The Futurist Who Helped Define Tech Trend Reports Just Killed Them (Literally)

At SXSW, Amy Webb declared the end of the annual trend report—and warned that leaders are missing the bigger story.

Unless you spend your time in boardrooms and C-suites, there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of the Future Today Strategy Group (FTSG). There’s also a better-than-decent chance you’ve encountered its influence.

Every year, the consulting firm publishes a massive tech trends report that maps emerging threats, white spaces, and opportunities early enough for companies to act on them. Past editions have flagged shifts around synthetic media, digital humans, and generative AI before they entered the mainstream conversation. And some major institutions are clearly paying attention: FTSG’s client list includes Mastercard, Ford, and NASA.

Which makes what’s happening onstage inside a Hilton hotel in downtown Austin quite jarring. Clad in a black cloak, FTSG founder and CEO Amy Webb opens her South by Southwest festival talk with a mock funeral for the trends report. Somber music fills the ballroom while a slideshow plays behind her.

“We are gathered here today to celebrate and remember the life of the trend report,” Webb tells the rhapsodic crowd of roughly 1,500.

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She wasn’t kidding: An anthropomorphic cartoon version of the report appears first in a hospital delivery room, then at school, then sightseeing at the Eiffel Tower, before eventually arriving where it spent most of its life: the corporate boardroom.

In an interview with Fast Company ahead of the talk, Webb is characteristically blunt about the spectacle. “As long as we’re killing the thing we’re famous for, why don’t we have some fun with it?”

The issue, she says, is the format itself. An annual trends report captures only a fleeting moment in a landscape now shifting too quickly to summarize once a year. By the time a massive PDF lands in executives’ inboxes, parts of it are already outdated.

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