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.
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Construction, engineering and building products
Create stronger project and portfolio economics as infrastructure demand, capacity constraints and delivery risk reshape construction markets.
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Resilience beyond business continuity
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Retail is entering the age of value-seeking consumers and AI-mediated shopping
Price sensitivity remains structural while AI agents begin to influence product discovery, comparison and digital purchasing behavior.
Travel demand is normalizing as financial caution reaches higher-spending customers
The post-pandemic surge is giving way to more selective spending, increasing pressure on hospitality and travel operators to prove value.
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.
Where should chipmakers invest when markets and governments want different things?
The challenge is balancing commercial demand, sovereign incentives and export restrictions across extremely capital-intensive technology cycles.
POV
The billable hour is becoming harder to defend when the hour disappears
Professional services will need to price judgment and outcomes rather than preserve economics built around human effort that AI removes.
The telco-to-techco story still needs to prove its economics
Connectivity may look strategically unexciting, but moving into lower-margin technology services is not automatically a better business.
Strategic impact
Agentic AI is shifting software value from interfaces toward completed work
Products may increasingly compete on outcomes and orchestration rather than the number of seats, screens or workflow steps they support.
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.
What we observe
Food companies often manage commodity risk one input at a time
Weather, fertilizer, energy and logistics shocks can interact across categories, creating exposure that individual procurement models miss.
Mobility strategies often celebrate autonomous miles before proving unit economics
Technical deployment does not guarantee attractive economics when fleet capital, remote support and low-density demand remain expensive.