Amy Webb

CEO

Amy Webb, Founder and CEO of Future Today Institute and the global leader in strategic foresight, partners with business leaders to drive corporate strategies that lead to long term success and resilience. She advises business leaders through disruptive change enabling them to navigate an unpredictable future with confidence and take actionable strategic decisions that address global challenges, create sustainable value, and ensure long term growth.

Amy is a quantitative futurist and has developed FTI’s rigorous, data and research-driven strategic foresight methodology anticipates the unexpected and creates a strategically driven roadmap to manage risks and take advantage of opportunities today, tomorrow and into the future. In 2023, Amy was ranked the #4 most influential management thinker by Thinkers50, a ranking of global business thought leaders. She was also featured on the 2021 Thinkers 50 list, was shortlisted for the 2021 Digital Thinking Award, and received the 2017 Thinkers50 Radar Award. Forbes called Amy “one of the five women changing the world” and she was honored as one of the BBC’s 100 Women of 2020.

Amy, a featured thinker at such forums as the World Economic Forum and SXSW, is a professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where she developed and teaches the MBA-level strategic foresight course with live case studies. She is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Säid School of Business, a Fellow in the United States-Japan Leadership Program and a Foresight Fellow in the U.S. Government Accountability Office Center for Strategic Foresight. She is an inaugural member of the World Economic Forum’s Strategic Foresight Advisory Board, a member of the WEF’s Global Risks Board, and is an AI Governance Alliance partner. Amy was elected a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. Amy is a former Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where her research received a national Sigma Delta Chi award. She was also a Delegate on the former U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, where she worked on the future of technology, media and international diplomacy.

Amy is a frequent speaker on strategic foresight. Her TED talk about data has been viewed more than 8 million times and translated into 32 languages. She has also written several books on strategic foresight as well as a range of important business topics. Her most recent book, The Genesis Machine (PublicAffairs/ Hachette 2022) examines the futures of gene editing, biotech and synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is the promising and controversial technology platform that combines biology and artificial intelligence, opening up the potential to program biological systems much as we program computers. Genesis Machine was named one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and won the 2022 Gold Axiom Medal. Previous books include The Big Nine: How The Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity (PublicAffairs/ Hachette 2019), which was longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award, won the 2020 Gold Axiom Medal and was named Amazon’s best book about technology for 2019. The Big Nine is a sobering analysis of the present state of artificial intelligence, the conflict between the US and China, and what will happen to business and society during the next 50 years as AI evolves. A Washington Post bestseller, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream (PublicAffairs/ Hachette 2016) explains Amy’s strategic forecasting methodology and how any organization can identify risk and opportunity before disruption hits. Signals won the 2017 Thinkers50 RADAR Award, the 2017 Gold Axiom Medal, and was selected as one of Fast Company’s Best Books of 2016. To date, her books have been translated into 19 different languages.

Writing extensively about uncertainty, futures, emerging technologies and foresight strategy, Amy regularly contributes to a number of publications, which include the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, New York Times, Wired, Fortune and others. Amy attended the Jacobs School of Music to study classical clarinet and served on the Board of Directors for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. She holds a B.A. in political science, game theory and economics from Indiana University and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is a competitive endurance cyclist.

 

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Press Kit

To receive Amy Webb’s press kit, including high-resolution photos, please contact Victoria Chaitoff at [email protected].

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Media Requests

If you are reporter and would like to interview Amy for a story, contact [email protected] or 267-342-4300. If you are a TV booker, contact [email protected] or if your request is urgent, please call 267-342-4300. Depending on her schedule, Amy can come to a studio in NYC, Washington DC or work remotely from her private home studio.

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Book Requests

If you are a reporter or reviewer and want to talk about THE GENESIS MACHINE, THE BIG NINE or THE SIGNALS ARE TALKING, please send your request to Amy’s publicist Jaime Leifer at 212-364-1100 or [email protected].

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Lecturing and Speaking Engagements

Amy Webb is represented exclusively by Leading Authorities. To check Amy’s availability for your event, please reach out to [email protected].

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TV/ Film consulting requests

If you are a producer or writer working on tech/ science/ future-themed shows and film projects and would like to work with Amy Webb, please contact Cheryl Cooney at [email protected]. You can also reach her at 267-342-4300.