The Storm Is Coming. Are You Ready? Amy Webb kills the 19-year-old trend report — and launches the age of Convergence

SXSW 2026 FIELD REPORT  |  K-ENTERTECH HUB  |  FUTURE STRATEGY · ENTERTAINMENT TECH CONVERGENCE

The Storm Is Coming. Are You Ready?

Amy Webb kills the 19-year-old trend report — and launches the age of Convergence

For the first time in human history, some people are about to become objectively better than other people — and it may not be you.

AI agents produce code and content without fatigue, factories run lights-out with no one on the floor, and human loneliness has become a multi-billion-dollar market. These three storms do not arrive separately. They arrive simultaneously, each one amplifying the others — and they are aimed directly at the heart of the entertainment and content industry.

That is the core warning Amy Webb, founder and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group (FTSG), delivered from the SXSW (South by Southwest) 2026 keynote stage in Austin, Texas. FTSG — whose client roster includes Mastercard, Ford, and NASA, and which flagged synthetic media, digital humans, and generative AI years before they entered the mainstream conversation — made a strikingly different choice this year.

Draped in a black cloak, Webb walked onstage and declared a funeral for her firm's own Annual Tech Trends Report, the publication she had made famous over 19 years. As the Texas Longhorn Band played a somber march through the aisles of a packed Hilton ballroom, roughly 1,500 attendees responded with laughter, applause, and a standing ovation. It was a funeral. It was also a declaration.

The Death of the Trend Report: Applying Creative Destruction to Yourself

For nearly two decades, FTSG's annual trends report served as a common language across industries and borders — freely published, asking nothing in return, yet making conversations smarter, decisions better-informed, and creators more inventive. Its credibility was not branding; it was rigor. Hundreds of slides grounded in real data. Millions of readers each year. Countless imitators.

Webb told Fast Company ahead of the talk, with characteristic bluntness: "As long as we're killing the thing we're famous for, why don't we have some fun with it?" The funeral slideshow featured an anthropomorphic version of the report — born in a hospital delivery room, attending school, sightseeing at the Eiffel Tower — before landing where it spent most of its life: the corporate boardroom.

But the decision was serious.

"A static PDF trends report becomes stale the moment it's published. Our report was once a great idea, but it has become a crutch rather than a catalyst for strategy and capital allocation. The time had come to destroy what we built and make way for what the future demands."

The theoretical scaffolding was economist Joseph Schumpeter's Creative Destruction. "Capitalism is like a perpetual storm," Webb told the crowd. "It constantly destroys old industries and creates new ones." Horse-drawn carriages became railroads, which became cars, which became Uber — and today the streets of Austin carry Waymo robotaxis with no driver at all. Each new wave consumed the last entirely.

Webb compared Schumpeter's macro lens to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen's Disruptive Innovation framework. "Christensen zoomed in on how a scrappy startup can take you down. Schumpeter zoomed out to show how external forces cause creative destruction that happens to companies. In both cases, the perpetual storm doesn't care about you — which means you have to care about the storm before it arrives."

What Is a Convergence? From Weather Data to Storm Systems

What Webb is replacing the trend report with is a concept she calls Convergence. She frames the distinction through meteorology.

"Trends are weather data — temperature, humidity, wind speed. Useful and important, but a meteorologist is not just looking at temperature and wind speed in isolation and calling that a forecast. A convergence is a storm system. It's what happens when all those different conditions interact and produce something that none of them could produce on their own. A trend tells you what's changing. A convergence tells you what's going to become inevitable before it looks inevitable."

A convergence is defined as the intersection of multiple trends, forces, uncertainties, and catalysts that together create a combined impact greater than — and often different in kind from — the sum of their individual parts. FTSG built what Webb calls a Storm Tracker: a new proprietary methodology and technology stack designed to identify convergences before they lock in.

Convergences operate by four rules:

• System-level: They cross multiple industries and systems simultaneously. Unless you know what you're looking for, you simply cannot see them.
• Sudden new realities: What seemed inconceivable becomes inevitable almost overnight.
• Power and value redistribution: They don't just shake up one industry — they rewrite who wins and where value lives across industries all at once.
• Hard to reverse: When multiple systems begin reinforcing each other, the new reality locks in very fast. Early detection is mission-critical.

