The 5 convergences that will redefine business
Future Today Strategy Group CEO Amy Webb explains why the next decade won’t be defined by single technologies but by how they converge.
In the past year, we’ve been living in a state of continuous disorder, especially in business. Tariffs, geopolitics, and technology are each colliding in unpredictable ways. Just 12 months ago, AI still felt like speculative fiction. Today, anyone can generate a video of Dolly Parton and LeBron James playing pickleball inside the Louvre using an off-the-shelf app. What once seemed impossible now feels trivial.
The result is a pervasive sense of paralysis. Most people can’t possibly track every breakthrough, every new model, every ripple of impact—and so they stop trying. It’s not laziness; it’s cognitive overload. For the first time in human history, civilization is undergoing fundamental transformation within a single generation. In the mid-20th century, people imagined a bright, distant future powered by technology. Today, the present itself feels alien. We’re not dreaming of tomorrow—we’re struggling to orient ourselves given the seemingly endless changes happening right now.
If it feels like technology is everywhere all at once, that’s because it is. Advances no longer occur in isolation—they compound. Progress in one domain amplifies another, creating a self-reinforcing flywheel of innovation. Improvements cascade across sectors, spilling into economics, politics, and culture. Each feedback loop accelerates the next, as new applications emerge, adoption grows, and the cycle tightens.
What we’re witnessing is a massive number of convergences: where technologies stop evolving alone and start evolving each other as they merge, multiply, and transform the very idea of value itself. Convergences, not isolated trends, will define the next era. They are the underlying forces reshaping industries, institutions, and identities alike.
Five powerful convergences are already in motion and reveal how to navigate the year ahead with clarity and purpose.
1. The era of living intelligence
AI is just one of three groundbreaking technologies shifting the business landscape. The other two—advanced sensors and biotechnology—are less visible, though no less important. Together, they’re creating something entirely new: living intelligence.
Living intelligence (LI) describes systems that can sense, learn, adapt, and evolve, made possible through the convergence of artificial intelligence, advanced sensors, and biotechnology. LI systems don’t just compute, they perceive, interpret, and respond. They adjust to environments, anticipate needs, and act without waiting for human input.
We’re already seeing the earliest examples. Australia-based agricultural technology company Costa Group developed robotic pollinators outfitted with computer vision and various sensors. They independently monitor greenhouse conditions, optimize pollination routines, and adapt their actions based on real-time environmental feedback, increasing yield without waiting for human instructions.
Leaders who treat AI as a single technology risk missing the deeper transformation already underway. Living intelligence is the new substrate of business, our economy, and society.
2. Devices that think for themselves
We’re moving into an era where devices are no longer passive tools but active participants. Phones, wearables, and home systems will sense context, interpret intent, and respond autonomously. This means a new ecosystem of devices that are expressive, adaptive, and anticipatory.
AI-native devices are what happens when artificial intelligence, advanced sensors, and edge computing converge—when perception, computation, and context merge inside the same machine.
The first wave is emerging. Rabbit’s R1 and the Humane AI Pin were early (if failed) prototypes—imperfect but directional. The next generation will debut in the coming year, as AI-first companies such as OpenAI transition to hardware. AI native devices signal the end of the phone as the central node of communication. In this new model, simple tasks happen offline. More complex processes sync seamlessly when needed.
Historically, hardware has been a vessel for software. We are seeing that logic get inverted. AI won’t just be the layer inside the device—the device will become the extension of the AI. The goal isn’t merely a smarter phone or a more powerful assistant but a new form of interaction that is deeply contextual, deeply personal, and very likely post-screen. This is a radical departure from existing computing paradigms. This is where computing begins to feel sentient, even if it isn’t (yet).
3. The rise of unlimited labor
In 1928, a humanoid robot named Eric stood up, sat down, and delivered a speech. In 2013, Boston Dynamics introduced Atlas, a 6-foot-2 robot that could walk, run, and jump. Both moments were hailed as the dawn of the robot age. A century later, we don’t have robot butlers—we have cats riding Roombas.
But that’s changing. Robots are finally crossing from promise to presence as AI, sensors, and materials science converge, resulting in machines that can see, think, and move through the world with purpose.
