2025: Are you able to turn navigating uncertainty into an asset?

The coming year promises to be one in which long-held assumptions about how business works are going to be thoroughly upended. While this might seem threatening, historically, periods of uncertainty create unprecedented opportunities for those willing to embrace new realities.

While there are any number of trends that we could be watching, there are five non-obvious ones that I think will make their way into people’s day-to-day consciousness in this coming year.

De-materialization

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” A lot of our new technologies are magical indeed – consider the modern smartphone that made flashlights, recording devices, cameras, health monitors, paper maps, calendars and … oh yes, communication devices obsolete by including all those things in one tiny little package. Or services such as Spotify that allow you to access vast treasure troves of content with little more trouble than spelling out (or even speaking) what you’re looking for. You can think of these trends as “de-materialization,” in which outcomes that used to require a physical device of some kind can now be achieved through some other mechanism.

Back in the day (I mean, way back in the day), there was no such thing as recorded music available to the general public. Thousands of years ago, records of how to play music were recorded on clay tablets. In 1457, the advent of the printing press made it possible to reproduce sheet music. As pianos and other musical instruments became fixtures in middle-class homes in the 1800’s, sheet music boomed in popularity as parlor music became the means of entertainment and even amateurs could play. That drove prices down – with Woolworth’s reportedly selling sheet music for ten cents a copy. The recorded music business, meanwhile, was going through its own technological hurdles, finally breaking through to what can be thought of as modest commercial success when stars such as opera singer Enrico Caruso made recordings that were popularly brought into front parlors everywhere.

Recorded media became widespread and radio took off after World War 1 as another way of distributing music. Of course, eventually we had cassette tapes, long-playing vinyl records and – once music could be digitized – CD’s. The CD business model, from the perspective of the music business, was awesome – customers had no choice but to buy 18 whole songs to get perhaps the one that they wanted.

And now, of course, we buy (actually, we rent) individual songs. While it’s a lot more convenient for consumers, one of the unintended consequences of this great dematerialization has been to squeeze most of the profits out of the music business, with rich rewards for a few big names and scraps for just about everybody else. This even as private equity cashes in by re-treading old music and circulating it around the ecosystem. Today, streaming makes up 84% of the industry’s total revenue.

As with music, de-materialization can completely upend the assumptions that a whole value chain is based on. Consider the health tech company Binah.ai. Their app transforms your smartphone into a medical diagnostic device, completely bypassing traditional medical testing infrastructure. Entire industries can vanish not because of direct competitors, but because the underlying need they serve gets met in a completely different way.

Here’s another example – patients on GLP-1 inhibitors (brands such as Wegovy and Ozympic) are dropping other medications. As an article reports, “I’m on Wegovy for the rest of my life, but I can show you an entire medicine cabinet full of medications that I no longer have to take,” said Taryn Mitchell, 53, a GLP-1 patient in Greensboro, North Carolina.”

De-globalization and stickier trade all around

This de-materialization trend intersects fascinatingly with the ongoing de-globalization movement. We're seeing a profound shift from the "world is flat" assumption that dominated strategic thinking for decades. As Ram Charan and I have written about, global trade is being reshaped from the assumption of safe, optimized supply chains that stretched across the world to localization, “friendshoring” and far more close-in trading.

Global conflicts sure don’t help. With the Suez Canal crisis forcing ships to circumnavigate Africa (adding 10 days to shipping times), companies are being forced to return to considerations nobody had to even think about before 1869! But here's the counterintuitive opportunity: as physical goods become less relevant due to de-materialization, some companies might find themselves accidentally well-positioned in a de-globalized world.

Elimination of ‘interface friction’ in software

If Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, is to be believed, the advent of agentic AI spells the beginning of the end for how we interact with software. In a recent podcast, he suggests that the future will be a concatenation of databases, with the basic functions of CRUD (create, read, update, delete) and that properly trained agents will interact directly with the data in those databases, rather than going through some kind of software with a programmed business logic in the middle. As he said, “I think the notion that business applications exist, that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right in the agent era.” In other words, we’re going to be changing how we relate to technology entirely.

