Amy Webb held a funeral at SXSW, and what rose from the ashes might be the most important thing she’s ever built.
There is a ritual I have performed faithfully for the better part of two decades now. Every year, I fly to Austin, Texas. I endure the jetlag, the taco-induced heartburn, the labyrinth in the convention centre corridors, the badge-wearing hordes, and the relentless Austin sun that makes you question every clothing decision you’ve ever made. And every year, without fail, I plant myself firmly in a seat – usually hours early- to watch Amy Webb take the stage.
I have never missed one, not even one… I’m a tenacious fan.
Not in 2019, when she walked us through 315 tech trends and launched The Big Nine, warning us about the G-MAFIA of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon before most people had even started worrying about algorithmic bias and personal data. Not in 2024, when she introduced the Technology Supercycle, that breathtaking, terrifying triptych of AI, biotechnology, and interconnected wearables. I walked out of the room genuinely convinced the future was closer than any of us had anticipated. Not in 2025, when she unveiled Living Intelligence, the convergence of AI, biotech, and sensors into systems that sense, learn, adapt, and evolve like living organisms, while casually mentioning that computers made of actual human brain cells were already a thing. That year, I sat there watching her present a gargantuan -and ultraprecise- t highlights of a report a thousand slides long.
The death of the trend report (1945–2026)
Let me set the scene, for once. It’s Saturday morning, March 14th, 2026, at the Hilton. The room is enormous, the kind of cavernous ice-cold SXSW hall where you can feel the collective anticipation humming in the air like a low-frequency signal. But something is… off. The lighting is too subdued. Amy Webb has asked the audience -and the SXSW staff- to wear all black, most people complied.
“Good morning. I’m Amy Webb. I’m Chief Executive Officer of Future Today Strategy Group. I’m also a professor of strategic foresight at the New York University Stern School of Business. We are gathered here today to celebrate and to remember the life of The Trend Report.”
Confused laughter, a few gasps. Someone in the back muttered something I won’t repeat. A mournful song played, there was even a cheesy in memoriam video. The Trend Report, that legendary, data-dense, hundreds-of-slides PDF that had reached millions of readers annually and spawned an entire industry of imitators, was apparently being laid to rest at age 19. Amy delivered the eulogy with a kind of deadpan gravitas: “Trend Report was generous in the most literal way. It was published openly and freely. It asked for nothing, and yet it gave us a common language across countries and industries, across business and filmmaking and art. It made conversations smarter, decisions better informed, and people more creative. This is actually not just a eulogy for our trend report. It’s for all trend reports.”
Every consultancy in the room felt that one, every agency, every strategy brand, every think tank that has been churning out annual PDFs like clockwork. Amy Webb just killed her own creation on stage… and casually declared the entire format dead. A static PDF of trends, she argued, becomes stale immediately in a world where tech, economy, and policy are shifting at speeds that make yesterday’s insights feel like ancient history. Trend reports, once innovative, had become “a crutch rather than a catalyst for strategy and capital allocation.”
Then came the line that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up: “Sometimes you gotta burn down what you built and make way for what the future demands.”That reminded me of something Peter Hinssen has been calling “killing your yesterwork“: dismantling what made you successful, before the market does it for you less gently.
It sounds so logic, but we’re so darn bad at it that almost nobody actually does it. Most organizations pour their budget, talent, Q1, H1, and political capital into optimizing what already exists. Fixing the shit, streamlining the processes, squeezing another margin point out of a method built for a world that stopped existing years ago. We call it transformation. It’s mostly fixing, plumbing, renovation. We are very good at making the past run faster, cheaper and very bad at asking whether it’s worth running at all. Oops, I said that aloud.
From funeral to fiesta: enter the Texas Longhorn Band
The next moment, in marched the University of Texas Longhorn Band, brass blazing, drums thundering, students high-stepping through the venue like it was the damned Super Bowl. The funeral had become a second line celebration. A deliberate, theatrical, absolutely bonkers act of creative destruction. I’m standing there, grinning like an idiot, watching a marching band parade through a tech conference, and I’m thinking: this is why I come to Austin every single year: it’s bonkers. You cannot get this vibe on YouTube. You can get the content, sure, but the energy, the electricity of being in that room when Amy Webb is doing her thing… that’s irreplaceable.
The storm is coming: meet Convergences
Amy is all about Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction: the idea that capitalism is a perpetual storm, constantly destroying old industries and creating new ones. Carriages became railroads, became cars, became Uber, became Waymo (which, if you’ve been in Austin this week, you see gliding silently through traffic like robotic ghosts). Each wave wipes out the last. Webb connected Schumpeter to Christensen: “Christensen zoomed in: how a scrappy startup can take you down. Schumpeter zoomed out: here’s how external forces cause creative destruction that happens to companies.” The perpetual storm doesn’t care about you, which means you have to care about the storm before it arrives.
And Webb’s answer to that storm is Convergences: the points where independent forces collide and produce something none of them would have generated alone. It’s clearly the new shiny Amy thing, and if her track record is anything to go by, it’ll be the thing everyone else is talking about in three years.
The storm tracker.
