Steve Brown

because it's very unclear how things are going to play out.

And it is in some ways kind of a chaotic system.

And a good futurist, FYI, doesn't predict the future.

That's a fortune teller.

It's not like I go into a darkened room and smoke peyote and think big thoughts.

What you're trying to do is stay on top of trends and look and figure out how will those trends play out over time and then how will different trends collide.

whether that be a technology trend and a business trend or a technology trend and a consumer usage trend.

That's what you're trying to do.

And it's trying to ask and answer two questions.

What's the world that we want to build?

And what's the world that we want to avoid?

That's the real job of a futurist.

For businesses, I think agentic AI is it.

Figuring out how to re-engineer workflows in the workplace and

and figure out how do agents work in partnership with humans and how do you use agents not just to offload tasks from humans and there'll be some of that because you're taking the suck out of people's jobs right you're taking a take offload the tasks that people find boring and repetitive that's good stuff yeah

But what you really want to do, and this is a big trend I see, is how do you pair people with agents to amplify the impact that that person has?

And it's not just about productivity.

Productivity is one vector of performance.

It could be amplifying their creativity.

It could be improving the quality of their output.