What’s next, and what are the implications that matter? This is a question I ask myself throughout the year. Here’s a collection of forecasts for the near future, and some early thoughts on their implications.

What is this!? Quick housekeeping, in case you’re new:

• This is the first of a new monthly newsletter analysis, called “Implications,” exclusively focused on the implications of recent advances in tech, shifts in culture, and evolution in the art and science of product design and building teams.

• Migrated? If you were a subscriber to the previous version of this newsletter on Revue, welcome! This is a public version of “Implications,” now powered by Substack (and you’re welcome to learn more / sign up for the monthly here).

• Note: I include products I work with in these forecasts as examples, and actively try to invest (and build) based on these views. I strive for all dots to connect.

The 9 forecasts that made the cut:

1. Internet browsers will shift from generalized to specialized, as use of web apps, communal browsing, and decentralized technology continue to grow.

2. Generative AI will have unexpected implications for content marketing, education, and MOST IMPORTANTLY the war to control the interface.

3. A highly personalized, AI-powered medical assistant will complement (and eventually replace) our General Practitioner.

4. Social media will evolve to become AI-curated-and-cut episodes of our lives.

5. The era of creative confidence, enabled by new template-based tools and AI capabilities, will elevate the human story and process as the differentiator.

6. Subscriptions to knowledge communities are the new books, as integrated tools emerge for “the platform-less creator” that allow content creators to own their audience.

7. The era in which we can no longer believe our eyes ushers in “The Age of Attribution” and a default distrust of our human senses.

8. Hyper-personalized experiences disrupt traditional e-commerce and hospitality brands – and enable an immersive era that is tailored to you.

9. Companies will perform rapid resets to eliminate organizational debt and compete with startups.

Let’s jump into each forecast, and a few implications for each…

#1: Internet browsers will shift from generalized to specialized, as use of web apps, communal browsing, and decentralized technology continue to grow.

Browsers are too generalized and antiquated for the future of web apps. The age of web apps is a godsend for collaboration, more productive workflows, tapping the power of the cloud for heavy computation and AI features, and enabling multi-surface experiences. Even some of the most sophisticated desktop applications like Photoshop are now available on the web. For the companies behind these apps, the web offers virality and infinite possibilities for product-led growth. But the full potential of these apps is constrained by the browser, a general purpose and increasingly antiquated piece of software.

A new generation of specialized browsers will emerge. Browsers reimagined for collaboration and higher performance web apps, like Arc from The Browser Company, will help teams work together and have more effective workflows across different web apps. Some browsers, like one being developed by Triangle Labs, will specialize in decentralized applications with less friction and far more security and confidence. As the ultimate interface on top of the web, browsers will begin to compete with the apps. If you subscribe to my “interface layer” theory of design disrupting technology, it is easy to see why browsers will increasingly be the host of our wallets, source of truth for client-side preferences and personalization, and host of the graph for who we collaborate with. The growing ecosystem of third-party plug-ins will compete directly with the next generation of these purpose-built browsers.

#2: Generative AI will have unexpected implications for content marketing, education, and MOST IMPORTANTLY the war to control the interface.

(Side note: Pretty wild and disconcerting if you think about it… Over the last few decades, humanity put its greatest ideas and creations online in pursuit of opportunity and accolades. From blogging and user-generated-content on social media and content marketing from every business to healthcare studies, family photos, and ultimately the rise of influencers and the creator economy, we shared loud and proud. In 2022, it became abundantly clear that we shared and shared only to, unbeknownst to us, train artificial intelligence to leverage all of our collective genius and develop mega ML models that pose a viable alternative to…everything humans have traditionally done. Now what?)

AI will commoditize decades of content marketing and SEO tactics, and usher in a new era of brand and influencer marketing. With models like ChatGPT driving the cost and time required to write effective SEO content down to zero, every brand will “flood the zone” of search engines, completely commoditizing content marketing. Perhaps this will make brand and influencer marketing even more important? Perhaps more brands will launch communities for their customers using platforms like Circle to leverage network effects?

Oral arguments and creative presentations are the new school essay (at the least, writing will now be supervised in class!). ChatGPT has done to writing what the calculator did to arithmetic. You can now ask AI to write an essay on dinosaurs in the style of a 6th grader…or a 9th grader – alongside any other creative prompt. After a few seconds, you’ll get an entirely original output every time. Sure, there may be watermarking techniques but there will also be workarounds. Education curriculums should focus on things humans must do as opposed to things computers can now do for us. While most writing – from content marketing to product specs – will be assisted by AI going forward, crafting presentations and oral rhetoric using counterintuitive arguments and creativity will be skills that bring a premium. Education curriculums must adjust accordingly. Math should be taught in Excel or Airtable, and writing should be taught alongside the art of prompt engineering.