Intelligent agents are thus poised to eliminate what I call "interface friction." Think about how many software applications exist simply as intermediaries between humans and the outcomes they want. As agentic AI matures, we're moving toward a "Star Trek future" where we simply request what we need, and intelligent systems handle the rest. I mean, you didn’t see Captain Kirk pulling out his laptop and executing a macro to get what he wanted from the computer – he just told it what he wanted to know and it did the rest.

This has profound implications for software business models – particularly the per-seat pricing that has dominated SaaS. When your primary user is an AI agent rather than a human, how do you price that seat?

Devolving and Permissionless organizational structures

This technological evolution is also forcing a rethinking of organizational structures. As I’ve written about before, another consequence of technology evolving is that many of the tasks performed by traditional bureaucratic structures aren’t going to be necessary. As Bill Anderson, the CEO of Bayer puts it, “There was a time for hierarchical, command-and-control organizations–the 19th century, to be exact, when many workers were illiterate, information traveled at a snail’s pace, and strict adherence to rules offered the competitive advantage of reliability.” With today’s highly educated workforce and information that travels at the speed of light, bureaucracy is a tax that slows companies down. We’re already seeing alternatives pop up at scale.

We’re also seeing (partly as a consequence of the earlier trends) that things that used to have to be centralized can become decentralized. Consider something simple, like going to a doctor’s office. It used to be that the office was the only place where expensive skills and equipment were located, and the cost of that needed to be amortized across many patients. Today, many procedures that used to have to be done there can be done at home or in distributed settings. You can do your own EKG, take your own blood pressure and pulse, give yourself injections that used to have to be infused….you get the idea. This is going to introduce unprecedented shifts in assumptions about where matters such as care are delivered.

Demographics are destiny

While technologies and their evolution are unpredictable, demographics are not. Among the things which are utterly predictable are some key demographic shifts that will shape our landscape beginning this year. One is an unprecedented wealth transfer to women among the Baby Boomer generation. This isn't just about changing investment patterns – though the preference for community and family-oriented investments over pure index-beating strategies is significant. It represents a fundamental shift in economic power that could reshape corporate priorities and stakeholder capitalism in ways we're only beginning to understand.

We are also confronting the issue that, as Avivah Wittenberg-Cox says, women are not having babies. They’re “voting with their wombs” with the results that many countries are facing a ticking demographic time bomb. Despite frantic efforts by governments and policies alike, few countries are seeing a reversal of this trend. As a recent observer noted, “What we do know is that, almost without exception, when women live in places that allow them access to birth control, access to education and access to jobs, they overwhelmingly have fewer children.”

I would argue that this is a classic tragedy of the commons type of problem – while more babies are great at a societal level, the costs are still borne by individual women and families. In making a rational calculation about what is best for their lives, many are concluding that having children, or having many children, makes no objective sense.

The Strategic Imperative

The key to thriving in 2025 won't be about picking the right trends or making accurate predictions. It will be about developing uncertainty capabilities. This means:

1. Building organizations that can rapidly reconfigure themselves as assumptions change.

2. Developing early warning systems for non-obvious threats and opportunities.

3. Creating portfolios of strategic options rather than rigid plans.

4. Fostering cultures that see uncertainty as a source of opportunity rather than threat by adopting an entrepreneurial mindset.

The companies that will win in this environment won't be those that correctly predict the future – they'll be those that build the capability to adapt to whatever future emerges.

Your Next Steps

Start by identifying your organization's core assumptions. What do you take for granted about your business model, your customers, your industry structure? Then ask: What if those assumptions weren't true anymore? The answers might be uncomfortable, but they'll also point the way toward your next strategic moves.

Remember: In times of massive uncertainty, the worst strategy is to wait for clarity. By the time the path forward becomes obvious, the biggest opportunities will already be gone.