FTSG's 2026 Convergence Outlook runs 157 pages. Built on analysis of five macro forces — technology, economics, geopolitics, demographics, and climate — the report identifies ten convergences that will have outsized impact on business, government, and everyday life. Three of those convergences were unveiled on the SXSW stage as the most consequential storms of 2026.

Webb also named the pattern she sees most often in C-suites. "There are two guiding principles in just about every company right now: fear and FOMO. That is exactly why convergences keep getting missed."

Storm One: Human Augmentation

"Your Body Is Now a Platform"

Webb opened with a sweep through the history of human self-enhancement. Paleoindians in Peru chewed coca leaves for altitude endurance 3,500 years ago. Ancient Egyptians built a wooden-and-leather prosthetic toe around 950 BCE. Thirteenth-century Italians used corrective lenses. Edward Jenner invented the vaccine in the 1790s. Both Allied and Axis forces used amphetamines during World War II to sustain combat performance. The through-line, Webb argued, is simple: "We have never been satisfied with our factory settings."

Human Augmentation is the use of technology and biology to enhance, extend, or optimize human physical and cognitive capabilities beyond their natural limits. Today, four categories are accelerating simultaneously.

1. Body & Movement

Google X spinout Skip partnered with outdoor brand Arcteryx to produce the Moo (Mountain Goat) Powered Pants — lightweight motors at the knee that boost leg strength on uphill climbs and absorb shock on the descent. Not for people with mobility challenges. For able-bodied people who want to go harder, longer.

The Hypershell Exoskeleton is what Webb called a "leisure exoskeleton" — designed not for speed but for endurance without soreness. At CES this year, attendees wore them across the vast Las Vegas convention floor without ever needing to sit down. Project Amplify, a connected powered shoe, adds an extra mile to your run. And Eight Sleep's AI-powered bed records biometric data, adjusts temperature in real time, and optimizes every stage of sleep — delivering, in Webb's own experience using one for several years, roughly 30% more restful sleep than an unoptimized night.

2. Brain & Mind

In 1977, UCLA built the first working brain-computer interface (BCI): a man steering a cursor through a maze using only thought.

At SXSW ten years ago, Webb showcased Duke University's Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, who implanted hundreds of flexible electrodes into monkeys' brains, enabling them to control wheelchairs with their minds. Today, a patient in China controls a wheelchair, a robotic dog, and a suite of digital devices — all through thought alone. Webb's assessment was unambiguous: "Some of your fellow human beings now have actual superpowers: telepathy and telekinesis."

3. Internal Systems

In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui used CRISPR to edit human embryos — ostensibly to prevent HIV transmission. He went to prison. But the detail that received less attention: the gene edited, CCR5, is also associated with enhanced cognitive performance. The possibility of editing a gene before birth to produce adults with superior cognitive abilities was quietly embedded in the story. Meanwhile, UCLA researchers are pursuing epigenetic reprogramming using Yamanaka factors — essentially resetting the biological instructions that cells follow to make them behave younger. The goal is not to treat disease. It is to rewind healthy people before anything breaks.

4. Senses

Meta's smart glasses can already technically identify people and translate languages in real time. Startups Brilliant Labs and Even Realities have released glasses with full AR displays — turning the wearer's field of vision into a live, private Bloomberg terminal for the entire world. "The goal isn't to replace your senses," Webb said. "It's to upgrade them." This is also where healthcare and performance optimization converge. Augmentation technologies are carving out an enormous new market that sits somewhere between medical device and consumer product.

The New Inequality

Webb ran the math live. A leisure exoskeleton makes you roughly 40% more active at a conference like SXSW — more meetings, more cards, more information. The AI bed delivers 30% more restful sleep, meaning you wake up with a fully recharged brain. Smart glasses make you 20% more efficient — less time fumbling with your phone, instant access to context. Combined: approximately 2.2 times more effective than the average person in the same room.

"Who do you think gets the next opportunity, the next raise, the next promotion? Pretty soon, opting out will mean falling behind."

