Amy Webb

Amy Webb is a quantitative futurist. She is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and the Founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures. Founded in 2006, the Institute advises Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, government agencies, large nonprofits, universities and startups around the world. Amy was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led and was won the prestigious 2017 Thinkers50 RADAR Award. Amy's special area of research is artificial intelligence, and she has advised three-star generals and admirals, White House leadership and CEOs of some of the world's largest companies.

Amy is the author of three books, including The Big Nine: How The Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity (PublicAffairs/ Hachette, March 5, 2019), which is a call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head. Her last book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream (PublicAffairs/ Hachette, December 2016), explains Amy's forecasting methodology and how any organization can identify risk and opportunity before disruption hits. Signals is a Washington Post bestseller, was selected as one of Fast Company's Best Books of 2016, won a 2017 Gold Axiom Medal for the best book about business and technology and was one of Amazon's best books 2016. Signals has been released in multiple international editions and has been translated into a number of languages. Her bestselling memoir Data, A Love Story (Dutton/ Penguin 2013) is about finding love via algorithms. Her TED talk about Data has been viewed more than 6 million times and has been translated into 32 languages. Data is being adapted as a feature film, which is currently in production.

Amy is 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 was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and her research received a national Sigma Delta Chi award. Amy 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 writes extensively about artificial intelligence, emerging technology, digital media and the impacts/ opportunities they present. She is the tech columnist and a contributing editor at Inc. Magazine, and she writes a column about the future of technology for The Nikkei (Japan). She regularly contributes to a number of publications all over the world, which include the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fortune, Mother Jones and others. Amy's future forecasting work has been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, CNN, NPR, and more. Her research has also been cited in several academic papers.

For the past 15 years, Amy has been dedicated to helping inform and shape the future of journalism. She is a member of the accreditation council of the ACEJMC, where she is helping to recalibrate accreditation standards for journalism and communication programs throughout the country. She is chairing a committee to develop a new, international digital certification program. Every year, Amy lectures about the future of media and technology at Harvard University as well as a number of universities worldwide, which have included Institut d'études politiques de Paris, Tokyo University and National University of Kyiv. She was a David Letterman Distinguished Professional Lecturer at Ball State University in 2016.

Amy serves on a script consultant for films and shows about artificial intelligence, technology and the future. Most recently, she worked on The First, a sci-fi drama about the first humans to travel to Mars (airing on Hulu and Channel 4). She is a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and has served as a Blue Ribbon Emmy award judge.

Amy originally 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 also earned Nikyu Certification in the Japanese government-administered Language Proficiency Test. In addition, she earned the rank of Shodan (first-degree black belt) in Aikido, but a serious accident during training a few years ago forced her to retire. She lives in Baltimore and in New York City.