“Clippy” is back! Leading knowledge and workflow management products will pivot to launch their own interface for queries. In just the last few months, some of the internet’s greatest repositories of content like Quora, Notion, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and other legendary sources of user-generated content have announced their own AI-powered chat experiences. This all leads to the uncomfortable realization that, in the age of AI, if you don’t own the query interface, you’re just assembling training data for those who do. We know “interface layers” commoditize the technology underneath, but I didn’t realize interface layers would also commoditize content. Today, AI is the ultimate interface layer, as it not only disrupts underlying services, data, and content, but also synthesizes and presents it all in transformative ways. AI-powered, in-product assistants will make a major comeback (Microsoft’s infamous “Clippy” was just ahead of its time!). Q&A interfaces on top of AI are the biggest threat to Google and other information sources that monetize via traffic.

#3: A highly personalized AI-powered medical assistant will complement (and eventually replace) our General Practitioner.

If you ask ChatGPT about a medical condition, you get a comprehensive, often bullet-pointed answer that rivals anything you could construct from dozens of Google searches. Now, imagine if a more health-specific AI model were personalized for you, with a private database of every health result, every trend from your Whoop band or Apple Watch, your family health history, and every ailment you’ve ever had. Conversing with such a deeply informed resource would be 10x better than our first line of defense today (Google) and could connect dots far better than we do on our own. I anticipate that the first line of healthcare will increasingly be AI-based, and we’ll start seeing this in the next 24 months. (Side note: the ability to source and manage private data with this mega models is a fascinating opportunity)

#4: Social media will evolve to become AI-curated-and-cut episodes of our lives.

Much like Netflix, we’ll tune in to see the supercut of our lives presented as short and highly engaging AI-edited daily or weekly episodes. The vanity metric and competitive component of this new era of social apps will simply be your contributions “making the cut” among all of the stuff you and your friends record throughout the day. The AI editor/curator will decide what everyone in your group will find interesting (measured by previous allocations of attention) to determine what content makes the final cut. One team exploring this space is Studio, a “group camcorder” taking off amongst teenagers. More generally across the next generation of social apps, the traditional social graph will continue to become less relevant as TikTok-like AI-powered algorithmic feeds determine what we see based on what we like. However, I am on the lookout for hybrid solutions that leverage both social graphs alongside AI-powered editing and curation.

#5: The era of creative confidence, enabled by new template-based tools and AI capabilities, will elevate the human story and process as the differentiator.

Everyone will become more creatively confident. We are more creatively confident in kindergarten than we are as adults. Our confidence deteriorates as we become discouraged by the learning curve of creative tools and by our tendency to compare ourselves to others. Now free web-based tools with templates that help conquer the fear of the blank screen and powerful generative artificial intelligence that conjures up anything from a text prompt enables anyone to express themselves creatively without a notoriously steep learning curve.

The “story” behind the work becomes more important and front and center. With the death of creativity’s learning curve, several implications emerge for both creative professionals and the rest of us (and I wrote a full article on this here). For starters, the value of creative work will shift from outcomes to process and ingenuity. The original idea, the judgment, the innovations in process, and the story become more important than ever. As any art collector knows, in a fine art gallery, a piece is valued based on its lineage, its originality, and the trials and tribulations of the artist. So, if the story defines the value and respect for a work of fine art, why wouldn’t the premium of story carry over to other creative genres, especially in a world where anyone can generate anything with a text prompt (or print a replica with a printer)?

Compensation models shift from time-based to value-based. Do creative people get paid for their judgment and ideas, or their time? Historically, time has been the easiest measure of work and the most popular factor for charging for work completed. But, in an era in which much of our mundane and repetitive work is accomplished by AI-powered assistants, the time required for creative work has materially reduced. So, how do creators — and other disciplines where judgment and taste are the result of a lifetime’s work — start charging for value added, as opposed to time spent? Perhaps there is, someday, some mutually agreed upon pricing model that takes experience into account? Perhaps more creative teams will get compensated based on the performance of their work? One of the most exciting and under-discussed opportunities is new compensation models for creators to monetize the use of their style or likeness to generate original art or music. Compensation is ripe for re-imagination in the era of AI.

Most start-ups in the space are building features, not products. The widening availability and decreasing costs of the AI mega models will give rise to AI-powered features in every product, so I’d argue having a go-to-market advantage may be 80% of winning formula. Only entirely new object models or network effects will be effective moats.

#6: Subscriptions to knowledge communities are the new books, as integrated tools emerge for “the platform-less creator” that allow content creators to own their audience.

Why did I spend time over holiday break figuring out Substack? I believe we’re at a turning point where content creators are seeking novel ways to own the relationship with their audience. Remarkable minds like Sahil Bloom, who shares curiosity and lessons learned in viral social threads, or Becky Kennedy, who (alongside my wife Erica) created Good Inside as an indispensable resource for parenting with over 1.6M followers on Instagram, are increasingly unwilling to rely on a single platform. I have watched Sahil build a fast-growing Substack that has become a business in itself. And the Good Inside founders have launched a subscription-based community that is off to a wildly successful start. In both cases, these subscriptions go way beyond lead generation; they are alternatives (or complements) to books and social profiles.