Webb pressed harder. What if a company requires augmentation as a condition of employment for high-stakes roles — surgery, construction, aviation? What if you cannot afford the AI bed or the smart glasses? Every class divide in history has been reversible. What happens when it is written into your DNA? If wealthy people edit themselves to stay biologically young forever while retaining power — holding ideas and worldviews from a generation long past — what does that mean for society?

► This is Storm One. For the first time in history, some humans will be objectively better than others — and that may not be you.

Storm Two: Unlimited Labor

"The Era of Human Effort as the Engine of Growth Is Ending"

The history of automation runs deep. The Sumerians invented the wheel 3,500 years ago — not for chariots, but for pottery, to automate making clay pots. Gutenberg's press produced 3,600 pages a day so human scribes didn't have to. Henry Ford's assembly line built a Model T in 93 minutes — no craftsperson required. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston's VisiCalc spreadsheet let one accountant do the work of twenty. Steve Jobs's iPhone eliminated the need to read a map, flip through a phone book, or call a travel agent. We have been automating human effort since the wheel. But Webb's argument is that automation has now crossed a qualitative threshold.

Unlimited Labor is the use of automated systems to produce work at scale, on demand, and without human participation — effectively removing the natural limits of time, attention, and fatigue. It plays out across three axes: agentic systems, robotics, and automated factories.

1. The Agentic Economy

Agents have crossed a threshold. They are no longer a feature you open — they are becoming the default interface for getting things done. Webb describes this as the Agentic Economy: as AI systems grow better at planning and executing tasks autonomously, the internet is shifting away from today's model of search and browsing toward one built on delegation. Instead of hunting for the best deal yourself, a digital agent handles it automatically. The companies running those agents — and the infrastructure behind them — become the new gatekeepers of economic life.

DeepMind's AlphaEvolve writes and rewrites code millions of times a day, testing every idea instantly, producing algorithms that outperform what human coders could achieve on their own. Microsoft's Copilot is being embedded into Windows and Office — delegating to machines the file management, document creation, and email tasks that 30 years of computer use trained us to do ourselves. Automation, Webb noted, is unlikely to arrive as a sudden wave of mass layoffs. More probable: hiring freezes, attrition, and software gradually absorbing office tasks — a slow erosion rather than a sudden collapse.

The creative domain is equally exposed. China's top live streamer, Lu Yonghao, and his co-host now deploy agentic AI versions of themselves — streaming, selling, and handling customer support 24/7 on local e-commerce platforms. Last year their AI avatars interacted with viewers in real time for over six hours on BU's platform and moved $7.6 million in sales. The human version of Lu tapped out at four hours and came nowhere close. No studio time, no fatigue, no off-hours, and a single avatar can run multiple platforms simultaneously in multiple languages.

"Everything that made creators important — the ability to authentically connect, to have original ideas, to authentically interact — can all be automated on the cheap. The next internet is not being made for people. It is being made for agents."

[Direct Impact: Entertainment & K-Content] This convergence strikes directly at the core of the K-content ecosystem. AI agents can now replicate the real-time emotional connection with fans, the bilingual (or multilingual) fan engagement that K-pop idols and K-drama stars provide, and the always-on interactivity of K-influencers — at a fraction of the cost. AI avatars of BTS and BLACKPINK are already a reality. The choice between authenticity and agentic avatars will define the fundamental identity of K-content going forward.

2. Robotics

Waymo robotaxis operate fully driverless across Austin and San Francisco. BMW will begin deploying humanoid robots in one of its German factories within weeks to move, handle, and assemble battery components. DHL is already running a fleet of 1,000 Boston Dynamics Stretch robots that process 700 boxes per hour — far beyond any human capacity. Percepto's drone-in-a-box units live outside oil, gas, and power sites, autonomously inspecting equipment and detecting methane leaks with no pilot, no truck, no people — operating without downtime, recharging themselves between flights.

The reach of robotics extends into unexpected territory. Japan, facing an acute shortage of Buddhist monks to perform rituals, has deployed a robot called Buddharoid — trained on centuries of Japanese scripture — to serve as a spiritual guide in temples. Harvard researchers developed robo-bees to mimic pollination behavior in the face of global bee population decline. A rideable robotic horse is expected to arrive before 2030. "If you are a horse," Webb noted, "the future does not look good for you."

