"Humanity Strikes Back": The 5th Industrial Revolution. Interview with Mike Bechtel, a futurist from Deloitte

Mike Bechtel is the Chief Futurist at Deloitte Consulting LLP, and his job is to "help today's leaders achieve their desired tomorrow slightly ahead of schedule".

Disclaimer: this is a free translation of an interview with Mike Bechtel, a futurist from Deloitte, which he gave to Big Think. The translation was prepared by the editorial team of "Technocracy". To not miss the announcement of new materials, subscribe to "Voice of Technocracy" — we regularly talk about news about AI, LLM, and RAG, as well as share useful must-reads and current events.

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His career began when he realized as a child how technology could help him become stronger while playing with his first Commodore 64. Since then, Mike Bechtel has gone from being an inventor, receiving 12 patents, to an investor, co-founding the early-stage venture firm Ringleader Ventures in 2013.

Today, he collaborates with various organizations, developing strategic approaches to new technologies. His approach is to look at the future with a broad perspective, as if looking through a wide-angle lens rather than a telescope.

Big Think was pleased to talk with Bechtel about his views, conclusions, and predictions for the future. Read on to find out why companies today realize that GenAI is not so much about cost reduction as it is about expanding ambitions; what is driving the growing interest in "tech health"; why AI "acts invisibly"; his six key investment areas; how technology today reveals an acute shortage of leaders; and much more.

Big Think: What did you mean when you said, "Futurists are secret historians"?

Bechtel: History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. From a practical standpoint, we have found that many "revolutions" in the history of technology, when viewed through the lens of long periods of time, are evolutionary steps toward surprisingly simple "end goals." Take user interfaces. The history of human-computer interaction—from PhDs with punch cards, schoolchildren learning BASIC, to me and my book "Windows '98 for Dummies"—has been an evolution toward simplicity. So when I started hiring young people who preferred to type text by voice on their phones rather than on a keyboard, I saw it not as unprofessional heresy, but as part of the inexorable movement toward simplicity. When VR headsets look and feel like stylish designer glasses, we will see that they have moved even further in this direction. Simplicity always wins.

Big Think: Marshall McLuhan once said, "I am very careful and only predict what has already happened." Can you say the same about your own methodology when addressing the future?

Bechtel: How about a quote for a quote? "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." William Gibson, 1984. I like this quote because it reflects the idea that unprecedented, "new to the world" innovations are relatively rare. The future generally arises from new combinations of the known. Therefore, the key to seeing the future is not a telescope, but rather a wide-angle lens. If you keep track of developments in different geographic regions and sectors, you can piece together images of your tomorrow today.

Big Think: It seems that the adoption of AI is happening very unevenly: Should companies be more proactive in shaping their AI strategies or be cautious and watch how things develop?

Bechtel: The genie is out of the bottle, and AI will determine everyone's business strategy, whether they are active in this matter or not. I remember in 1997 or so, companies were discussing how much they needed an internet strategy. We saw how that plot ended: You were either a disruptor or you were disrupted. I advise my clients: Follow the needs. Pay attention to the business problems worth solving, and then (and only then) turn to new shiny tools. Focusing on the AI tools themselves (or, worse, blindly worshiping them) is supply-side thinking. It's a hammer without nails to drive. Find the nails first.

Big Think: What do people misunderstand when they talk about artificial intelligence for business?

Bechtel: People look at AI as a weight loss pill, whereas they should look at it as rocket fuel for increased ambitions. When clients look at AI as a cost-cutting strategy, they miss part of the point. Efficiency is great, but as my former venture partner used to say: "In the long run, you can't cut your way to success." The real value lies in reallocating the time, talent, and money freed up by cost-cutting towards strategic lag.

Or, to put it another way: It's not that you no longer need Toby, but that you can finally rotate Toby onto that ambitious project you've been putting off for so long. And if you don't, you'll find that some business that doesn't care about your business a) hires Toby and b) works to put your business out of business.

Big Think: Is GenAI just a new tool or a massive transformation?

Bechtel: We tend to see GenAI as a technological evolution that manifests as a revolution in business. If that sounds "two-sided," let me explain. From a technical standpoint, large language models (LLMs) and media diffusion models are not unprecedented. They are deeply precedented. I remember in 2019 showing one of my clients early transformer models, demonstrating how they could convincingly mimic Shakespeare. He dryly replied, "Sorry, buddy, but we make hydraulic systems, not poetry."

