Futuresinfocus

We talk a lot about how the world will become software-centric. How we book experiences on Airbnb or order a taxi on Uber, and how AI will make decisions at level and consistency humans cannot yet achieve. The idea is that the supply chain issues we are all experiencing now are radically reduced because software is essentially an infinite resource, available when, where, and how we want it deployed. You cannot say the same for a tractor or a robot. More importantly, if something breaks on a machine or it needs a hardware change, the software cannot do this. It might not even be a major piece or machine. It could be a cog in a kitchen mixer.By 2033 our guest Nadav Goshen argues that the ability to 3D print near anything will make hardware as agile as software promises. In effect, killing the idea of supply chain challenges because the word “chain” is instantly removed. Just imagine receiving a text that a part for your car has been printed at your local garage based on sensor feedback from your

We live in a radically transforming world on every front. Demographics are shifting more than ever before; mass personalization of products and services, global markets, and shifting expectations of what a company should do for society are changing how we need to act as leaders. Key questions exist about how company boards have reacted to these changes, and it could be existential as boards need to navigate an inherently more complex and ambiguous world. In a world where there are new stakeholders, new employee imperatives, and a different sense of company value to the world, the company board should be the agent of change and not the brake that holds changes back.

By 2030 PWC estimates that 70% of the growth in global GDP will come from AI, the Edge, and the tens of billions of machines, computing, sensing, and learning in real-time. How we, as humans, billions of people, interface with those machines is a whole new world. How these machines, billions of them, talk and work with each other and us is a whole new perspective on the collision paths of technology and the human experience. It is unlikely that we can avoid these challenges because we each will need to work, play and live with and around these new, almost life forms, machines. The design principles for this new world of 2033 and beyond are going to require us to reconnect the way we have evolved rapidly with our intellects through technology, the web, and in the future with a software-centric world with the ways we have evolved (far more slowly) with our empathy. Suppose we cannot re-address these evolutionary disbalances. In that case, we under-deliver on the promise of these technologies to delive

Farms use 70% of water for natural consumption, and half of it is lost. The ability to micro-control water consumption in very small and unique environments may be one of the most important developments in society. Multiply the ability to do this by the tens of millions of fields across the globe in easy and difficult places to reach, and technologies like small-footprint embedded devices might be part of changing our resources on the planet. Imagine this challenge and apply it to the thousands of industries and use cases around us where resource efficiency becomes an increasingly important priority. Our guest, Ron Martino of NXP, talks about the power of these 75bn connected devices to change the world of 2035 and beyond at a very practical level.  This new edge economy could be at least $4 to $5 trillion by 2030, where 64 zettabytes of daily data are processed locally at the edge. In this case, at the micro point of the field where the water is being controlled.  This is all additive to

Is the idea that big retail is dead by 2030 a commonly held belief or will retail have evolved so significantly that it will get over get over the hump of e-commerce, near infinite choices for consumers, and the desire to get everything within fifteen to thirty minutes from when it was ordered. This is the new world of commerce by 2030 for every one of us, according to our guest Michael Lagoni, the CEO of Slackline. How companies react to this in the next few years will define if they are around in 2030 to take advantage of this world.Lagoni’s view is that the data scientist will make over 80% of all product marketing decisions by 2030 as if they were hedge fund managers on Wall Street; the building never realized niche market opportunities in near real-time. This is a radically different world of choice as consumers transact nearly everything on the phone and one where brands and product managers have to focus on cultivating a direct relationship far more than they do now.

There are six hundred thousand restaurants in the USA and tens of millions of restaurants around the globe. In the US, Fifteen million people work in these environments, often on minimum wages and supporting families. There we 98,000 non-fatal accidents or associated illnesses from restaurants in the US in 2019. The restaurant industry is under immense pressure to evolve fast. This week's guest believes that intelligent robots can reduce injuries, free up valuable labor for more front-of-store activities and revolutionize the economics of a loved, vital, but under threat industry that brings color and variation to our lives. 

Neil Cloughley is the CEO of Faradair aerospace his ideas about opening up airspace to the idea of the greyhound in the sky that is quiet, operationally far lower cost, and environmentally eco-friendly promises. This is a whole new way to move people and things around that will use many existing technologies without having to reinvent a lot. Imagine opening up the skies for $30 flights to and from the 5,700 regional airports in the US versus having to drive for five hours to get somewhere. This type of certified solution will open up whole new global markets as part of our new daily lives – a true Greyhound bus for the skies. The company, Faradair, is based in Droxford in the UK in the air hangar that housed the very first Spitfire squadron and where Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, had learned to fly and work from 1929.