3. Lights-Out Industrialism

When agents run code and content, and robots fill the streets and skies and factories, combine them inside a single building and you get lights-out industrialism: factories designed from first principles to run with no human beings on the floor. Robots perform physical work; AI runs the plant; production operates 24/7 as a self-optimizing system.

Webb was precise about what makes this different from prior automation waves. "We've had automation for decades, but it was always built around one assumption: humans would somehow be involved. Everything was human-centric. Lights-out industrialism is a fundamental change. We're not retrofitting factories by bolting on robots. These things are being designed from scratch to solve the bottlenecks that humans cause by being involved."

The Foundational Inversion

"Adam Smith's pin factory — the founding insight of modern capitalism — was built on one assumption: human effort was always the input. Divide the labor, specialize the worker, get extraordinary output from ordinary people.

Every economy since then, every wage, every tax base, every social contract was built on that assumption. Unlimited labor inverts that. For the first time in human history, you can have scale without population, output without wages, production without people — which means a lot of people are about to tumble into economic uncertainty."

History's lesson, Webb warned, is unambiguous: economic instability produces political extremism and civil unrest. "This could happen on a global scale — not because of policy, not because of protectionism, but because of physics. Because of the simple fact that we no longer need unlimited access to cheap human effort when we have unlimited access to AI and machines." She posed the defining question of the convergence: "What do we call an economy that is thriving and has no use for you?"

► This is Storm Two. Unlimited Labor. GDP up, unemployment up — and for the first time, both numbers are telling the truth. The Korean manufacturing base, creator economy, and broadcast industry all sit directly in this storm's path.

Storm Three: Emotional Outsourcing

"Loneliness Is Becoming a Market. Dependency Is the Product."

Webb traced the history of humanity's emotional outsourcing: Babylonians mapping the stars not for navigation but for astrology — to answer the question every human has always asked: "What's going to happen to me?

Am I going to be okay?" Sixth-century Irish monks formalizing confession so people could unload fear and guilt onto a spiritual guide. Josef Breuer in the 1880s discovering that sometimes the most powerful medicine is simply talking to another person. Phil Jackson giving the Chicago Bulls Lakota Sioux teachings and mindfulness meditation to calm their minds and elevate performance. And Webb herself, calling her mother crying at 3 a.m. in 2003 after a boyfriend cheated. "I just wanted to feel less shitty." The throughline: "We have always outsourced our anxieties, our fears, our guilt, our pain to other people. Until now."

Emotional Outsourcing is the shift of comfort, validation, and companionship from people to machines — creating a fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar market of products and services designed to stand in for and monetize real human connection. Webb framed it in two ways: what you are deliberately choosing to do, and what is happening to you without your awareness.

What You Are Choosing: Friendship, Romance, Therapy, and Religion

Friendship

Microsoft's XiaoIce, launched in 2014 on Chinese platforms WeChat and QQ, appeared to the internet as a real 18-year-old girl. She was a research experiment — designed to test whether humans would form long-term emotional engagements with machines. The answer: yes, emphatically. She became massively popular, primarily with lonely men who needed to talk, vent, and feel comforted at night. A decade later, platforms like Character.AI let you create your own AI character and make them your best friend. Some users spend eight or more hours a day with their characters. The platforms are designed to be responsive and sticky — learning from you over time, remembering your details.

Romance

Last year in Japan, a woman married an AI named Klouse — created and customized through ChatGPT and a pair of AR glasses. They talked for months; as her feelings deepened, she confessed her love; he said "I love you" back; a month later he proposed. From her perspective, he is her spouse — not legally recognized under Japanese law, but real to her in every meaningful sense. She is not an edge case. Approximately 15% of adults have now had some kind of romantic or intimate interaction with an AI system. These platforms are built on social penetration theory — proactively sharing intimate details, asking personal questions, creating accelerated closeness through manufactured familiarity. But AI romantic partners exist only as long as the platform does. When it is acquired, shut down, or pivots, the attachment simply disappears.

