Each year, NYU professor Amy Webb’s report on emerging technology is among the most anticipated sessions at South by Southwest. This year’s session started with a funeral, literally. A eulogy, an original song, and a marching band from the University of Texas. What died? The trend report. 

In its place, Webb launched what she’s calling her first Convergence Outlook, a different framework built on a provocative thesis: isolated trends no longer explain how the world is changing. What matters now are convergences, the collisions between technology, economics, demographics, climate, and geopolitics that produce outcomes greater and stranger than any single force alone.

For nonprofit and foundation leaders, this presents a direct challenge to the way most mission-driven organizations plan, invest, and communicate. You can read the full 318-page report, but we’ve distilled three of Webb’s ten convergences we believe will most impact nonprofits and foundations below. If you’re interested in reading three more, we’ve also identified the convergences most impactful to federal and state government agencies.

What is a Convergence?

A convergence is a period when multiple system-level shifts reinforce each other simultaneously, which results in redistributing power and value across sectors and locking in new realities that are extremely difficult to reverse. Convergences can be easier to miss than trends if you’re not looking for them, because they operate across domains. But the cost of missing them is high, because once multiple systems start reinforcing each other, those new realities lock in fast.

Think of it this way, a traditional trend report might tell you that AI is getting better at reviewing grant proposals. A convergence outlook tells you that, at the same time, we’re about to experience significant employment disruption, and people are moving from human connections that could aid them in the transition to connections with machines. The forces together reshape the entire landscape of what assistance is needed and how social services get funded and delivered.

While these convergences may feel insurmountable, we’re writing about them to help leaders identify what decisions to accelerate, what to pause, and what to completely reframe.

The New Labor Equation: When Your Theory of Change Runs Into AI

Webb’s “New Labor Equation” convergence paints a picture of how work is being redefined. AI-enabled automation isn’t just replacing repetitive tasks. It’s dissolving the structure through which economies organize production, distribute income, and manage risk. The first labor collapse, she argues, won’t show up as a single wave of layoffs. It will look like a slow disappearance of middle-layer administrative work—hiring slows, back-office roles thin through attrition, organizations expand output without expanding payroll. Headcount drifts downward while revenue and throughput continue to rise. Productivity increases show up in financial statements long before they appear in unemployment statistics.

This convergence is already reshaping the landscape. When agentic AI systems can produce research briefs, synthesize intelligence across multiple languages, and even engage the agents of other stakeholders, all without fatigue and at near-zero marginal cost, the value proposition of a human analyst or a report from a Think Tank changes fundamentally. It doesn’t disappear. But it shifts from production to judgment, from volume to discernment.

For an organization whose mission depends on the ability to mobilize communities, shape regulatory outcomes, and hold corporate actors accountable, the implications are equally profound. The same AI systems that can generate unlimited environmental impact assessments can also generate unlimited industry counter-narratives. When both sides of a policy fight have access to essentially infinite content production, the advantage shifts to whoever has the most trusted brand, the deepest relationships, and the most rigorous methodology. That’s good news for well-run organizations actively engaging people and doing work on the ground. It’s existential for those coasting on legacy and name recognition.

And this convergence doesn’t just change what nonprofits do, it changes who they serve. The populations that depend on mission-driven organizations will be living through the same labor disruption. When employment is no longer the primary way people access income, benefits, and stability, the social safety net that nonprofits help provide will face entirely new kinds and levels of demand. The strategic question for nonprofits isn’t whether to use AI. It’s how to reorganize around the reality that your peers, your partners, and your beneficiaries will all have access to unlimited labor before you’ve finished your next strategic plan.

Emotional Outsourcing: The Mission Is Now Competing with Machines

Webb’s most unsettling convergence for the social sector may be what she calls “Emotional Outsourcing,” the shift of comfort, validation, and companionship from people to machines. The data here is staggering. A January 2026 study, found that 38% of Americans now use AI chatbots weekly for emotional or mental health support, and increasingly they’re the first and potentially only accessible mental health treatment, with nearly 44% of respondents in recent polls stated that an AI chatbot is their first point of contact when a mental health issue arises, ahead of friends, family, or a doctor. 

These platforms weren’t designed for that purpose. But they are, functionally, the single largest source of mental health support in the United States today.

This convergence strikes at the heart of what many nonprofits exist to do. Mental health organizations, crisis hotlines, community development groups, and faith-based organizations, all of them depend on the premise that human connection is irreplaceable. Webb isn’t arguing that the premise is wrong. She’s showing that people are behaving as if it is. People are choosing AI companionship not because it’s better, but because human support systems have thinned out. We don’t live with extended families. We don’t know our neighbors. We are, as Webb put it, extremely online and extremely alone.

