Are trends dead? Amy Webb and the rise of convergences

On March 14th, futurist Amy Webb took to the stage of SXSW, one of the world's biggest innovation events, to present the long awaited 2026 Emerging Tech Trend Report. Instead of her usual presentation, she walked on stage clad in a black cloak, announcing the death of the trend report. The event became a funeral with over-the-top theatrics, complete with a memorial video, flowers, and even a band, as Webb declared that trends were no longer reliable sources for companies to plan long-term marketing strategies. To surpass this issue, she introduced new and improved forecasts: convergences.

Let's take a step back and understand the Emerging Tech Trend Report’s relevance in past years. For nearly two decades, their trend analysis helped leaders anticipate change in subsequent years, revealing early patterns across technology, science, economic systems, environmental conditions, and social behavior. Marketing enthusiasts and specialists highly anticipated Amy Webb’s SXSW speech as it became a reference for shaping future strategies.

Although the reports were extremely relevant, the increasing pace at which trends change has made them less and less reliable. This is something observable on our daily lives: we’ve all experienced buying the shiny new fashion trend, only to inevitably regret our life choices when they finally arrive a month later, void of its initial appeal. As Webb argued, by the time it takes to write and publish a trend report, it's already become outdated. Her point isn't that trends no longer have any importance, but rather that they don't give us much information when analyzed on their own.

To solve this issue, Amy Webb proposed a new solution: Convergence Reports. To explain this idea, she alludes to convergence reports being like storm trackers. While trends are like weather data — temperature, humidity, windspeed — that are useful to know but not entirely relevant by themselves, convergences are like storm systems, occurring when all of those different conditions interact and produce something that none of them could produce on their own. 

In Webb’s words, a convergence occurs when multiple trends, forces, uncertainties and catalysts intersect to create a combined impact that is greater — and often different in kind — than the sum of their individual effects. They are defined by four main rules: they shape interconnected industries, redistribute power and value across those industries, create sudden new realities, and are hard to reverse.

A trend tells you what's changing, a convergence tells you what will become inevitable. In other words, convergence reports group individual trends into insights on major global perspective shifts, making them more relevant than simple trends. Then, instead of reacting to convergences, you should act ahead of them. 

To exemplify this method, Amy Webb explains the human augmentation convergence. Human augmentation is the use of technology and biology to enhance, extend, or optimize human physical and cognitive capabilities beyond their natural limits. There have been recent trends involving human augmentation that seemingly give us superpowers, such as technology using neural signals to let its users control devices with their mind. Webb believes that they point to a new reality: our bodies are becoming platforms, and opting out of using human augmentation might mean falling behind. This could lead to a reality where some humans, using these tools, will be objectively better than others, reshaping competition across several industries.

What can you, dear Bocconi student, take away from all of this? Something I find essential about this new outlook is the importance of analyzing grouped, instead of individual, data. In an increasingly interconnected world, where boundaries between industries or even countries are disappearing, having a full-picture view is essential. Not only in marketing but in other career paths, it is vital to be aware of global occurrences, to question how events in different sectors can interact. In a world obsessed with spotting trends, the real advantage might be understanding what happens when they collide.

Article by Julia Forace - BSMS Partnerships