Amy Webb
Quantitative futurist who turns strategic foresight from trend guessing into a data-driven discipline
Amy Webb is founder and CEO of Future Today Strategy Group and a professor of strategic foresight at NYU Stern, ranked #3 by Thinkers50 in 2025. Her value is turning “future trends” from intuition into an operating process: scanning fringe signals, separating trends from noise, mapping technology, social, economic, regulatory, and geopolitical intersections, and building multiple actionable scenarios. Her books The Signals Are Talking, The Big Nine, and The Genesis Machine address trend identification, AI power structures, and synthetic biology futures.
Methodologies
- Weak Signal Scanning Workflow - Every week, collect early signals from fringe communities, papers, patents, regulation, user hacks, and capital flows.
- Multi-Scenario Strategy Check - Test every major plan against at least four futures rather than optimizing for one prediction.
Key decisions and timeline
- 2006 Founded the Future Today Institute/Strategy Group Predecessor - Foresight capability can be institutionalized as process, research, and advisory work.
- 2013 Published Data, A Love Story - Algorithmic thinking can support everyday decisions, but metrics must not replace the real goal.
- 2016 Published The Signals Are Talking - Trend judgment needs steps, evidence, and mechanisms for disconfirmation.
Beliefs and mental models
- Foresight Is a Discipline, Not Prediction Theater - Strategic foresight is not claiming to know the future; it is using structured methods to improve organizational preparedness for multiple futures.
- Fringe Signals Foreshadow Mainstream Change - What looks fringe today in technology, culture, or business often becomes an early indicator of tomorrow’s mainstream change.
- AI Futures Are Shaped by Power Structures - AI is not a neutral technological path; big tech firms, state strategy, capital markets, and data control jointly shape its trajectory.
- Signal-to-Trend Funnel - Start with fringe signals, then validate patterns, drivers, and constraints before treating them as actionable trends.
- CETA Scanning Framework - Look for early signals through contradictions, inflections, practices, and hacks.
- Cone of Possibility - Do not ask what the future will be; map plausible, probable, possible, and preferable futures.
Sources
- Amy Webb - Future Today Strategy Group bio
- Thinkers50 Amy Webb biography
- The Signals Are Talking, Amy Webb, 2016
- The Big Nine, Amy Webb, 2019
- The Genesis Machine, Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel, 2022