Daniel Burrus, CEO of Burrus Research and New York Times bestselling author, shares the method he’s used for decades to predict technology change, and how marketers can use it to anticipate needs, personalize with data, and act before disruption hits.
Most of us handle change the same way. Something breaks, and we scramble to fix it fast. We call that agility and we’re proud of it. Daniel Burrus thinks that’s only half the job.
Daniel is a global technology futurist, AI strategy expert, CEO of Burrus Research, and the author of seven bestselling books, including Flash Foresight and The Anticipatory Organization. He started out teaching biology and physics, then designed and built an airplane, then launched a string of companies. He’s spoken in 52 countries and has around 1.2 million followers on LinkedIn. He also built one of the first mobile real estate apps and sold it to a little company called Zillow.
He came on Deconstructing Data with one goal: to give our audience a method, not just a pile of predictions. I loved that.
“Agility is good, but it’s only half of the strategy coin. What I want to talk about today is the other half of the coin, which is how to anticipate disruptions before they happen.”
— Daniel Burrus, CEO, Burrus Research
What is the difference between a hard trend and a soft trend?
This is the core of Daniel’s framework, and it’s simple enough to use in your next planning meeting.
A hard trend is based on a future fact. It will happen, and nothing you do can change it. A soft trend is based on an assumption. It might happen, or it might not, and you can influence it.
The test is one question: can it be changed? If yes, it’s soft.
Both are useful. Hard trends give you certainty, so you can see disruptions and problems before they arrive. Soft trends give you leverage, because if you don’t like where one is headed, you can push back on it.
Daniel’s example that caught me off guard was healthcare costs. They’ve been climbing for decades, so most people assume that’s a hard trend. It isn’t. Just because something has been happening doesn’t mean it has to keep happening. Price transparency, for instance, could start bending that curve. And once you realize a trend is soft, you actually start trying to change it.
AI is a good example of both types at once. AI getting more capable? Hard trend. You aren’t going to make it stop. Whether it puts most people out of work? That’s soft. We still get a say in that.
And here’s the thing he stressed: a trend on its own doesn’t do much.
“A trend by itself is academic. Who cares? Until you attach an opportunity for you into it.”
— Daniel Burrus, CEO, Burrus Research
How can businesses use hard trends to anticipate customer needs?
Daniel sorts hard trends into three categories: demographics, technology, and government regulation. That last one surprised me, but regulation creates a lot of predictable, low-risk openings.
Demographics are the easiest to see. In the U.S., roughly 10,000 people a day are moving into their senior years. They won’t get younger. So what problems can you predict and solve ahead of time?
His examples were great. An “easy launch” boat trailer for older people who still love fishing but struggle to get the boat in the water. Or a lightweight exoskeleton that helps seniors climb stairs and keeps them from falling. Exoskeletons will keep getting smaller, lighter, and cheaper. That’s a hard trend too. Neither product exists for this market yet. Do you think nobody will ever build them? I don’t.
For marketers, the lesson goes further. Every demographic moves through life stages, including starting families, buying cars, and retiring. If you know where they’re going, you can anticipate what they’ll need next instead of treating each group like it’s frozen in place.
So why don’t more companies do this? Daniel says it’s because they believe everything about the future is uncertain.
“Uncertainty does not empower you to make bold moves. Uncertainty makes you hesitate… When you have certainty on the other hand, you have the confidence to make a bold move.”
— Daniel Burrus, CEO, Burrus Research
That’s a big deal in sales too. An uncertain buyer says “I’ll get back to you.” A certain one writes a big check.
Why does fragmented data hurt AI personalization?
This is where the conversation got close to home for us at BDEX. Daniel’s first point was about data hygiene, not personalization at all.
“There is good data, bad data, obsolete data, and if the good, the bad, and the obsolete is all going into AI, you’re not going to like what AI has to say.”
— Daniel Burrus, CEO, Burrus Research
His advice is to audit your own database before you worry about connecting outside sources. Some of what you have isn’t valid anymore. Then, once you pull fragmented data together properly, you can go past personalization to real hyper-personalization.
I shared what we’ve been doing at BDEX. We’ve trained AI to build around 16 personality profiles, like creative versus pragmatic or analytical. Knowing what someone likes is helpful. Knowing how to talk to them is a whole other level of targeting.
I also talked about something I’m seeing right now. More companies are coming to us to clean bots and click farms out of their identity graphs and ad platforms. For years the industry just accepted bad data as part of the ecosystem. That’s changing, especially as agentic ad targeting grows and platforms need to tell a person from a bot.
Daniel was clear that the same depth of data can be used for good or bad. His answer is to use AI for good while protecting yourself from people who don’t. For example, have a family password. If a “nephew” calls sounding exactly like himself and asking for money, ask for the password. It costs nothing.
Will AI replace human expertise?
Daniel framed this with a question. Someone you love has cancer. Do you want a great oncologist, AI alone, or a great oncologist with access to AI?
Obviously the third one.
“It is augmenting your thinking, not replacing your thinking.”
— Daniel Burrus, CEO, Burrus Research
But he also warned about leaning on AI too much. He told a room of university students that prompting AI to “act as an award-winning marketer” comes with a catch:
“If you do that, I can guarantee you, you will never become an award-winning marketer.”
— Daniel Burrus, CEO, Burrus Research
If you only use AI to get answers and never learn anything, he said, you make yourself unemployable. And since AI can sound caring on a phone call, he had one more reminder: nobody’s really home in there. Keep talking to actual people.
How do you turn AI insights into strategic action?
Daniel has started six companies without a business loan or a partner. Five were profitable in their first year. His secret isn’t complicated. He acts.
“Not doing it was actually the bigger risk, because if I didn’t do it, someone else would.”
— Daniel Burrus, CEO, Burrus Research
His playbook: narrow a long list of things you could do down to the vital few you must do. Then leave every meeting knowing what the actions are, who owns them, and what happens in the next 24 hours, 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. I try to walk out of every meeting that way, and it’s the difference between a good conversation and actual results.
On tools, Daniel uses Claude, Gemini, and other frontier models at the paid tiers, and never relies on just one. He’s personally tested more than 2,000 AI tools. He says a lot of them are junk, so he puts his top picks by category, with case studies, in a free report at aistrategyreport.com.
The bigger picture
Two hundred episodes ago, I predicted on this show that we’d eventually just tell AI to write software for us. Here we are. That wasn’t luck. It was a hard trend. Computing kept getting more powerful, and the opportunity was sitting right there.
That’s why Daniel’s framework stuck with me. Most of the future isn’t a mystery. A lot of it is already decided, and the companies that separate hard trends from soft ones get to make bold moves while everyone else waits. And it only works if the data underneath is clean. Bad data in means bad predictions out, no matter how smart the AI is.
Want to connect with Daniel? Follow him on LinkedIn, explore free resources at burrus.com, and download his free AI tools report at aistrategyreport.com. His book The Anticipatory Organization goes deep on hard and soft trends.
Want cleaner data behind your AI? BDEX removes bots, click farms, and bad data from identity graphs so your targeting reaches real people. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert.”
Watch the full episode: Using Data to Anticipate, Personalize, and Innovate on YouTube
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