If you sit on a board, then it is likely the following statements are common feelings about them. You receive a foot-thick set of pre-read documents and reports a week or so before the board meeting. The agenda is very tight, measured in minutes like a day in an NFL training facility. The feeling that you are going to spend a day or longer with some of the brightest people you have ever met, but you only really get to have deep discussions at lunch, maybe for the evening meal or possibly for an hour between agenda items. In a world of constant change, organizations that thrive on this idea are five times more successful financially than organizations that do not accept this reality. That capacity to thrive and respond starts at the very highest levels, the company board. To succeed in a world ten years from now dominated by blockchain, remote work is the norm, and everything starts with the digital experience and ideas like the machine economy driven by machines; these board meetings will become inc

The idea of autonomous vehicles delivering products straight to our door may not sound novel, but there are not a lot of examples of that level of the last yard or meter delivery in practice right now. Ten years from now, the practice of doing this will be commonplace. There are approximately one hundred and forty million households in the US and over 10,000 major cities worldwide. To do this with autonomous vehicles to a universe of large destinations is inherently complex, but we have to start doing this somewhere now where the environment is somewhat representative of a wider world of moving bodies, other modes of transport, and some levels of unpredictability.  

In ten years, time, web3.0 and blockchain will drive each of us to have a digital ID as our prime ID. This means our various identifications on social platforms will be fluid. The social media platforms will have no control as you move your ID and private blockchain wallet from place to place. This could be the end of the platform age.The conversations today are less about the social media platforms dominating our personal expressions but the shift away from the platform economy that has dominated Web.2.0 to the open source self-identification economy that will dominate the next ten years. This stretches across financial and healthcare sectors and how governments sustain sovereign control over the value of nearly anything as each of us becomes our own market (physical and virtual) that is protected by our own digital wallet and the power of blockchain technologies.  This will drive a whole new sense of worth, identification, and privacy and completely re-structure what assets we own, trade, and borr

What have Drew Brees and Kim Kardashian got in common? Both have had social posts about them either playing Pickleball or maybe coming back as a professional Pickleball players (in the case of Drew Brees). These are two very powerful names in the world of sports and celebrity entertainment. Sports are a vital part of our social fabric and it would be foolish to assume that the sports we play and or watch now will be identical in ten years’ time. On one hand, it would be a sad idea that we cannot evolve new tastes or variants. On the other hand, understanding the triggers that drive these new sports and experiences tells us a lot about the potential world we will live in, ten years from now.Change is often misread as purely a moment of fashion. When a close colleague told me he was recently driving his boys past a set of tennis courts his boys called them, pickleball courts. That is the subtle shift in language that often tells or shows us more about the future than just a passing comment. Pickl

Imagine the idea of the soldier software coder? It might sound odd now, but the combination of world events, technology, and future needs on the battlefield makes this an inevitability. The ability to learn, and adjust in the moment of combat with the capacity to bring all forces to bear, where and when they are needed could be the future of defense. This is the software-centric world, on the edge and in real-time, possibly through the cloud. The ability to bring all forces to bear together on the earth, in the sea, and through the sky in a joint command sits at the heart of this idea that the US DOD hopes to make a reality by 2030. This in many ways might be the best representation of the power of software to change the world around us in the most complex and volatile of situations.  

Globalization has for all its great virtues exposed certain vulnerabilities to us. Jobs get lost, supply chains can be pinched and more importantly the capacity to respond to these pressures become increasingly difficult in the timelines we now expect. JobsOhio’s recent success in attracting Intel to build the largest microprocessor plant in the world, right in the heartland of America is maybe the first and most programmatic process for bringing jobs back to the United States and also protecting industries increasingly reliant on sourcing key technology components in the markets they sell to.In 2018 Ohio was last in all states for the availability of investment capital.The idea of re-shoring is tougher to put into practice than we think, but it is part of a new map for globalization for the year 2032 and beyond that, we will need to navigate.Transforming America’s diverse industrial base to handle future supply chain shocks as well as a stronger presence for innovation and future-ready jobs is the

