Amy Webb

Future Today Summit co-organizer.

Amy Webb is a futurist and CEO of the Future Today Institute, a leading future forecasting and strategy firm that researches technology and answers “What’s the future of X?” for a global client base, which includes government agencies, research universities, Fortune 500 companies and startups.

Ms. Webb is an Adjunct Professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she teaches a course of forecasting the future of technology, and she is a summer Lecturer at Columbia University, where she teaches a course on the future of media. Ms. Webb was a 2014-15 Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and her research on the future of postsecondary education reform received a national Sigma Delta Chi award.

Her future forecasting work has been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, NPR and CNN and has been cited in a number of academic papers. Ms. Webb was a Delegate on the former U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, where she advised on the future of media and technology, and she served on the Aspen Institute’s Dialogue on Libraries, where she worked with FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and others on the future of libraries. In 2013, she published Data, A Love Story (Dutton/ Penguin), a bestselling memoir about finding love via algorithms. Her TED talk about Data has been viewed 5 million times and has been translated into 31 languages. Data is being adapted as a feature film, which is currently in production. Her next book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream is about how to use the tools of a futurist to predict change—and what to do about it in the present (PublicAffairs, December 2016). Ms. Webb originally attended the Jacobs School of Music to study classical clarinet. She then studied game theory, economics and political science at Indiana University. She holds an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.