As social platforms get insecure about losing their creator’s content, they will respond in ways that spawn the era of “platform-less creators.” We’ve seen Twitter’s short-lived policy outlawing links to competing platforms, but they will surely continue to downrank tweets with outbound links. These behaviors to keep people onsite are anti-Creator. My friend Li Jin wrote a great playbook for this new world in which creators can leverage new tech to own their audiences. Ultimately, I believe all creators-turned-businesses will own their audiences through newsletters and personalized, subscription-based communities.

Flawed censorship and moderation policies will cause operators of social platforms to act more as stewards than owners. Social platforms have been struggling more and more lately with the lines of censorship, policy, and active policing of content. The problem here is that the management teams of these social platforms are acting as owners (we will decide right and wrong) vs. stewards (we are here to serve the community, we will engage you in decisions, seek not to pass judgment, and strive for transparency whenever possible). One lesson learned building Behance to a community of 35M+ highly opinionated creative people: you don’t own a network, you are the steward of a network.

#7: The era in which we can no longer believe our eyes ushers in a new age of attribution and a default distrust of our human senses.

Some of you may have seen this uncanny deep fake of Morgan Freeman circling the internet. Clearly, we can no longer rely on our senses to determine truth. If you've been playing with any of the latest AI-powered video and editing features, you've likely realized: we’re entering an age where we can no longer believe our eyes. The same tools that speed up workflows and empower creative professionals to create wondrous media are becoming easier to use and more powerful. We’re just years away from anyone being able to render a conversation with the unmistakable voice and likeness of somebody else without their permission. Our human senses and judgment will be hackable by anyone.

"Verify, then trust" is the new "trust, but verify." It’s an era of both wondrous creativity and new genres of risk. We must be imaginative not just about what can go right, but also about what can go wrong. Humans must develop new instincts to verify before we trust and become less prone to manipulation. We must usher in an era of attribution, where content shows WHO made it and HOW it was made (and unsigned content is assumed to be fake or AI-made). When humans see anonymous content without any verifiable "content credentials" about its origins (from open source efforts like the Content Authenticity Initiative), we must stop believing it by default. At Adobe, we are full steam ahead embracing this open source solution to enable creators to add content credentials from within our tools, but we need more attention from both the content creation and dissemination tools (social platforms) of the world.

#8: Hyper-personalized experiences disrupt traditional e-commerce and hospitality brands – and enable an immersive era that is tailored to you.

As people gain creative confidence (see Forecast #4), culture will change as fashion and life design (your furniture, wallpaper, etc.) becomes hyper-personalized. Today, the designs in your life are created by small teams and generalized for the masses. The clothes you wear, the media you consume, the digital dashboard in your car, the items in your home — they are all made by a few and generalized for as many as possible. But with widespread creative confidence will come a desire to culturally flex yourself through personalization. I anticipate a world in which you customize your shoes or clothing before checking out (or select an artist to do it and ship your purchase to them first!). I anticipate that our experiences in cars will be personalized by us using templates for the dashboard design and customization kits for interiors. And when we start wearing AR glasses around, every person’s world will look remarkably different, by design, just because we can!

A new technology will emerge that enables user personalization without compromising user privacy. Yes, sounds like a total contradiction, but I am aware of one early-stage team assembling around this opportunity (contact me if you’re passionate about this space). Without creative solutions, the great “opt out” of data sharing led by Apple, and a growing desire for consumer privacy and regulatory control over the use of personal data, will increasingly compromise the quality of personalization. Ultimately, this goes against every human’s innate desire for personalized experiences.

#9: Companies will perform rapid resets to eliminate organizational debt and compete with startups.

Current market conditions shift companies from the “carbs era” to the “muscle era” of building great organizations. Coming off a decade of excess, in which the easiest way to acquire customers and scale organizations was to throw more money and people at the problem (carbs), the world is left with countless bloated organizations, redundant teams, and extraneous processes. But today's economic woes are a much-needed forcing function. We're entering the "muscle era," where we must solve problems by refactoring how we work and building a more resilient and capable team. Resourcefulness outperforms resources, especially when resourcefulness is your only option.

Twitter will serve as a case-study for to do’s and don’ts of rapid resets and collapsing hierarchy in an organization. While I have a lot of empathy for those afflicted and don't identify with the process, I am fascinated by the impact of collapsing the stack of an organization. What happens when you remove multiple levels of managers and bring everyone doing the work closer together? Do you regain the agility of startups? Do you instantly shed years of "organizational debt" that restrains a product's potential? Organizational debt is the accumulation of decisions that should have been made, but weren’t, and the people and processes that have become outdated or redundant, yet remain. I suspect we'll see more bold resets of companies around the world, reimagined for a world in which most functions can be automated and process management is better accomplished with a stack of SaaS products than legions of people.

Want forecasts and implications on a monthly basis? You’re welcome to subscribe and hold me accountable. Thank you to Oscar Orozco for the graphics, and Andrea Manzati for the graphic in forecast #6. You can blame me for the Golden Goose photo and the drawings. Hope you have a safe and happy new year, and thanks for following along. -scott