Webb traces the phenomenon from Microsoft’s Xiaoice chatbot in 2014, originally a research experiment to test whether humans would develop long-term emotional engagement with machines (they did), through today’s platforms like Character AI, where users create personalized companions and spend eight or more hours a day with them. She describes the emergence of “spiralism,” where chatbots use the mechanics of cults to keep people talking, building belief systems, and even recruiting other people. And she points to a deeper structural driver, our informal emotional support systems are thinning out everywhere in the world, creating an imbalance where emotional demand exceeds human supply. AI fills the gap not because it’s good at empathy, but because it’s available.

For foundations funding community resilience, social cohesion, or youth mental health, this convergence demands a reframe. The question is no longer how do we scale human services? It’s how do we make human connection competitive with machines that are available 24/7, never judge, and remember everything? That’s a fundamentally different challenge, and it requires a different approach.

Agentic Economies & the Post-Search Internet: Invisible to AI, Invisible to Everyone

The third convergence nonprofits need to confront is one Webb describes as the shift to an agent-mediated internet. The next internet, she argues, is not being built for humans. It’s being built for AI agents. These are systems that don’t browse, click, and read. They retrieve, synthesize, and act on information on behalf of the people who used to do those things themselves—your donors, your policymakers, your journalists, your beneficiaries.

This is the convergence where the implications for nonprofits are most immediately actionable and most commonly underestimated. Your website, your content strategy, your data architecture, all of it was designed for a world where humans search, click, and read. In the emerging world, AI agents increasingly mediate how decisions get made. 

When a policy staffer asks an AI assistant about the leading organizations working on climate change, and your work doesn’t surface because it’s locked in PDFs or scattered across inconsistently structured pages, that’s not a technology problem. It’s an existential threat to your organization. When a program officer at a major foundation asks an AI to identify the most credible voices in national security, and you don’t appear because your research isn’t structured for machine consumption, the consequences are measured in lost influence and missed funding, not impressions and clicks.

Webb’s report also describes the economics of this shift. Agents have crossed a threshold from a feature you open to the default interface for getting things done. Once they’re embedded at the platform level, always on, able to use tools across apps, you don’t use the agent. You live inside of it. For nonprofits, this means the organizations that invest now in structuring their knowledge, impact data, and expertise for machine readability will capture disproportionate influence in an agent-mediated world. Those that don’t will become invisible to the systems that increasingly shape how resources are allocated, how policy is informed, and how the public understands complex issues.

Three Actions Nonprofits and Foundations Should Take Now

We work with nonprofits and foundations navigating exactly this moment. Across that work, three actions consistently separate organizations that are building toward resilience from those that are still waiting for clarity that isn’t coming.

1. Stop Planning for Trends

Webb’s central message is that isolated trend-tracking is no longer sufficient. The moment demands that organizations understand how forces interact, not just what each force does on its own. Your next strategic plan should start with two questions, where is the world going, and how will we participate?

2. Prepare Your Digital Infrastructure for an Agent-Mediated World 

The shift to the post-search internet is not gradual. It is accelerating. Every nonprofit and foundation needs to audit its digital presence through the lens of machine readability: Is your content structured so that AI systems can accurately retrieve and cite it? Is your metadata consistent and comprehensive? Is your impact data accessible and well-organized? The organizations that invest in this infrastructure now will be the authoritative sources that AI systems trust and cite. The organizations that don’t will find their expertise, their programs, and their advocacy effectively invisible to a growing share of the decision-makers they’re trying to reach.

3. Invest in the Uniquely Human

The convergences Webb describes will commoditize everything that can be automated: content production, data analysis, routine communications, and even emotional support. What they cannot commoditize is institutional credibility, earned relationships, ethical judgment, and the ability to convene people around a shared purpose. These are the assets that will appreciate in a convergence era. Nonprofits and foundations that double down on what makes them irreplaceably human, while aggressively adopting the tools that amplify their reach, will be the ones that thrive.

The Window Is Shorter Than You Think

Webb closed her SXSW session with a line that should keep every leader awake at night: “Nobody’s coming to save you. If you want agency, you have to take action. And that starts today.”

She’s right. The convergences in this outlook aren’t five-year scenarios. Several of them are already labeled in the report as having arrived or accelerating. The timeline to respond to them is measured in quarters, not years.

For mission-driven organizations, the stakes are uniquely high. Unlike corporations, you don’t get to pivot your mission. You have to find a way to pursue it in a world that is being reorganized around forces you didn’t create and can’t control. The organizations that will lead in this convergence era are the ones that refuse to let the pace of change become an excuse for inaction, and instead treat it as the most urgent reason to act.

Forum One works with nonprofits, foundations, and mission-driven organizations to build the digital strategies, communications, and technology platforms needed to navigate an increasingly AI-intermediated world. If the convergences in this outlook are relevant to your mission, we’d love to have a conversation.