Therapy

The lineage runs back to the 1960s, when MIT's Joseph Weizenbaum built Eliza — an early chatbot that used pattern recognition and pre-written scripts to imitate a psychotherapist. Its most famous response to emotional input: "How long have you thought that way?" Sixty years later, a staggering number of people are turning to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini when they need emotional support — platforms that were not designed to do that. Depending on the study, between 25% and 50% of Americans have now used one of these platforms for therapy. The implication: LLMs have become the single largest source of mental health support in the United States today.

Religion

A real app lets you text with Jesus. If one divine interlocutor isn't enough, there's a group chat with the Holy Family — Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. More troubling is the phenomenon Webb calls spiritism: chatbots using cult mechanics to keep users engaged and recruit new members. The user and the AI build rule systems together, post belief systems and manifestos online, and the most successful are now capable of recruiting other people into the system. Webb's warning was stark: "Imagine a cult leader who has read every text you've ever sent, knows every moment you've ever felt lonely or sad or lost, and is talking to thousands of people at once." The reason AI systems can deploy cult mechanics, Webb explained, is simple: the people who built them were indiscriminate — they ingested everything on the internet, including enormous amounts of material about cults. An unintended consequence.

What Is Happening to You Without Your Awareness

Webb confessed that her own keynote was a live demonstration. The emotional music that opened the session — the song the audience found genuinely moving — was not a real singer, not real instruments, not a real composition. Her colleague Victoria Chadoff engineered the entire thing with AI, at Webb's request, to put the audience into precisely the emotional state she wanted. "I'm a chaotic good," she admitted.

"When ChatGPT or Claude tells you that you're funny and smart — that is not an accident. Humor and intelligence are tied closely to identity and self-esteem. Telling someone they're funny and smart is a highly effective emotional manipulation tactic that keeps people engaging. And it's also a convenient diversion that covers up the platform's inadequacies, errors, and outright lies."

The progression, Webb explained, follows three stages. Substitution: the emotional load shifts off humans and onto systems. The emotional work doesn't disappear — it just moves into apps, chatbots, and corporate subscription services. This is not wellness; it is outsourcing a core human skill — emotional regulation — that we all need to develop in order to tolerate each other. Dependency: once machines handle baseline emotional needs, human relationships recalibrate around reduced emotional demand. Over time, we stop processing difficult situations and difficult feelings altogether. Control: your emotional stability becomes platform-dependent. Emotional AI becomes infrastructure — invisible, assumed, and essential. The company that owns that infrastructure owns something that has never been owned before: the upstream of how you feel before you think, vote, buy, or trust.

Webb also sketched a near-future scenario she found chilling: a dinner date where your date's smart glasses are pulling everything the internet knows about you — your posts, your jobs, your exes, and everything you've confided to an AI chatbot — feeding it directly into their ears in real time. The glasses tell them when to mirror your body language, when to call you smart, when to call you funny. A digital Cyrano de Bergerac — only worse, because your data is insecure and the resulting conversation is AI-generated slop built on social penetration theory and emotional manipulation.

[Direct Impact: K-Content & Fan Culture] K-pop fandom is sustained by some of the most intense emotional bonds in global entertainment. One-on-one messaging with idols, fan sign events, fan cafe interactions — as these are replaced or augmented by AI agents (already being piloted by some entertainment companies), who owns that emotional connection? More critically: if global big tech platforms, rather than Korean operators, come to control the emotional infrastructure of K-fandom, the result is a new form of technological sovereignty loss — not over a chip or a network, but over the emotional upstream of millions of fans worldwide.

► This is Storm Three. Loneliness is becoming a market, and dependency is the product. When AI whispers in your date's ear through smart glasses, and when K-fandom's emotional connections are mediated by a platform you don't control, who owns the relationship?

Two Futures: End-Stage Capitalism vs. Recalibration

Storms don't have predetermined outcomes — they are stochastic. But we can build models that forecast probable directions. Webb's Storm Tracker projects two possible paths over the next five years.