Go to Google and type in the term, social investing. 400 million references will come up but the RISE fund is the largest ($6bn) in the world. Founded by Bono (that one) and TPG the fund is an early explorer in finding the balance between investing for profit, investing to change markets, and investing where social impact really needs the help of businesses in order to get traction. This might be one of the key pathways forward for capitalism to make, or enable direct action but supporting entrepreneurs' ideas that can change the world and thrive financially.The podcast with the managing partner for the Rise fund, Maya Chorengel walks through real-life companies looking to triangulate between social impact, entrepreneurial ideas, and economic opportunity. As social challenges become increasingly more complex and the ability of government to handle them all becomes less viable, social investing may be the key to bringing, assets, ideas, and capital together to solve these on the ground.

In a post-Covid world, where physical and virtual become increasingly synthesized the way we express ourselves, the way we work, and how we are going to organize our personal and work lives are going to evolve. This is the best manifestation of the idea of the Metaverse.  The podcast talks to the leader, CEO of the largest carrier in the US (CEO Verizon business) with a workforce in the hundreds of thousands about how their 5G and edge services will change to match this world, but also how they have evolved the way they think about the working world for their employees. Tami Erwin talks about the human component of the world we are experiencing and how home and work are intertwined responsibilities for her and the company going forward.  Every business will leave Covid having to re-imagine a full range of practices for its people, customers, and markets. This is the trigger 5G had needed and the ripple effect on 6G will become increasingly clear as we adjust to the new world of the evolving Metavers

Ukraine has been the sleeping development partner for software companies based in the US for decades. The invasion by Russia presents an existential threat to the continuing food chain of talent, ideas, and productivity from a market that today’s guest a Ukrainian investment banker is from. Vitaly Golomb is an investment banker at Drake Star, and he believes that this is the moment where we re-examine the role of Ukraine as the potential new version of Israel’s technology hotbed, but in Europe.  A vast array of technology companies from Microsoft, Cisco, Samsung, and LG, have significant IP and technical resources in Ukraine to build new products and technologies because Ukraine is one of the most science-based educated companies in the world. 

Eric W. Sanderson is a landscape ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, director of the Mannahatta Project, and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. In 2013 his book Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs was published and set the stall for how we should be thinking about building a new world around us.Sanderson’s argument is that the world we live in now is very much an artifact of decisions our grandparents and great, grandparents made about how we build cities, transport ourselves, and how we used the land around us. We still live with those decisions and our children, and their children will live with the decisions we make now, ten-twenty, and one hundred years into the future. We cannot keep kicking the can down the road for 2032 and beyond. We cannot change the laws of physics, but we can change human laws.He argues for three shifts:·      We adjust taxes around the costs (for example what the lan

Recent research by Cambia Information shows only 7% of Americans are fully in on the idea of EVs. Now imagine an EV with no driver, that looks completely different than any other form factor than ever before and is backed by Amazon breaks the mold for transportation ideas for the next ten years and beyond.  As we move to accept new vehicle form factors Imagine how this changes how we interact with the cities and towns we live in, not just getting from the office to a client meeting or even how we might commute from home, but also how we experience going to a restaurant, a late-night jazz club or even shopping. A completely autonomous experience for human passengers, basically re-inventing human transportation. Jesse Levinson is the Co-Founder and CTO for Zoox, The Amazon autonomous vehicle company based in Foster City, California.  

Charlene Li is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership, and co-author of the critically acclaimed book, Groundswell. Her latest book is the bestseller The Disruption Mindset. She is the Founder of Altimeter, a disruptive analyst firm that was acquired in 2015 by Prophet. Charlene is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School and was named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company. The podcast covers a variety of contriversial topics for 2032 on the shape of things to come.

Our guest for this podcast, Lawrence Shindell, is a world-renowned expert in the verification and trustworthiness of methods designed to verify the authenticity of art. His ideas on the potential power of NFT’s, nanotechnology, machine learning and AI to solve the challenges of authenticity in artwork by 2030 are a rare glimpse into the world 99.99% of us will never be involved in. Yet the progressive application of technologies may open up a sense of comfort to us who go to art museums and have a doubt that maybe not all the collections are fully authentic. Crazy things still happen in a modern, technology-centered world. For example, a gallery bought and then sold on a Jackson Pollack with misspellings in the signature for $2M less than ten years ago. An inflation-adjusted $127M now.