Why tracking trends is no longer enough: Amy Webb on convergences

Executive overview

Most leaders track trends. Trends are insufficient. When multiple trends collide with geopolitical, economic, or social forces, they produce something net new — a convergence — that rewrites markets, collapses industries, and creates entirely new ones.

Amy Webb, futurist and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group, killed her 20-year trend report at SXSW to make this point concrete. The report was replaced with a convergence outlook — because static trend tracking blinds leaders to the structural shifts that actually matter.

The real risk isn't missing a trend — it's missing the convergence that makes your business model obsolete.

What a convergence is

• A convergence occurs when multiple trends collide with bigger forces — policy, war, economic shifts — producing something fundamentally new.
• Unlike trends, convergences redistribute power, collapse and create markets, and rewrite the rules of entire industries.
• Trends are building blocks. Convergences are what result.
• Leaders miss convergences because they fixate on what's visible and trendy, not what's structurally forming underneath.
• By the time the shift is obvious, it's typically too late to respond.

The post-search internet

• Google is no longer the default gateway to information — AI assistants are replacing search for broad segments of users.
• This isn't a trend (people using ChatGPT); it's a convergence of AI capability, mobile behavior, and platform trust.
• The result is net new: a world where the search-advertising model that funded the internet for 25 years breaks down.

Programmable biology

• Generative biology — the ability to read, write, and edit biological systems using AI — is converging with medicine, agriculture, energy, and construction.
• Biology has become editable in the same way that language or images are editable with generative AI.
• Applications extend far beyond drugs: programmable materials, climate-resilient crops, new energy sources.
• The same tools also enable lethal bioweapons accessible to actors who previously lacked the means.

The corporate panopticon

• China's surveillance state is centralized and visible. The West has built an equivalent through a distributed network of corporate sensors and data systems.
• This corporate panopticon surveils every person constantly — through banking, retail, social, and communications — but with no single controller and no single point of accountability.
• Most of the time the surveillance is invisible and delivers perceived benefits (loyalty points, spam filters, personalization).
• What's given up in exchange — and how decisions are made using that data — is largely invisible to the people being watched.
• Convergences like this are neither utopian nor dystopian. They just are. Naming them is the first step to engaging with them.

Shibsted: seeing convergence early

• Norwegian news group Shibsted in the 1990s recognized that the internet would destroy the print advertising model that funded journalism.
• While every other news organization stayed the course, Shibsted rebuilt for a digital ad future before the shift happened.
• They designed, built, tested, and deployed a digital advertising system first — and became one of the most profitable news organizations in the world.
• Harvard published a case study. The lesson: convergences give leaders a long lead time, but only if they're looking for them.

Short-termism and the US competitiveness problem

• Many large companies are making structurally damaging decisions to hit arbitrary margin targets — sacrificing long-term capability for short-term share price.
• CEO tenure is short, boards select for CFO-type stability, and quarterly incentives crowd out structural investment.
• China's next five-year plan funds a 10-year process to put 1.4 billion people onto AI and automation infrastructure — education included.
• The US has no equivalent plan. The result: American companies are doing R&D that the rest of the world benefits from, while domestic infrastructure gaps widen.
• Leaders competing on "shiniest product" rather than scale are running a short-term mirage.

How to respond

• The antidote to trend-chasing is slowing down enough to identify convergences before they become obvious.
• Productive wandering — letting the mind make connections across large bodies of diverse knowledge — is how futurists (and science fiction writers) imagine what's coming.
• GPS has eroded people's ability to navigate without it. Over-reliance on AI tools risks the same erosion of independent thinking.
• The world is not moving as fast as it feels. Responding thoughtfully is more valuable than reacting in the moment.
• Leaders who learn to distinguish trend from convergence will know where to place long-horizon bets — and when to destroy their own business model before someone else does.