Demand is fragmenting faster than most growth models
How companies can identify emerging demand pools, changing customer economics and new sources of willingness to pay.
Read articleRelated macro
Agribusiness and agricultural technology
Build productivity, resilience and growth as agricultural economics respond to climate pressure, resource constraints and technological change.
Discover the macroEditorial overview
Articles
The AI workforce is an operating-model question
How companies can redesign roles, skills and capacity around the work that AI should automate, augment or leave to people.
Read articleFocus
Critical minerals are becoming an industrial-policy problem as much as a mining one
Copper constraints, concentrated refining and export controls are pushing resource security into national and corporate strategy.
Telecom operators still face the problem of turning network investment into growth
AI, network APIs and sovereign digital infrastructure create new opportunities, but connectivity economics remain difficult to escape.
Strategic challenges
Can autonomous operations scale beyond isolated high-performing plants?
The challenge is integrating intelligent systems across ageing assets, fragmented data and manufacturing networks with uneven maturity.
When does autonomous mobility become cheaper than human-operated transport?
The challenge is moving from technical capability to fleet economics that remain viable after vehicles, supervision, maintenance and infrastructure are counted.
POV
Retail may soon compete for machine preference as well as human preference
If agents increasingly shortlist products, retailers will need to be legible and compelling to algorithms before the shopper ever arrives.
A distributor that only moves boxes is increasingly easy to bypass
The durable role sits in solving availability, complexity and service problems that manufacturers and digital channels handle poorly.
Strategic impact
Software-defined vehicles are changing where automotive value is created
Centralized architectures and remote updates move differentiation from mechanical features toward software, data and digital services.
AI-mediated commerce could change how retailers compete for consideration
Machine-readable product data, value clarity and fulfillment performance may matter more as digital agents influence purchase decisions.
What we observe
Fintech firms often treat regulatory divergence as a temporary inconvenience
Different stablecoin and digital-finance regimes are becoming structural design constraints across products, jurisdictions and business models.
Manufacturers often automate equipment before redesigning the production system
Advanced technology adds limited leverage when bottlenecks, legacy workflows and disconnected plant architectures remain untouched.