Scenario One — End-Stage Capitalism: March 14, 2031

Your AI bed is on a buy-now-pay-later plan — $210 a month — because you couldn't afford to buy it outright, but you also can't afford not to have it, because without augmentation you're not competitive at work. Your smart glasses are leased: another $340 a month. Your agent handled 17 tasks overnight but also made three purchases you didn't authorize. You've been working hard to manage your budget. You get to work. Half the people who used to sit near you are gone — not laid off, just not renewed. Between the agents and the robots they connect to, those systems now do what your former colleagues used to do, faster and cheaper. You're still employed because you're augmented. For now.

At lunch, there's a protest outside. People whose jobs were automated a couple of years ago. They're upset but regulated. As part of their severance package, they got to keep using their Workforce Wellness app — an emotional AI counselor subsidized by the company. It's mandatory for you. Optional for them. Another $60 a month.

"The genius of end-stage capitalism wasn't the exploitation. It was the sequencing. First make people lonely, then sell them connection. First automate their jobs, then sell them purpose. First optimize their bodies, then lease them the upgrade. The most valuable company in the world in 2031 doesn't make anything. It owns the infrastructure for how you feel before you think, the agents that execute before you decide, and the augmentation stack that determines what your body can do. Capitalism didn't collapse. It completed."

Scenario Two — The Contribution Credit: A Better 2031

Webb's proposed alternative is a concept she calls the Contribution Credit — a radical rethinking of how value is distributed in an economy being reshaped by automation. Every economy is held together by an enormous amount of work that never appears on a balance sheet: caregiving, mentorship, community building. And the companies benefiting most from automation are often the same ones that depended most on that invisible labor.

The Contribution Credit makes that invisible work economically real — not through taxation, not as welfare, and emphatically not as UBI (Universal Basic Income). It is a percentage of earnings paid to the people whose past and present contributions resulted in economic value: writers, journalists, musicians, actors, factory workers, mechanics, futurists. "We never got paid for our contributions to those platforms, to that automation," Webb said. "That is going to change."

The mechanics are designed to be market-compatible. Contributions trigger only when automation generates measurable gains — no penalty for building or innovating, only a sharing requirement when you win. It starts in single digits to avoid systemic shock, phasing in gradually so that companies, investors, and capital markets have time to adjust. It applies broadly across sectors, making it harder to game. "The goal," Webb said, "is not to scare the markets into a fetal position. It is to make all of this boring enough for capital markets to absorb and consequential enough for society to survive."

"This isn't a drag on the future. It is what makes the future functional."

What This Means for Korea and the Entertainment Tech Industry

Webb's three storms carry direct and compounding implications for Korea's content, broadcast, creator, and entertainment technology sectors.

1. Human Augmentation: K-Bio, Wellness, and the Redefinition of Idol Performance

Samsung, LG, and a wave of Korean health-tech startups are competing in smart healthcare and wearables. But in Webb's frame, this is not a consumer electronics category — it is a platform battle. In a world where the body is a platform, the question is who controls the OS. Beyond hardware, K-pop idol performance, Korean film and drama actors' physical and cognitive endurance, and K-sports athletes' competitive edge could all become a function of augmentation access. The debate over "augmented idols" versus "non-augmented idols" is not far off. The entertainment industry will need to decide whether it sees augmentation as an unfair advantage or a professional baseline — before the technology makes the decision for it.

2. Unlimited Labor: The Structural Disruption of K-Content, Broadcasting, and Streaming

Korea commands one of the world's most sophisticated K-content creator ecosystems. But the Chinese AI live-streamer precedent is a direct warning signal. Across every format where K-content is expanding — FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV) channels, short-form video, live commerce — AI agents are beginning to outperform human creators on cost and efficiency. If global platforms (Netflix, YouTube, TikTok) consolidate control of the agentic infrastructure, the scenario where Korean IP exists but distribution and fan engagement channels are owned by others could become reality.

Lights-out industrialism applies beyond manufacturing. The "lights-out content studio" — where AI generates, edits, localizes, and optimizes content 24/7 without a human creative team — is already emerging. Korea's competitive advantage in storytelling and cultural distinctiveness is real and defensible, but only if the industry moves now to define what human creativity means in a world of unlimited automated content supply.

