Oliver Wyman Partner Kelly Zheng sits down with entrepreneur, financial investor, and author Lars Tvede to discuss the four main trends of the future: artificial intelligence (AI), robots, new healthcare, and nuclear energy. These trends are highlighted in Tvede’s book Supertrends, which was recently awarded one of the FTChinese-Oliver Wyman Business Books of the Year 2024. 

Kelly Zheng

Hello, everyone. I'm Kelly Zheng, a partner at Oliver Wyman. Today I would like to invite the very famous, insightful author, Mr. Lars Tvede.

This Supertrends [book] has been selected as one of the FTChinese-Oliver Wyman Business Books of the Year this year. We invite Mr. Lars to introduce yourself a bit.

Lars Tvede

Hi, China. I have written seventeen books; I think nine have been published in China so far. I also started thirteen companies, and one of my latest companies is called Supertrends that was inspired by this book. Supertrends uses AI to scan the world of innovation all the time, and then it creates a map of all the innovations that exist and are coming.

Kelly

First of all, among all these Supertrends, Lars, would you help us to share which would be the most significant one you think that would impact our society in the coming years?

Lars

Of all the things we are looking at in Supertrends, I think there are a few that really stand out, the number one is AI, you know, I don't need to say that. We will get through the next five years with wave after wave after wave of new AI technologies that will become more and more amazing. We are going into hyper intelligence and a genetic workflow where you have lots of different agents solving specific problems and much more.

The second one builds on this, and that is versatile robots. Robots — some of them are humanoid, shaped like humans, some of them not. For robots, you can teach anything, or they can teach each other anything — [this] will probably really break through around 2028. Most of the companies that are making such robots today are in the US and China; they are not at a level where they are ready for mass market, in our opinion, but they will be soon.

Then there's healthcare. There’s a number of super exciting things going on in healthcare, and the development of new healthcare will be accelerated, actually by AI, mainly because AI can analyze what proteins are, how they fold, and how they will interact.

Then I think we should be concerned about energy. China is a world leader in solar and wind. As it is now, solar and wind is only a very small fraction of the global energy supply, [though] it will become a bigger fraction. But we need something else. I think we need a number of different forms of nuclear power. And the biggest one — the really, really big one — is nuclear fusion power. We think that that will go commercial somewhere between 2035 and 2045.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Oliver Wyman Partner Kelly Zheng sits down with entrepreneur, financial investor, and author Lars Tvede to discuss the four main trends of the future: artificial intelligence (AI), robots, new healthcare, and nuclear energy. These trends are highlighted in Tvede’s book Supertrends, which was recently awarded one of the FTChinese-Oliver Wyman Business Books of the Year 2024. 

Kelly Zheng

Hello, everyone. I'm Kelly Zheng, a partner at Oliver Wyman. Today I would like to invite the very famous, insightful author, Mr. Lars Tvede.

This Supertrends [book] has been selected as one of the FTChinese-Oliver Wyman Business Books of the Year this year. We invite Mr. Lars to introduce yourself a bit.

Lars Tvede

Hi, China. I have written seventeen books; I think nine have been published in China so far. I also started thirteen companies, and one of my latest companies is called Supertrends that was inspired by this book. Supertrends uses AI to scan the world of innovation all the time, and then it creates a map of all the innovations that exist and are coming.

Kelly

First of all, among all these Supertrends, Lars, would you help us to share which would be the most significant one you think that would impact our society in the coming years?

Lars

Of all the things we are looking at in Supertrends, I think there are a few that really stand out, the number one is AI, you know, I don't need to say that. We will get through the next five years with wave after wave after wave of new AI technologies that will become more and more amazing. We are going into hyper intelligence and a genetic workflow where you have lots of different agents solving specific problems and much more.

The second one builds on this, and that is versatile robots. Robots — some of them are humanoid, shaped like humans, some of them not. For robots, you can teach anything, or they can teach each other anything — [this] will probably really break through around 2028. Most of the companies that are making such robots today are in the US and China; they are not at a level where they are ready for mass market, in our opinion, but they will be soon.

Then there's healthcare. There’s a number of super exciting things going on in healthcare, and the development of new healthcare will be accelerated, actually by AI, mainly because AI can analyze what proteins are, how they fold, and how they will interact.

Then I think we should be concerned about energy. China is a world leader in solar and wind. As it is now, solar and wind is only a very small fraction of the global energy supply, [though] it will become a bigger fraction. But we need something else. I think we need a number of different forms of nuclear power. And the biggest one — the really, really big one — is nuclear fusion power. We think that that will go commercial somewhere between 2035 and 2045.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.