Why the next decade of tech won’t be taller, it’ll be wider
Opinion
Brands should build bridges before towers and think breadth before breakthrough. Phil Rowley explains Horizontal Progress.
Let’s challenge a default assumption. I want you to picture the idea of ‘progress’ in your mind.
What ‘direction’ are you thinking of? Maybe it’s forward. Maybe it’s up. Maybe you’re thinking of a superlative: higher, faster, bigger, further. That’s understandable.
But there is another kind of progress. One that moves along an alternative vector, and one that gives different returns: Horizontal Progress.
Horizontal Progress speaks not of an increase in altitude or distance from a starting point, but an increase in surface area. It’s a spreading, a scaling, an adoption, an equalisation.
If invention is vertical progress, integration is horizontal progress. Or to put it another way: first-to-market and first-to-mainstream are two different things.
The truth is, we need to measure technological progress by both width and height.
Horizontal in Helsinki
There is a reason I mention all this. I’ve just come back from our annual trip to Helsinki’s Slush tech conference, where that ‘horizontalisation’ was in full effect.
Slush is Europe’s biggest start-up conference and remains one of the most influential tech gatherings hiding in plain sight. It’s not consumer gadgets, it’s tech solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges: climate, healthcare, and AI’s impact on society. You can read our report here: Closer To The Edge: The Next Decade In Tech
Most relevant, what typifies Slush is a ‘lateral bleed’ of disciplines. It’s profoundly anti-silo, with founders often holding PhDs in biology and AI, or environmental science and computing.
Thus, the tech on display is always more than one thing: it’s wearables, AI, and sustainability. It’s all those things and more, integrated and indivisible – like the two neighbouring trees whose branches have grown to be intertwined; structural proof of the power of reaching not for the sky but reaching out to those standing next to you.
The report looks at four themes defining the next decade in tech: Trust By Design – where we look at safeguards for an accelerating world; Wearables Grow Up – where we identify how wearables will move beyond body tracking; Rise Of The Robots – where we bust some myths about the nature of robotics over the next decade.
But it’s the last one – AI Goes Lateral – where we detail AI’s horizontal spread through new sectors, categories and verticals, that I will focus on here.
AI goes from ‘breakthrough’ to ‘build out’
Rather than any big disruptive plays, AI at Slush this year was more about quiet horizontal expansion and integration into markets, perhaps previously less well served by AI. In short, not so much ‘breakthrough’, rather ‘build out’.
On display were tools using agentic tech to alleviate barriers and bottlenecks in corporate event planning, coordinating venues, menus, itineraries, and guest speakers to streamline the event planner’s workflow.
We also saw ‘AI For Pets’ become a phenomenon, with the veterinary industry committing to match the AI integration we now see in human medicine.
Lastly, we saw improvements in AI hardware’s ‘local’ computing power, meaning devices can ‘think quicker on their feet’ and respond to users more rapidly without sending calculations to the cloud and back.
Again, the point: these were evolutions, not revolutions. Progress means not only moonshots, but ‘mainstreaming’ – that’s where the real value is delivered, and where tech becomes ‘accepted’.
Lateral lessons for brands
Although the Slush report focuses on consumer needs in the 2030s, its acknowledgement of the impact of that horizontal progress offers two lessons for brands today.
First, smash the siloes. Slush’s cross-disciplinary approach to solutions demonstrates the power of progress that cuts across disparate fields of expertise, breaks down walls between fiefdoms, and welds together existing knowledge bases.
Author Steven Johnson argues that breakthroughs are most likely to emerge in ecosystems where different species, cultures, and ideologies collide.
He cites coral reefs, cities and even The Francis Crick Institute – where biochemists swap learnings with cosmologists – as examples of Liquid Networks: free exchanges of expertise birthing new answers to old questions.
Thus, brands should build bridges before towers, asking: what can we combine and recombine? What innovations lie at the intersection of two adjacent disciplines? What permutations have not been tried?
Second, think breadth before breakthrough. Before we automatically think about ‘the next big thing’, consider if you’ve scaled the learnings from the innovations you’ve already dabbled with. First-to-market is great. But first-to-mass-market is even better.
Take AI in marketing, for instance. Have any forays into AI remained an isolated experiment? Or is it now integrated across your processes? Moreover, have you looked at how to apply AI horizontally across a whole spectrum of your marketing disciplines – from targeting connected consumers to synthetic focus groups?
Ultimately, both principles above mean a shift in emphasis within a brand or business.
When innovation is reframed as a wiring problem, not a breakthrough problem, it underscores the need not for more capital, but more coordination. The question becomes not “how do we go further”, but “how can we connect better”.
And perhaps that can be our lens for viewing the future – whether 2026 or 2036, or even beyond: Before you look to the heavens, first look around at where you are standing. Everything you need might be right next to you, right now. So, reach across.
Phil Rowley is head of futures at Omnicom Media Group UK and author of Hit the Switch: The Future of Sustainable Business. He writes for The Media Leader about the future of media.