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Amy Webb - Speaker Profile

As one the world’s most sought-after futurists, 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. Forbes called Amy “one of the five women changing the world.” She was honored as one of the BBC’s 100 Women of 2020 and was named to the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led.
 
Amy is a professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where she developed and teaches the MBA-level strategic foresight course with live case studies. She is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Säid School of Business, a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center, a Fellow in the United States-Japan Leadership Program and a Foresight Fellow in the U.S. Government Accountability Office Center for Strategic Foresight. Amy was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where her research received a national Sigma Delta Chi award. She was also a Delegate on the former U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, where she worked on the future of technology, media and international diplomacy. Recently, she was named a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
 
A lifelong science fiction fan, Amy collaborates closely with Hollywood writers and producers on films, TV shows and commercials about science, technology and the future. Recent projects include The First, a sci-fi drama about the first humans to travel to Mars, an AT&T commercial featuring a fully-autonomous car directed by Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow, and an upcoming film based on Amy’s hilarious and heart-wrenching memoir about data, algorithms and online dating (“Data, A Love Story”). Amy is a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and has served as a Blue Ribbon Emmy award judge. 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 showrunners.
 
Amy is the best-selling author of three books, including “The Big Nine: How The Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity“ (PublicAffairs/ Hachette 2019), which was longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award, won the 2020 Gold Axiom Medal and was named Amazon’s best book about technology for 2019. “The Big Nine” is a sobering analysis of the present state of artificial intelligence, the conflict between the US and China, and what will happen to business and society during the next 50 years as AI evolves. A Washington Post bestseller, “The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream“ (PublicAffairs/Hachette 2016) explains Amy’s strategic forecasting methodology and how any organization can identify risk and opportunity before disruption hits. “Signals” won the 2017 Thinkers50 RADAR Award, the 2017 Gold Axiom Medal, and was selected as one of Fast Company’s Best Books of 2016. Her bestselling memoir “Data, A Love Story” (Penguin 2013) is about finding love via algorithms. Her TED talk about “Data” has been viewed more than 8 million times and translated into 32 languages. “Data” is being adapted as a feature film, which is currently in production. To date, her books have been translated into 19 different languages. Currently, Amy is working on a new book about genomes and the next wave of disruptive innovation with leading biotech visionary Andrew Hessel.
 
Amy writes extensively about corporate foresight strategy, uncertainty and emerging technologies. She regularly contributes to a number of publications, which include the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, New York Times, Wired, Fortune, Nikkei (Japan), Mother Jones and others.
 
Amy’s “clear, insightful, relatable and humorous” style in writing and in speaking makes it easy to understand why audiences are drawn to her and her work. Every one of Amy’s engagements – from keynotes to hands-on workshops – is bespoke and highly customized for each audience. She spends extensive time in advance with every client to learn about their interests and needs and develops keynote speeches and interactive workshops anchored in original research and insights specific to an organization, industry or conference. For her clients, Amy includes a folder of digital assets for organizers and participants, which includes her open-source frameworks and foresight tools as well as curated research on emerging technology.

Amy Webb - Speaking Topics

Living in a COVID-19 World: Speech or Interactive Virtual SessionSince the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve experienced social, economic and political shocks unlike any other generation. What we’re living through is less like a war and more like an alien invasion: attacks are difficult to understand, seem indiscriminate, and the enemy continues to find vulnerabilities in us we never saw ourselves. The virus has challenged our critical systems: our global supply chains, communications infrastructure, healthcare, education, transportation, and even our ways of governing. It is reshaping our economies in real time, and it is shifting the geopolitical balance to create new tensions and alliances. The global coronavirus pandemic will lead to downstream implications we’re only beginning to see. Now is the time to create recovery scenarios for your company and industry. In this bespoke session, Amy Webb offers essential advice specifically for your organization. Drawing from nearly two decades of modeling next-order risks, Amy will share two practical, accessible foresight tools that you can use now to model Covid-19’s next-order impacts on your organization, mitigate near-future risk, and find ways to thrive in a post-coronavirus world. She will research and develop data-driven scenarios describing your organization’s plausible futures and challenge your teams to get to action on their preferred futures, today. 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.
Emerging Tech Trends: A Bespoke Speech Featuring Custom Research for Your Organization or IndustryWhat 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 13th year, has 8.5 million cumulative views 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 SessionThe 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: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, blockchain – 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.
Scenes from the Year 2030Soon, 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 2030, 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.
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp HumanityThe most powerful technology of our lifetimes is now in the hands of just nine big corporations. That technology — artificial intelligence — is reshaping business, privacy, commerce, agriculture, warfare, healthcare, education, and even our relationships to each other, and the companies responsible for our futures are driven by competing forces. The American portion of the Big Nine—Amazon, Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Facebook—have big ideas about how to solve some of humanity’s most wicked problems, but their shareholders prioritize short-term returns over long-term challenges. The speed of technology dramatically outpaces the speed of policy, so lawmakers often find themselves in an antagonistic position as they try to play catchup. Meanwhile, China’s Big Nine members—Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent—are tethered to Beijing and the demands of the Chinese Communist Party. What about businesses, nonprofits, and everyday people caught in the middle, as our data are mined and refined in service of building the future of artificial intelligence? 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 to your team.