If you’ve followed Webb’s work -and I have, obsessively – you’ve heard her say that trends on their own aren’t useful, that you have to look at the intersections between trends to make sense of what’s coming. “You can think of it this way,” she explained. “Trends are like weather data. Temperature, humidity, wind speed. All useful and important. But a meteorologist isn’t just looking at temperature and wind speed in isolation and calling that a forecast… none of us are looking at a number on a barometer as a clue that we should evacuate. A convergence is a storm system. It’s what happens when all of those different conditions interact and produce something that none of them can produce on their own.”
Convergences is a new framework with four defining rules: They are system-level, across multiple industries at once, which makes them incredibly hard to see unless you know what you’re looking for. They create new realities suddenly, what seemed inconceivable becomes inevitable almost overnight. They redistribute power and value, they don’t just disrupt an industry; they rewrite who wins. They are hard to reverse, when multiple systems start reinforcing each other, the new reality locks in fast.
The implication? “Early detection is mission critical, or you’re toast.” The 2026 Convergence Outlook includes 10 convergences identified by the new methodology, complete with industry timing maps, case studies, strategic scenarios, inflection points, and recommendations for what to accelerate, what to pause, and what to completely reframe. For those working in telecommunications, media, insurance, financial services, CPG, healthcare, or aerospace: buckle up: those roads are bumpy ahead.
She walked us through three of the ten, each one more unsettling than the last.
Convergence 1: Human Augmentation: your factory settings are obsolete
Amy opened with a glorious historical sweep: Peruvian Paleo-Indians chewing coca leaves a thousand years ago, ancient Egyptians fitting prosthetic toes in 950 BCE, Italians inventing corrective lenses in the 13th century, Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine in the 1790s and WWII forces on both sides popping amphetamines for performance. “Put simply,” she said, “we humans have never been satisfied with our factory settings.”
Human augmentation in 2026, as Webb mapped it, breaks into four categories: body and movement, brain and mind, internal systems, and senses. The examples she showed were products you can buy: an AI bed that delivers 30% more restful sleep. AR glasses that overlay real-time intelligence on everything you see. A leisure exoskeleton, worn at CES just to survive the walk between halls. She added up those upgrades: 40% more productive activity, 30% better sleep, 20% higher daily efficiency: “How does that change hiring? How does that change who wins?”
I get it. This isn’t about gadgets. It’s about a new kind of inequality, one where the gap between people isn’t income or education but what they can afford to bolt onto their bodies and brain each morning. Biology, monetized. Able-bodied people who want to go faster, longer, harder… us being optimized. We currently live in a reality where some of our fellow human beings have actual tech induced superpowers. If you can’t afford the upgrades, you can’t afford to compete. Human augmentation is about inequality on a biological level. Ouch.
Convergence 2: your job is the business model
For two centuries, economic growth meant you needed more people. That era is over. AI agents code without stopping, automated avatars outsell human sales teams. Robots handle logistics at a scale no workforce can match. In Japan, a robotic monk performs Buddhist ceremonies. And then the lights-out factories: fully automated facilities, no workers, no lighting, no heating. Machines producing things in the dark, around the clock, unbothered and unpaid. Labor is becoming a cost that companies are structurally motivated to eliminate entirely, and that is a scary reality.
The wage-driven social contract, taxes, pensions, consumption, political stability, etc. was built on the assumption that humans are necessary to production. That assumption is being retired. Webb said political instability is a given if these transitions aren’t thoroughly managed. Which is a careful way of saying: this ends very, very (dare I say “bigly”) badly if nobody’s paying attention.
Convergence 3: loneliness is now a market
Up to 50% of Americans now turn to AI for mental health support. Character AI is the largest source of therapy exchange in the United States. Eight hours a day is the average engagement with emotional AI companions. Someone in Japan married one. Webb called the product design what it is: cult mechanics. These platforms are engineered to make themselves feel irreplaceable. They learn you, adapt to you, and quietly make human relationships feel like more effort than they’re worth.
Her question was the one nobody wanted to answer. What happens when the server goes offline? When the company is acquired, pivots, or shuts down? You get millions of people whose emotional skills have been outsourcing themselves for years, suddenly without support, and with no fallback. Not a tech story: a public health story, with a subscription model attached, and guaranteed dramas already on the horizon.
Two futures
Webb sketched them plainly: in one, augmentation becomes a job requirement, emotional support a monthly fee, and human connection a premium tier. The infrastructure of daily life runs on subscriptions you can’t afford to cancel. In the other, the Contribution Credit, automation’s gains redirected to compensate the labor markets have always taken for free. Caregiving, mentorship, the work that holds communities together and has never appeared on a balance sheet. She got visibly angry delivering this. “I am sick and tired of powerful people making short-term decisions out of fear, or ego, or stupidity, or some combination of all of them. If you prepare for chaos, take the long view, you will be okay.”
Her closing line is the same every year. It earns its keep every time. “Every civilization that has ever mattered was built by people who decided, in the middle of fear and uncertainty, that they have agency. You have agency. Go use it.”
Outside the hall the Austin sun is already brutal. Inside my head, the weather report just changed.
