Amy Webb

She is known for working on the slides for her keynotes right up to the last second. While our stage directors are already sweating, visitors to the OMR Festival can look forward to it all the more: when Amy Webb is on stage, she delivers. According to the futurist and technology scientist, we are currently in a ‘technology supercycle’, a phase in history in which several technologies are coming together, each of which already has the potential to massively change the economy and society. These include artificial intelligence, of course, but also biotechnology and the connected ecosystems of things. 

Throughout her career, Amy Webb has been intensively involved with these trends and, above all, exploring the opportunities that arise from them. Starting out as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and then Newsweek, she quickly went on to found the Future Today Strategy Group in 2005, of which she is still CEO today. In this role, she has not only advised companies, central banks, intergovernmental organisations, authors and producers over the past two decades. She has also established herself as one of the most respected trend and futurologists around - who has not only developed a data and technology-supported foresight method, but also teaches as a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University. 

Once a year, Amy Webb and her team at the Future Today Institute summarise all the trends, developments and their potential impact on the future in the ‘Tech Trend Report’. The current version is a thousand pages long. That sums up Amy Webb's claim quite well.