Then one company had the bright idea to attach a chat interface to their LLM, and the same client messaged me saying he thought this (the same basic technology) "would significantly change the trajectory of their business for the better." As I see it, the takeaway is: from a technical standpoint, GenAI is just the next page in a book that programmers have been writing for 200 years. From a business standpoint, it's the part of the book where our silicon colleagues finally join the white-collar workforce en masse. Spoiler alert: we're not at the end of the book yet.

Big Think: Your approach to futurism has a very practical bent - "understanding what will allow us to move from probable to profitable." Many executives today do not know how to implement AI at the enterprise level. How do you help dispel this fog?

Bechtel: My colleague Laura Schacht and I have developed a model for measuring and monetizing AI, which we call the "3 'E's." Think of it as a target for archery. The largest circle, the bronze medal circle, is Efficiency. Doing current work faster and/or cheaper. The next circle is Effectiveness. Doing today's work better. This is the silver medal strategy. The innermost circle? Exponential. Doing entirely new work that we couldn't do without AI. All three options score points, but as we see in the market, the margin increases as we get closer to the "bullseye."

Big Think: How do you see corporate technology evolving over the next 12 months?

Bechtel: Here is an attempt to create a brief cheat sheet to answer an undoubtedly big question. Over 15 years of Deloitte Tech Trends research, we have identified 6 key areas of investment that have been and are likely to remain unchanged: interaction, information, computation, culture, cybernetics and trust, and core modernization. In our 2024 study, we highlighted organizations ahead of their time, using new technologies and approaches that will become the norm within 18-24 months. We are now entering the main stage of implementing these technologies:

• Interaction Layer: Spatial computing (AR/VR) has a huge impact on industrial sites: industrial metaverses enable the operation of digital twins, spatial modeling, augmented work instructions, and digital collaboration spaces that make factories and enterprises safer and more efficient.

• Information Layer: Leaders are increasingly realizing that generative AI, in its most strategic sense, is less about cost reduction and more about raising ambitions.

• Computational Layer: Enterprises use a heterogeneous mix of hybrid architectures, private and public clouds, hyperscale, niche, and edge platforms to maximize existing investments.

• Cultural Layer: We are seeing increased attention to empowering developers to improve everyday productivity and engineer satisfaction to attract, retain, and engage the best technical talent.

• Cyber Layer: Leading organizations are responding to the proliferation of deepfakes driven by new AI tools with a combination of policies and technologies aimed at more actively detecting malicious content and raising employee awareness of emerging risks.

• Core Layer: Increased attention to technological health is driven by the realization that leading organizations need to move away from reactive and fragmented approaches to addressing technical debt and towards a more holistic approach.

In 2024, we noted that generative AI became the main technological sensation of the year, but at the same time warned that excessive attention to any one technology could lead to us not seeing the forest for the trees. In 2025, this opinion will change, and we will begin to notice that AI is moving "undercover." It is becoming the story behind corporate IT plots.

Big Think: How are technologies currently affecting C-level executives and the nature of their management?

Bechtel: I think the first thing I observe in senior executives is an emerging deficit of imagination. Here's the thing: generative AI is like a genie. It fulfills all your wishes, but it will only be magical if the wish is made by the person themselves. A little story: I showed ten senior executives an image diffusion model. And I told them: "Ask for anything. ANYTHING. You are literally limited only by your imagination." Awkward silence: it was obvious that these gentlemen hadn't had to imagine anything for many years. Finally, one of the guys cracked and asked to generate a sunset. As a result of this (uninspiring) request, an uninspiring photo of a joyless sunset was produced.

And then the executive assistant, a woman about 20 years younger, burst into the discussion and said: "I want to see a fight between potato chips and pretzels. Chips get guns. Pretzels get nunchucks. And all this happens on Mars." The resulting image became a modern masterpiece, and the previously grumpy circle of executives was now literally clapping with delight. But here's the key point: They had to applaud her. In the coming era, as we increasingly limit ourselves only to our imagination, a lack of imagination may become our limiting factor.

Big Think: If we are currently in the stage of the 4.0 industrial revolution, what will the next stage look like and how soon will it come?

Bechtel: Well, (shock!) let's start with a little history. The third industrial revolution was associated with digitalization. The fourth is the merging of information technology with fields such as biotechnology, space technology, robotics, etc. The fifth, as I believe, can be called "Humanity Strikes Back." It will not be a rejection of digitalization, but rather a focus on carbon-silicon symbiosis. That sounded terribly highbrow, so let's rephrase: "People and machines, better together." Such symbiosis is already in its infancy thanks to wearable technologies, but in the next ten years, we will begin to see significant progress from "technologies on us" to "technologies inside us." Brain-computer interfaces, biological agents, and who knows what else.