ongoing. She advises the White House, the European Union, and the United Nations. She was a founding member of the World Economic Forum’s Strategic Foresight Advisory Board. Webb reported for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek before founding the firm, and holds a master’s degree from Columbia’s journalism school. Her annual Tech Trends Report, tracking more than 700 emerging technology and science developments, is downloaded more than one million times a year.
Ranked third on Thinkers50’s 2025 list of the world’s most influential management thinkers, Webb teaches strategic foresight at NYU Stern’s MBA programme and holds a visiting fellowship at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. Her current framework, “living intelligence”, maps the convergence of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and advanced sensors into what she argues is a technology supercycle already underway. For organisations whose long-range strategy begins and ends with AI, it is a substantive challenge to the scope of their thinking.
Key speaking topics
- Quantitative strategic foresight
- Artificial intelligence and the global technology power landscape
- Living intelligence: AI, biotechnology, and advanced sensors
- Technology supercycles and long-horizon planning
- Geopolitics of emerging technology
- Futures methodology and organisational decision-making
- Synthetic biology and the next frontier of disruption
Ideal for
- C-suite and boards developing long-range technology and competitive strategy
- Chief Strategy Officers and innovation leads rethinking their approach to uncertainty and futures planning
- Government, regulatory, and policy audiences responsible for technology governance
- Risk, investment, and scenario-planning teams assessing the strategic implications of AI and converging technologies
Audience outcomes
- A clear analytical method for distinguishing which emerging technology signals warrant a strategic response from those that represent noise
- Understanding of the “living intelligence” framework and why the convergence of AI, biotechnology, and advanced sensors represents a broader challenge than current AI strategy typically accounts for
- A structural vocabulary for the global AI power landscape, and for the dynamics between major US and Chinese technology actors in particular, that simplifies a complex geopolitical issue for non-specialist leaders
- Familiarity with the Tech Trends methodology: how to scan, filter, and prioritise signals across a large and rapidly evolving technology landscape
- Practical frameworks for building a long-horizon foresight capability internally, rather than depending on periodic external consultancy
Talks
Webb’s framework for the convergence of artificial intelligence, advanced sensors, and biotechnology into systems that sense, learn, adapt, and evolve, and what that convergence does to industry structure.
Key takeaways:
- What living intelligence describes, and why an AI strategy that stops at software is working with too narrow a frame
- How the convergence of AI with the physical and biological sciences is opening new markets in healthcare, agriculture, and energy
- Where the first commercial signals of this convergence are already visible
Where AI development goes after the current generative cycle, and what that trajectory means for organisations building strategy around it.
Key takeaways:
- The structural forces driving AI development, including the concentration of control Webb identified as the “G-MAFIA” in The Big Nine
- What progress in generative models and artificial general intelligence research implies for competitive strategy
- Scenarios for how AI reshapes business models, ethics, and industry structure, covering the catastrophic outcomes alongside the optimistic ones
An original set of modelled scenarios for the client’s own industry, built on Future Today Strategy Group research and delivered across a chosen 5, 10, 15 or 20 year horizon.
Key takeaways:
- A set of plausible futures for the organisation’s sector across the chosen time horizon
- The specific signals that would indicate which of those futures is materialising
- What the organisation would need to do now to reach its preferred one
How the electricity, chip, and cooling demands of AI infrastructure are becoming a determinant of national and corporate competitive position.
Key takeaways:
- Why access to power, not access to data, is emerging as the binding constraint on AI capability
- How the global race to supply that power is redrawing economic and geopolitical advantage between nations
- What leaders should be assessing now about their own energy and infrastructure exposure
A custom read on the technology trends that matter to one organisation, built from Future Today Strategy Group’s longitudinal research, a version of which Webb has presented at South by Southwest and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Key takeaways:
- How to separate a durable trend from a passing one using longitudinal data
- How trends outside the organisation’s own sector set off chain reactions inside it
- Which trends to monitor, and what each would demand of the business if it accelerates
The forecasting method from The Signals Are Talking, adapted for leaders who have to run the present business while positioning for the next one.
Key takeaways:
- The foresight framework Webb set out in The Signals Are Talking, applied to the organisation’s own strategic objectives
- How to rethink risk at the fringe, where change becomes visible before it reaches the mainstream
- Scenarios for emerging technologies in the audience’s sector and adjacent ones, including synthetic biotechnology and artificial intelligence