Strategic Planning, Seeing Opportunities, and Technological Trends: A SXSW 2025 Recap
by Jennifer Kemp
This is my 13th year attending SXSW Interactive. I look forward to this conference every year because it is a place where new innovations, emerging technologies, and important discussions are happening and reveal themselves.
The content for the conference changes every year, and the sessions are decided by past attendees during the following summer. The themes that emerge from the summer voting is a trend indicator itself, and it’s typically the signal for me to sign up. From the US Army to NASA, the German House, Smart Cities, the Museum of the Future and the Dubai Foundation, topics like AI, Quantum Computing, and more, there are so many things to choose from that days go by in a blur.
Upon my return, friends and colleagues are inevitably interested in what I saw and learned. Eight full days of listening, learning, and interacting is a lot to share out, but here are a few of the sessions I found most interesting in 2025:
Strategic Foresight Master Class:
This was a 4 part series in the following segments:
Factors Influencing the Future
‘What If’ Scenarios
Design Futures
This master class is a multi-day event conducted by Amy Webb and her team at the Future Today Institute (FTI). According to FTI, “strategic foresight is a data-driven practice for developing plausible future scenarios in order to inform today’s decisions.” The first part of the series introduced the origin of strategic foresight and different models and methodologies within foresight practices.
This process helps strategists like myself understand what’s coming in terms of technological and business trends, why it is meaningful, and who needs to be in conversations about them. The focus isn’t about picking what’s “winning” or “succeeding:” it’s thinking about why things are trending that way and what it means for businesses. For me, this means being on top of trends to ensure my clients have the information they need to make smart, informed decisions.
I’ve been doing strategic analysis for years, but this is a discipline to help ground my work. The framework provides a new lens for me to think through macro themes, disparate datapoints, how to make connections between different themes, and see patterns over time.
2. Smart, Sustainable, Streamlined: Factories of the Future
This panel included Maria Curry-Nkanasah from EPIXC, Kathie Leonard from Auburn Manufacturing Inc., Suzy Teele from ARM Institute, and Jeff Winter from CESMII. The panelists discussed the current state of U.S. manufacturing, what technologies the next few decades will bring, and what steps companies can take to future-proof their business. Like many, many sessions at SXSW Interactive 2025, this session discussed automation and AI-related tools as well as sustainability and streamlined supply chains.
I almost always try to attend manufacturing related sessions because manufacturing is one of the key industries that Cimarron Winter specializes in. Manufacturing is such an exciting industry with big possibilities for growth and investment. And although some manufacturing companies might not be on the forefront of cutting-edge digital marketing–the alignment between manufacturing and technology is powerful. Manufacturing jobs are technology jobs. It’s a technology space, which makes digital marketing really important and connected to the work manufacturing companies do.
There are so many challenges and opportunities within manufacturing. Manufacturing is the 5th largest employer in the U.S.,¹ and at least 35 of the top 50 most innovative companies are manufacturing companies.² And yet manufacturing faces some obstacles in terms of growth and perception.
There are a lot of unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S., and there is a lingering perspective–especially from younger generations–that manufacturing must mean dark, dirty, and dangerous. When in reality, significant amounts of manufacturing work is in clean, bright, safe spaces such as clean room environments. In addition, manufacturing–almost by its very nature–means multiple technological systems and frequent tech changes.
So many of these future-oriented trends identified in manufacturing are tied to digital ecosystems. Education, training, and communication are key strategic areas where businesses could see future success. Automation, personalization, remote technology, and on-the-fly training are huge growth opportunities for many manufacturing companies. There is so much growth and output opportunities, that we need to be thinking about the technology roadmap of how to get from where we are to where we could be–and that roadmap needs to be robust, easily communicated, and easily adopted.
3. Uncertainty: A Path to Flourishing and Survival in an Age of Flux
A bit of a change of pace and focus, this session on uncertainty has been one of the ones that has continued to resonate with me the most. Led by Maggie Jackson, author of the book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, this session focused on three key modes of uncertainty within 2025 and strategies for empowering work through uncertainty.
It’s important for us to see that not always agreeing and not always knowing can be positive and empowering opportunities. If you don’t have disagreements or uncomfortable moments within your work, your work can start to degrade and get worse over time. Without disagreement or uncertainty, there is nothing to nudge us into questions, better insight, deeper consideration.
For my work as a strategist, this gives me additional frameworks for analysis and teamwork that work very nicely with some of the methodologies from Strategic Foresight–how to ask more questions, frame work discussions, encourage productive descent, and find insight in micro conflicts.
Where do we go from here?
One of my favorite aspects of SXSW Interactive is that it’s not an end… it’s a beginning. I come back from having met with colleagues, partners, and thought leaders to continue what we discussed and focused on at the conference. I work on gathering the themes together to share with my company, our clients, and build my own roadmap for continuous learning and making my work better and future-focused.
So what did you learn at SXSW Interactive? And how have you or can you integrate it into your strategic or digital marketing work?
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