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 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 federal and state agency leadership, this presents a direct challenge to the way many agencies plan, invest, and communicate. Strategic plans require a stable environment over a multi-year period, budgets justify incremental changes against a baseline, and performance metrics track progress within existing program structures. Convergences break all three: they shift demand faster than planning cycles can respond, create needs that don’t map to existing budget categories, and have the potential to diminish the agency’s role as the source the public and policymakers turn to. You can read the full 318-page report, but we’ve distilled three of Webb’s ten convergences we believe will most impact government below. If you’re interested, we’ve also identified the convergences most impactful to nonprofits and foundations.

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 government agencies are using AI to digitize paper forms. A convergence outlook tells you that, at the same time, AI may cause significant employment disruption, it also has the potential to inform those displaced of your offerings, help them determine eligibility, and complete the application process for them. Together, these forces have the potential to reshape the entire landscape of how social services are accessed, 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.

Preventing Healthcare Institutions from Becoming the System of Last Resort

Webb’s “Autonomous Care” convergence describes how people are building their own health systems and routing around institutional gatekeepers entirely. At-home diagnostics are approaching lab quality. Continuous biosensing has evolved from fitness tracking into medical-grade monitoring. Decentralized health data means patients own and route their biological information across providers, second opinions, and jurisdictions without institutional mediation. Telemedicine and digital pharmacies then route diagnosis and treatment through whichever jurisdiction offers the best combination of cost, speed, and regulatory flexibility.

For an agency like the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), whose mission is connecting underserved communities with health resources, this convergence completely reshapes needs. HRSA’s model depends, at least in part, on patients engaging with institutional health systems: clinics, hospitals, and community health centers. When people with resources and technical fluency can assemble their own care outside those systems, and when the cost of doing so keeps dropping, the populations that remain inside the institutional system will increasingly be those least equipped to leave it: seniors unfamiliar with the technology, rural communities, and low-income families who can’t afford a $500 smart ring and a subscription health service.

To benefit all Americans, this convergence demands a fundamental rethinking of what access means. It’s no longer just about funding clinics and extending insurance coverage. It’s about ensuring that the digital infrastructure, plain-language guidance, and technology access required to participate in autonomous care don’t exclusively belong to those who can already afford the best care.

Your Website Was Built for a World That’s Disappearing

The next convergence government leaders need to confront is arguably the most immediately actionable. The next internet is not being built for humans to browse; it’s being built for AI agents, systems that don’t click and read but instead retrieve, synthesize, and act on behalf of users. In 2026, agents will cross the threshold from an experimental feature to the default interface for getting things done.

For agencies focused on economic development, labor, and small business support, this convergence has immediate, high-stakes implications. Consider an entrepreneur using an AI agent to identify federal grants for an energy startup, or a worker displaced by automation asking an agent to find retraining programs they are eligible for. In this new reality, that agent is pulling from whatever content it can find, process, and trust. If your agency’s program requirements, eligibility criteria, or guides are buried in 100-page PDFs or multipage applications, agents won’t point out that they couldn’t navigate your website; they’ll just act like you don’t exist. Agencies risk becoming invisible at the exact moment more citizens are looking for government assistance. 

When your audience increasingly relies on AI-mediated information retrieval rather than direct website visits, the metric for success shifts. It’s no longer about page views; it’s about machine readability. Can an AI agent correctly summarize your regulatory guidance without stripping out critical details? If not, the gap between your agency’s work and the public’s ability to use it will widen precisely when the convergences described above are driving more people to need them. Rebuilding digital infrastructure for this world means moving beyond just accessibility. It requires structured data, clean schema markup, and emerging protocols such as NLWeb and Model Context Protocol that enable your agency to communicate directly with AI platforms.

Regulating a Private Data Economy

Webb’s “Corporate Panopticon” convergence describes a world in which anonymity is engineered out of existence. She believes we have entered an era of continuous authentication, where biometric systems identify people by default, through face, voice, and touch, turning everyday life into passive surveillance without anyone’s explicit participation. Smart devices, loyalty programs, and AI-enabled security systems finance this surveillance through subscription models that feel optional but quickly become structural. 

The government has a unique opportunity to be the architect of trust, setting the terms for how private companies behave and disclose through actions like: 

Standardize Disclosure: As with food ingredient labels, agencies could mandate data transparency labels. Clear, machine- and human-readable disclosures that empower citizens to see what their devices are doing, creating competition in privacy. 

New Certifications: By developing voluntary standards, agencies could offer a “government seal of approval” to firms that prioritize data minimization, creating a market incentive for ethics. 

Zero-Knowledge Architectures: Agencies could move toward systems that verify eligibility without ever storing the sensitive raw data.

The convergence of health monitoring, commercial surveillance, and AI-driven inference creates a data governance challenge that no single agency can solve alone, but that every health agency will have to confront.

Three Actions Government Agencies Should Take Now

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

1. Treat convergence as a driver of your budget and staffing, not a briefing topic.

Webb’s central message is that organizations adhering to sequential planning risk being overwhelmed by convergences that arrive simultaneously. The moment demands that organizations understand how forces interact, not just what each force does on its own. Your planning for the next fiscal year should start with two questions: where is the world going, and how will we best serve our constituents in this time of transition?

2. Prepare your digital infrastructure for an agent-mediated world

The shift to a post-search internet is not gradual. It is accelerating. Every government agency 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? Are you experimenting with emerging protocols like schema markup, NLWeb, and Model Context Protocol that enable direct communication with AI platforms? The agencies that invest in this infrastructure now will be the authoritative sources that AI systems trust and cite.

3. Adapt before you need to

Agencies face the challenge of adapting while still adhering to procurement rules, appropriation cycles, and oversight requirements. The White House’s recently released National AI Legislative Framework is a start. The agencies getting this right are proactively establishing clear processes for AI-assisted operations, defining accountability structures for automated decision-making, and building institutional capacity to evaluate risks across converging systems. Perfect governance isn’t the goal. Adaptive governance is.

Doing More With Less

For teams that are stretched thin, Webb’s closing line at SXSW session lands differently: “If you want agency, you have to take action. And that starts today.” The government organizations that will thrive during this time of transition aren’t waiting for more resources; they are experimenting where they can, adapting, and moving forward with what they have. 

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Forum One works with federal and state agencies to build the digital infrastructure and adaptive governance frameworks needed to serve a public that now interacts through AI agents. If the convergences in this outlook are relevant to your mission, we’d love to have a conversation.