Researchers are combining data from human motion, teleoperation, and visual archives—teaching machines to act by watching us act. Late in 2024, when Google DeepMind trained a robot to tie a shoe, it crossed a sort of physical Turing test for robotics: It was a deceptively simple act that requires touch, dexterity, and learned intuition.
Nvidia is betting on an AI-driven robot workforce to help reindustrialize the United States. Its executives see robots filling more than half a million manufacturing jobs. The company is already working with Agility Robotics on warehouse automation, with Diligent Robotics on hospital logistics, with Johnson & Johnson on surgical robots, and with Figure AI on humanoid fleets for both industry and the home.
Amazon is moving in the same direction with Blue Jay, a system of overhead robotic arms that handle warehouse packages faster and cheaper—eventually with less human labor. Elon Musk told investors during an earnings call in October that Tesla’s Optimus robots will reach “five times the productivity of a person per year.”
Humanoid robots will be joined by millions of robots that look nothing like people and service science labs, construction sites, warehouses, supply chain logistics, and beyond. For the second time in modern history, technology isn’t offering tools for people to work. It’s offering unlimited labor itself. The question isn’t whether robots will replace jobs. It’s who will own them when they do.
4. The post-search internet
The post-search internet is emerging from the convergence of large language models, retrieval systems, and personalized data ecosystems. Soon, we will stop searching for the exact thing we want in a browser. We may stop browsing altogether. Collaborative AI systems will do it for us.
Months ago, Google’s Chrome started natively running Gemini. Perplexity launched its Comet browser and made it available to everyone for free. Not long after, Microsoft introduced new Copilot features for Edge, now branded as “Your AI Browser.” In quick succession, OpenAI launched its own AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas. The old interface of tabs and links is being replaced by one built around conversation and intent.
Search used to be the front door to the internet. Now, conversation is. You won’t search Google for which blender to buy. In the near future, you’ll more likely ask an AI, and it will sell you one. No ads. No affiliates. No click-throughs. The implication: The referral economy could disappear overnight.
Here is the tension no one wants to acknowledge. Google makes profit. OpenAI makes debt. Its model depends on investor capital and long horizons. So, what happens when a loss-making AI company replaces the gatekeeper that drives trillions in consumer spending? We are building the next era of commerce on borrowed money. If the pipes of our economy shift from profit to promissory, we’d better be ready for what follows. (As of right now, we’re not.)
5. Programmable matter
Technology is rewriting the laws of matter. Metamaterials are engineered structures that defy the normal rules of physics. They’re the result of the convergence of AI, advanced manufacturing, and nanotechnology, allowing us to design matter with computation rather than chemistry.
Metamaterials behave in ways nature never intended. They can bend light or sound in reverse. They can take on impossible shapes. They can change their properties in response to heat, pressure, or light. In essence, they are programmable matter—physical systems that adapt to their environment in real time.
When AI and biotechnology converge with metamaterials, the world starts to look incredibly weird. For example, researchers at Penn State are developing materials that conduct electricity with zero resistance at room temperature, making lossless energy transmission possible. A team at the University of Pittsburgh has created a self-powered spinal implant that transmits data from inside the body, powered only by the motion of living tissue. In Scotland and Italy, engineers have designed a twisting 3D-printed metamaterial that reshapes itself on impact, offering next-generation crash protection for vehicles.
The implications are profound. The last time a breakthrough in materials science reshaped civilization was the discovery of semiconductors in the 1920s, which led to the transistor and the digital age. Metamaterials could mark the next leap.
What these convergences mean for you
These convergences form a new kind of feedback system. Advances in one domain now accelerate progress in others, creating a chain reaction of innovation. The effect is less a wave and more a compression, with technologies folding into each other to produce change faster than organizations can adapt. Entire industries will emerge and vanish within years. Economies will reorganize around new forms of value. For those using strategic foresight, it will be a moment to lead. For everyone else, it will feel like whiplash.
Whether you see this moment as thrilling or terrifying misses the point. What matters is that possibilities once unimaginable are now real. Every breakthrough carries risk and reward in equal measure. The future will not be shaped by any single technology but by what happens when they converge.
Note: This content was created by Future Today Strategy Group.