52 questions for leaders & innovators in 2025.
Inspired by recent glimpses of the future normal.
As a ‘reluctant futurist’, I make no claim to know what’s coming next.
Despite what the 200+ trend reports might suggest, no one does. Especially not in 2025, as a whole bunch of exponential forces come together.
Instead I want to inspire you to think differently, with 52 questions that every leader, entrepreneur and innovator should consider as we head into 2025. Some you’ll be familiar with. Some will be new. Each question below is inspired by a product, experience, or startup that launched this year.
Two quick primers before we dive in:
First, I deliberately haven’t split out this list by category. You spend enough time in silos. Looking outside your usual area of focus is how you get ahead of what’s coming to your industry. I want you to skim past something happening in an seemingly-unrelated area and for it spark a winning, non-obvious insight.1
Second, what’s changed in 2024 (vs. the 2023 and 2022 editions)? It won’t surprise you that AI continues to get even bigger. But here it’s less about what’s landed, but what it means. How will work and organisations change as agents and robots become part of the future normal? Beyond AI, climate and health are the big topics – with everything from aging populations, synbio, energy, pollution and climate adaptation making an appearance. Oh, and a few more left-field moonshots.
Ready? Let’s go…
What will your workforce look like in the future normal? Jensen Huang has said Nvidia will have 50,000 human workers supported by 100 million AI agents; this Starbucks in South Korea has 100 robots and a handful of human baristas. Here’s why that’s no bad thing for your human staff.
Would you welcome a Robody into your home? Devanthro’s ‘Robodies’ combine humanoid robots with real-but-remote human care for elderly patients, with only slight (ahem) dystopian vibes, as you can see above ;)
What other seemingly-improbable in-person jobs will be done remotely? Doctors in Switzerland performed a remote operation on a pig in Hong Kong. Which other tasks will we welcome being done remotely by the best global talent?
Which experiences will robots make faster, cheaper and ultimately more accessible? Perceptive’s robots can perform dental crown placements in a 15 minute visit, versus two one-hour visits today. Aescape’s robot massage starts at $60 (yes, even in a New York 5* hotel) and doesn’t use oil (no shower required).
How will you use AI agents to create better human relationships? Here are 4 tangible ideas for the event industry. What would a similar exercise look like for your industry or organisation?
Where, when and how should you deploy AI avatars? The German tourism board got it very wrong. As did Character.AI, tragically.
How will we handle the trade-off between privacy and the digital superpowers that multimodal AI assistants grant us? Combine smart glasses, Google’s upcoming Astra assistant and few morals, and you quickly enter a brave new world.
Will smaller, hybrid ‘shared reality’ experiences be the future of live events? No expensive headsets here – but I can’t stop thinking about this video of Cosm in LA.
What if you could call Mark Cuban or Richard Branson for business advice? Masterclass On_Call enables people to have 1:1 phone calls with deepfake AI avatars of celebrity gurus.
How will you use AI to teach people the (new) skills they need, right when they need them? Beyond celebrity deepfakes, Microsoft’s Copilot Vision is a multimodal AI that can see and hear what’s on users’ screens, enabling it to act as a tireless, omniscient, on-demand coach.
What if your organisation had a ‘second brain’? Ever-expanding context windows will make it trivial to tap into your organisation’s historic and collective intelligence.
Will human judgement and creativity become even more valuable when you can generate and explore 10,000 ideas in seconds? Adobe’s Project Concept supercharges creative exploration. But there’s always a production cost (even if just time), making good taste an essential shortcut to success.
What if you could simulate reality at scale? Altera created 1,000 AI agents to play Minecraft, saying that “creating digital humans is our way of understanding humanity better, both at the individual and societal levels.” Read more in The Weird World of Working with AI Agents.
What if you could talk to your future self? MIT Media Lab’s Future You project enabled young people to chat to simulations of themselves at 60. How will we make decisions in the future normal?
Which ‘impossible’ ideas can you now pull off? NBC’s Daily Olympic Recap published millions of personalised clips, all featuring AI-generated commentary from Al Michaels.
What if at your next event you could crowdsource hundreds of visions of the future of your industry (or your next product), instantly? Plus your audience will love having such a positive and creative experience with AI. Interesting? Watch the video above and let’s talk ;)
What would your job look like if it had zero admin? Zero’s bold promise of an autonomous, agent-driven, ‘zero-click’ CRM is a compelling vision of the future normal for software – and indeed more generally, jobs.
