Gary Vaynerchuk says he doesn’t predict the future, it just seems to be the way it is.
The 49-year-old CEO and media personality invested in Facebook in its infancy and built an audience on YouTube in the early 2000s by posting daily – a rare practice at the time. His insightful forecasts have made him and his company, Vayner Media, a preferred employee for Fortune 500 companies such as JPMorgan and PepsiCo.
But Vaynerchuk emphasizes that he’s not speculating about the next big thing, but rather paying attention to what’s working in one corner of the world — or the Internet — and taking that into account. The question is whether it can and will scale.
“I’m reacting too quickly to what’s happening rather than guessing what it might be,” Vaynerchuk told The Post.
Here, he shares three major trends on the horizon in tech and business.
live social media shopping will explode
Vaynerchuk believes the QVC-ization of social media — people using TikTok and Instagram to instantly click and buy what they see without leaving the app — will explode in 2025.
“I think social shopping is going to be a monster,” he enthused.
Live shopping networks on television such as QVC and HSN have been popular for decades and still gross billions per year. Now, social media influencers are taking the same format and modernizing it.
“I think retail is going to transition to QVC in a very big way,” Vaynerchuk said.
Live social media shopping has already taken off in China, bringing in billions of dollars. Influencer Zheng Jiang Jiang earns an estimated $14 million per week By displaying affordable items ranging from clothing to mugs for just three seconds. Their followers simply tap a button on the screen to buy it instantly.
“Tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of live shopping is happening right now,” Vaynerchuk explains. “But it’s not done 95% of the way [of the world] Still knows – in fact, only 5% do.”
Influencers and podcasters must adapt to AI – or be left behind
According to Vaynerchuk, over the next year, artificial intelligence will begin to replace influencers, podcasters, and other content creators as the technology becomes increasingly sophisticated.
Google’s new program NotebookLM allows users to upload any article or book and instantly turn it into a podcast. Like other, more fledgling companies like PixAI and SolgenAI, Glambase allows anyone to create an artificial intelligence influencer from scratch.
But, Vaynerchuk emphasizes that smart content creators won’t be worried about being replaced by new technology. Rather, they will find smart ways to use it to their advantage and “seize the opportunity rather than cry about it.”
He suggests that the best thing anyone can do at this time is to create an AI library of their videos, articles, and designs so that they can be more efficient and use AI to their advantage.
“When the tractor came out, there was a lot of discussion in society several years ago that it was bad because 83% of the people in the world work on farms,” he said. “People didn’t understand that tractors would allow people to do bigger and better jobs.”
NFT not completely dead
The initial craze for non-fungible tokens – better known as NFTs – may be over and many are now worthless, but Vaynerchuk thinks they still have utility.
“Non-fungible tokens are contracts that you can’t negotiate with, they can’t burn in a building, they can’t disappear from the face of the earth,” said the entrepreneur, who sold the NFTs at their peak popularity in 2021 Only Flyfish Club’s new Will help finance the members.
Vaynerchuk believes that the technology behind NFTs – namely the blockchain on which they are recorded – is so impressive that it will make a comeback.
“Blockchain is intensive… and I think assets, digital assets will also find their way in there,” he said, adding that blockchain could be used to authenticate luxury goods, track goods in the supply chain or trace documents. Can be stored for a long time.
“My great-grandmother used to tell me … her family had a 500-acre farm that was taken over by the Bolsheviks and was gone,” he said. “If that deed sat on the blockchain, my great-grandchildren could one day claim that land. ,
this is part of the story NYNext, a new editorial series Which highlights innovations as well as leading figures in various industries in New York City.
