Gary Vaynerchuk says he doesn’t predict the future, it just seems that way.
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 prescient forecasts have made him and his company, Vayner Media, a favorite hire for Fortune 500 companies such as J.P. Morgan and PepsiCo.
But Vaynerchuk insists he’s not speculating about the next big thing so much as paying attention to what is working in one corner of the world — or internet — and considering whether it can and will scale.
“I’m just reacting very fast to what is happening versus guessing what it might be,” Vaynerchuk told The Post.
Here, he shares three key trends on the horizon in tech and business.
Live social media shopping will explode
The QVC-ification of social media — people using TikTok and Instagram to instantly click and buy what they see without leaving the app— will explode in 2025, Vaynerchuk believes.
“I think social shopping’s going to be a monster,” he enthused
Live shopping networks on television, such as QVC and HSN, have been popular for decades and still rake in billions per year. Now, social media influencers are taking the same format and modernizing it.
“I think retail is about to convert into QVC in a very big way,” Vaynerchuk said.
Live social media shopping has already blown up in China, bringing in billions. Influencer Zheng Xiang Xiang earns an estimated $14 million per weekby simply displaying inexpensive items ranging from clothing to mugs for just three seconds. Her followers simply tap on a button on the screen to purchase it instantly.
“There’s tens and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of live shopping happening right now,” Vaynerchuk explains. “But it hasn’t happened in a way that 95% [of the world] knows yet — in fact, only 5% does.”
Influencers and podcasters will have to adapt to AI — or get left behind
In the next year, artificial intelligence will begin to replace influencers, podcasters and other content creators as the technology gets increasingly sophisticated, according to Vaynerkchuk.
Google’s new program NotebookLM allows users to upload any article or book and instantly turn it into a podcast. Other, more fledgling companies such as PixAI and SoulGenAI, Glambase allow anyone to create an artificial intelligence influencer from scratch.
But, Vaynerchuck stresses that smart content creators won’t fret about being replaced by the new technology. Rather, they’ll find smart ways to use it to their advantage and “weaponize the opportunity instead of crying about it.”
The best thing anyone can do at the moment is to create an AI library of their videos, articles and designs so they can be more efficient and use AI for their own benefit, he suggests.
“When the tractor came out, there was a lot of conversation in society many, many years ago that this was bad because 83% of people in the world worked on farms,” he said. “What people didn’t understand was the tractor was going to allow people to do bigger and better things.”
NFTs aren’t totally dead
The initial craze over non-fungible tokens — better knowns as NFTs — may be over and the many are now worthless, but Vaynerchuk thinks they still have utility.
“Non-fungible tokens are contracts you can’t f— with, they can’t burn down in a building, they can’t disappear off the face of the earth,” said the entrepreneur, who sold NFTs at the height of their popularity in 2021 to help finance his new members only Flyfish Club.
Vaynerchuk thinks that the technology behind NFTs — namely the blockchain they’re recorded on — is impressive enough it will make a comeback.
“Blockchain is profound… and I think assets, digital assets will also find their way there,” he said, noting that the blockchain could be used to authenticate luxury items, track goods in a supply chain or store documents indefinitely.
“My great grandmother use to tell me… her family had a 500 acre farm that was taken by the Bolsheviks and it was gone,” he said. “If that deed sat on the blockchain, my great grandkids could take claim to that land one day. “
This story is part of NYNext, a new editorial series that highlights New York City innovation across industries, as well as the personalities leading the way.