What if AI agents could spend money? Okta’s Async Authentication will enable users to set budgets for AI agents, and receive one-touch notifications to authorise their actions.
How will you know when you’re ready to cross the chasm from ‘meh’ to magical, and back again? Google’s NotebookLM’s audio overviews and Waymo’s self-driving taxis were the UX hits of the year. They raised expectations to new heights, then instantly became unremarkable.
Will 2025 be the year wearable computing (finally) breaks through? Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses are the company’s best selling product in 60% of its EMEA stores.
Which jobs will we happily hand over to robots? We’ll look back in amazement / horror that people ever cleaned the windows on skyscrapers.
What non-obvious jobs are humans really doing for you? Women riding in Waymos have posted videos of men harassing them. Remember Rory Sutherland’s ‘doorman fallacy’.
What if exoskeletons could extend workers’ ability to do demanding physical jobs? Designed to support an aging workforce, Hyundai and Kia’s X-ble Shoulder reduces workplace strain and injuries.
What if your next video call could also flag burnout, or even pick up early signals of cognitive decline? I’m obsessed with vocal biomarkers; Sonde Health’s platform can help identify mental health conditions and users’ ‘cognitive fitness’ from 30-second voice samples.
What if medical devices didn’t look like medical devices? Apple’s new Airpods Pro 2 are also FDA-approved hearing aids, making them a perfect fit for the affluent-yet-still-aspirational older populations that will dominate the future normal.
What if we didn’t die? I’ve been watching Bryan Johnson’s quest to ‘not die’ for a while, but expect interest in longevity to surge after his Netflix documentary lands on 1 Jan 2025.
What if digital democratisation comes to even regulated industries? Huma’s Cloud Platform enables healthcare professionals to create and deploy regulator-approved apps from text prompts. Read more on AI & Hacking Health.
What if you gave away your biggest discovery of 2025? Google DeepMind open sourced its latest AlphaFold 3 model, which predicts the interactions between proteins, DNA, RNA and more. Here’s why this will be a smart talent play.
Will 2025 be the tipping point when it comes to restricting young people’s use of smartphones and/or social media? Last year I suggested regulation of social media was coming – this year saw that happen for under-16s in Australia. Certainly they won’t be the last.
What data are you gathering? Are you being ambitious enough? Pillbot is a swallowable micro robot which can see inside your body. What will you learn when you can analyse everything?
What if we could cool ourselves without making the world warmer? Eztia’s reusable cooling patches don’t require ice (so no freezers or electricity). 2025 will see the search for similarly sustainable climate adaptation solutions.
What if we didn’t need syringes? Novo Nordisk & MIT published research exploring how squid-inspired, orally-taken capsules might be able to deliver large molecule drugs (such as GLP-1) directly into the digestive tract. Innovation begets innovation – which non-obvious adjacencies could you explore?
What if dancing is the best medicine? A meta-analysis of over 200 studies found that dancing was significantly better than SSRIs and CBT at helping people with depression. We featured non-pharmaceutical ‘Green Prescriptions’ in The Future Normal – clearly we should have broadened our horizons :)
What if co-living could bridge generation gaps and reduce loneliness? A former primary school in Singapore will reopen as an intergenerational co-living space. A model to bring to other aging populations?
What if climate security becomes the new must-have real estate ‘feature’? Real estate listing platform Zillow now features climate risk information (covering flood, wildfire, wind, heat and air quality), in response to rising insurance costs. Will financial pressures finally drive behaviour change?
What if we could have limitless clean water, everywhere? Desolenator is a Dutch startup using solar power to create net zero, solar desalination plants in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. I wrote about the decentralisation of energy systems in The Future Normal, now these same ideas could apply to water, too.
Astro Mechanic’s engine What if flights were three times faster and half the price? Astro Mechanica’s Turboelectric Adaptive Engine offers the tantalising promise of affordable, convenient and sustainable supersonic air travel.
What if micro-drones could fly forever? Chinese scientists have created a solar-powered micro-drone, weighing just 4.2g. The dystopian implications are obvious, but which positive opportunities could these also unlock?
What if we could make batteries from abundant, clean materials? CarbonScape is building a €50m plant in Finland to make its biographite from wood biomass. Another step from the extractive era into the regenerative one.