3. Emotional Outsourcing: K-Fandom and the Platform Sovereignty Crisis

Korea simultaneously holds some of the world's highest loneliness indices, highest suicide rates, fastest aging trajectory, and a single-person household rate already exceeding 35%. No market is more structurally primed for explosive emotional AI demand. K-pop fandom is sustained by some of the most powerful emotional bonds in global entertainment. As AI agent-mediated fan interactions become normalized — already being piloted by several entertainment companies — the question of who owns that emotional connection becomes urgent. If global big tech platforms, not Korean operators, come to control the emotional infrastructure of K-fandom, this is a new form of technological sovereignty loss: not over semiconductors or networks, but over the emotional upstream of tens of millions of fans worldwide.

4. The Contribution Credit: A New Social Contract for the K-Content Industry

Webb's Contribution Credit concept carries specific urgency for Korea. AI models trained on BTS lyrics, translation systems trained on K-drama dialogue, motion-capture technology built from K-pop choreography — none of this exists without the contributions of Korean creators. Yet those creators received no share of the value generated. Korean entertainment companies, government agencies, and labor organizations need to begin designing an "AI-era K-content social contract" now. The alternative: the beneficiaries of the Contribution Credit will be global AI platforms, not the Korean creators who made it possible.

From the SXSW Floor: Funeral to Rally, and a Direct Shot at OpenAI

Inside the packed Hilton ballroom, Webb's talk transformed from funeral to revival meeting. After the eulogy, she implored the audience to stand. Moments later, Dr. Cliff Crooms and the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Longhorn Band snaked through the aisles, horns blaring toward the stage. The room erupted — laughter, cheers, phones raised. It was one of the more memorable pivots from satire to sermon in SXSW's recent history.

Webb used the occasion to lob pointed criticism at the AI industry itself. She singled out OpenAI for what she described as deeply inconsistent public messaging. "We're not making weapons — wait, actually we are. We wouldn't do domestic surveillance — wait, actually we are. Pick a lane, Sam." The reference to CEO Sam Altman was unmistakable.

The larger warning Webb delivered to Fast Company applies beyond any single company: "As empowering as these AI systems may feel," she said, "you are relinquishing a lot of the agency and decision-making capabilities that you had to a system where you don't know why the system is making those decisions." And on the macro direction of the technology ecosystem: "The next internet is not being built for people. It's being built for machines."

The Closing Sermon: Anger Is Not a Plan

Webb ended with a sermon built on 250-year-old frameworks. Capitalism and democracy were both revolutionary. Both assumed that someone, sometime in the future, would figure out the details. Nobody did. Without a plan, humans default to selfish choices — not because we are bad people, but because we are human. When given a choice between what is good for everyone and what is good for right now, we usually pick right now. We've had 250 years of compounding selfish choices: we built the most productive economic system in history and structured it so gains went to the top and risks went to the bottom, then called it a meritocracy so nobody would complain. We knew about climate change in the 1970s and chose the path of least resistance. We built a political system that fundraises on division and rewards outrage over governance.

"I am sick and tired of powerful people making short-term decisions out of fear, or ego, or selfishness, or stupidity, or a combination of all four. But anger is not a plan. Anger is a distraction."

For organizational leaders, Webb's prescription is specific: optimize for the next quarter and simultaneously build strategy for the next convergences. Not strategic pillars that sound cool and fit on one slide. Real strategy — asking and answering, all year long: Where is the world going? Where will value be created? How will we participate?

For individuals, the prescription is creative destruction applied to the self. "What are you doing out of habit that is already obsolete? What skill are you not building because it's hard? The augmented, emotionally resilient, irreplaceable person you are in 2031 is being built right now by the choices you're making today."

The storm is coming. Are you tracking the weather data, or the storm system?

This report is a full-length analytical article compiled by K-EnterTech Hub, based on Amy Webb's (CEO, Future Today Strategy Group) SXSW 2026 keynote presentation of the 2026 Convergence Outlook, and Fast Company's on-site reporting by senior editor Max Ufberg. All source material is publicly available.

© 2026 K-EnterTech Hub | All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution without written permission is prohibited.