From Web3 to Neurotech: Tracey Follows Outlines the Next Frontier for Business and Society

Tracey Follows is a globally acclaimed futurism speaker, ranked among Forbes’ Top 50 Female Futurists and named one of the World’s Top 30 Futurists for 2025. As founder and CEO of Futuremade, she guides organisations such as Amazon, Virgin, Google, and Coca‑Cola through the mega‑trends shaping tomorrow. 

Her bestselling book The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st‑Century Technology? and her award‑winning podcast explore how emerging technologies are redefining identity—and have established her as a trusted voice in media, academia, and global forums.

In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Tracey reveals how organisations can anticipate coming shifts, reconcile digital disruption with identity, and strategically prepare for the future—before it arrives.

Q1. Many people misunderstand the role of a futurist. From your perspective, what does being a futurist actually involve, and why does it matter in today’s business landscape?

Tracey Follows: “Well, a lot of people think that a futurist is about predicting the future as you would, and some of the job is that, but I think increasingly the job is about preparation not just prediction. So we do try to help businesses, brands, organisations, even individual people actually try to prepare for the future.

“And we do that in lots of different ways. We’re scanning the horizon for trends — pockets of the future in the present — and also we’re trying to help people come up with alternative perspectives on the future, and sometimes that’s called scenarios. 

“A lot of people will have done scenario planning, but what we’re really trying to do there is to rehearse for and practise for different possible outcomes and different possible futures.

“And in that respect we’re trying to help people not always be right about the future, as we do when we’re predicting, but certainly try not to be wrong. So we hope that we have foreseen most, if not all, future possibilities that are coming down the line.”

Q2. Businesses and brands are constantly being shaped by global forces. From your horizon scanning, what do you see as the most significant trends currently transforming organisations worldwide?

Tracey Follows: “Well, there are some very big trends — we might call them macro trends as opposed to micro trends. I mean there are megatrends that are global and last for decades, there are macro trends which are still big trends that are important, they have huge impact on businesses, organisations, consumers, citizens, and there are micro trends that are much smaller, burn out a bit quicker if you like, and can come and go.

“All of them are important and the interplay between all of them is very important, but I would say that there are some key trends that are affecting all of us pretty much across the world, actually in slightly different ways. One of the big ones is decentralisation. We’ve heard a lot about that in the last few years.

“I think people will be used to thinking about cryptocurrency, about decentralised finance or DeFi, but what’s behind all of that is a bigger trend around decentralisation. So it’s the breaking down of old hierarchical systems that were very organisationally vertical, if you like, and we can see some of those institutional failures. 

“We can see some of those organisations crumbling, if you like, falling away, because what is emerging is a new kind of world which is more networked. So it’s a flatter structure, less hierarchical, and because of that it’s more participative and inclusive.

“People are becoming involved in and participating in new types of business, new types of revenue generation — the creator economy, the decentralised finance sector, Web3 is often what people talk about when they refer to this. One of the reasons it’s very popular with people is because it’s permissionless. 

“The trust is across the network as a whole; there is no one centralised authority that is giving you permission to come and play, take part, and participate in this organisation or business or whatever it might be. And that is very attractive to a new generation.

“Of course, one of the things we should remember about trends is that for every trend there’s a counter-trend. So the more decentralisation we see in certain quarters, and with start-ups and new types of business, the more recentralisation we see with some of the legacy businesses. 

“So one of the things we are probably observing at the moment — and you might be able to feel this, everybody I think when I test this out on people they say they can — is a tension between the new emerging system of decentralisation and the recentralisation, where older businesses and organisations and institutions are trying to wrestle back the control into the centralised format.

“This is where we are at the moment, and one of the reasons we are feeling a little bit in this liminal space, a bit of stagnation, a movement without progress, is because there is this jostling, this tension, between these two big trends. And I think that’s one of the biggest and most important things for businesses today.”

Q3. Spotting trends is one thing, but applying them is another. How can organisations identify which developments are most relevant to them and harness those trends effectively, without becoming overwhelmed?

Tracey Follows: “For organisations it’s really important that one looks to the horizon for lots of different trends, but one doesn’t come at this thinking, I need to activate and action all of these things I’m seeing on the horizon, because it’s so overwhelming. It would be a massive cognitive overload or organisational overload.

“One has to pick one’s way through some of these trends and look at exactly how they’re going to affect the type of business you’re in, the sector you’re in, the kinds of consumers you have, the purpose of your organisation, the vision that you’re trying to build towards, and then choose which trends are important to you and the ones that you want to activate. Not necessarily try and boil the ocean and act on everything.

“One of the most important ways to use these trends for organisations, I think, is to take the organisational vision or purpose — which might be a vision that’s 20 or 30 years in advance and you’re trying to get somewhere, but you have a really clear idea of what your market, your sector, your company or your consumers are going to be like in the further future — and then use that to dictate what two to three actions you’re going to take in the next 12 to 18 months that are going to get you to that vision.

“Once you have that model and that framework to work with as an organisation, you can harness the relevant trends that are going to help you get there, and all the other trends can kind of go by the wayside. 

“Somebody else can pick those up and harness and augment them and turn them to their advantage. But you, as an organisation, a brand, a company, have your own distinct purpose, and so you can use the signals from the trends that are relevant to you.

“You don’t have to try and do everything. Because the two questions I tend to get asked the most from organisations are: which are the most important trends that are going to have the biggest impact on us, and over what time length?

“So one of the biggest challenges is to really try and predict accurately whether a trend is really going to take off in the next six months or the next 12 months, or whether it’s going to go a little bit quiet into the trough of disillusionment and then come back burning brighter sort of five years later.

“This is what we’re trying to work out with horizon scanning. But again, I say to organisations, it’s for somebody like me, somebody that works in foresight, strategic foresight, or futures, to try and work with a company to work out which trends are the most relevant and appropriate to that business and make them work harder for you.”

This exclusive interview with Tracey Follows was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.

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