What if solar paint meant we could generate power on cars, buildings, and beyond? Mercedes-Benz is testing solar paint that can deliver enough power to drive 12,000km, even under German skies.
What if you never had to change or charge a battery? The world’s first Carbon-14 diamond battery has a half-life of 5,700 years. Yes, it only emits a trickle of power, but it could revolutionise medical implants, RF tags, satellites, and more.
What if microbes could ‘eat’ waste petroleum and other pollutants? Bioremediation startup Bluumbio uses enzymes to break down industrial chemicals fast-but-naturally. The future normal will be the future bio-normal.
Which luxury materials will be replaced by ‘unnaturally better’ alternatives? Faircraft released its first lab-grown leather handbag. Shiny new tech, yet still made by traditional leather artisans.
What if decadence and indulgence could be made authentically guilt-free? Vow’s cultivated ‘forged gras’ is being sold in Singapore and soon Hong Kong.
What if we could make food out of thin air? I’ve kept watching Solein’s air-derived protein powder ingredient since featuring it in The Future Normal; last month it entered the US market.
What if we could ‘grow’ zero-impact shoes and textiles from a single, versatile, plant-based material? O°’s mind-bending vision imagines creating 3D-printed, 100% biodegradable shoes and textiles.
What if electronic devices were designed to last for decades? Bang & Olufsen’s luxury H100 headphones might be $1500, but key components can be replaced or upgraded if needed. Will planned obsolescence become obsolete?
What if contributing to scientific progress became the new luxury status symbol? Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke’s Rev Ocean will be the world’s largest private super yacht. But as well as the usual luxury toys, it also has nine (!) onboard research labs, and will be offered free to scientists doing marine research.
What if you could recreate – and therefore transport – smells as easily as you can digital files? Osmo’s scent generation technology might be sci-fi tech today, but could have novel implications from detecting counterfeits to healthcare.
What breakthroughs might quantum computers unlock? Google’s Willow quantum chip takes less than five minutes to do what would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10^25) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.
What if we could ‘speak’ with animals? CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, shows how scientists are using AI to decode animal communication. While it might be of little practical importance today, it is a powerful reminder that there will inevitably be certain of today’s ‘truths’ which get broken in the future normal. Our job is to be open to these new realities.
Finally – what won’t change in 2025, or even in 2037? It’s important to remember that most things won’t change in the next 12 months, if 12 years. But what will change is our expectations. What the meme below doesn’t show is that while we might still sit in traffic, but we now expect real-time updates on how long we’ll be delayed, and to remain productive. So please use these provocations as fuel for your thinking, but never lose sight of who you’re serving.
People who understand people will always win.
Can I inspire your team to win in 2025?
This year I’ve delivered 30+ sessions, both live and virtually – from Brazil to Saudi Arabia, Slovenia to Shoreditch.
My regular trend & innovation keynotes bring fresh, cross-industry, people-first perspectives to your audience.
VisuAIse Futures takes it one step further, turning a keynote into an interactive, ‘multiplayer’ creative experience. Here’s what people are saying about it:
“It was so refreshing to hear how AI can be used to power human imagination, rather than replace it. And then it was even better to actually experience it”
“Fantastic session! Hugely insightful and fun, too!”
“Brilliant. The feeling in the room was positively intense whilst the images were coming through!
Feel the optimistic vibes it will bring to your event in the 2-minute video below (or watch it here).
If you’d like to discuss bringing me to your next meeting or event then please do reach out directly to Renee Strom or check out my speaking site.
Thanks for reading,
Henry
Here’s a quick recap of the innovation-focused approach to trend spotting I laid out in Trend-Driven Innovation:
Forget trends. Look for opportunities.
Opportunities lie in the gaps between people’s emerging expectations and their current reality.
Expectations are created by people’s experiences, which can be direct or just indirectly being aware that something is now possible.
Look at innovations – i.e. new startups, products and services – as these shape people’s experiences.
Not all innovations are equally important (to you) – look for those that raise people’s expectations around a core, unchanging basic human need or want that you cater to.
They will lead you to identify meaningful expectation gaps. Ask ‘so what…?’ and ‘what if…?’, instead of stating ‘this will…’ Tell stories to inspire action rather than presenting data to convince.
Great article!