An overview of macro tech trends, with a focus on the e-commerce slowdown, Amazon, layoffs, advertising, and generative AI opportunities beyond text and images
Presentations Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘The New Gatekeepers’.
Context & Ripple Effects
Benedict Evans's annual macro deck has become a running ledger of where the industry thinks it is: the April 2020 edition argued COVID would permanently accelerate ecommerce adoption, and the December 2021 edition put its weight behind Web3, the metaverse, and an early-stage cloud shift still dwarfed by on-prem IT spend.
The 2023 edition, 'The New Gatekeepers', reads as the correction issue — the e-commerce slowdown, layoffs at companies like Amazon, and a softening ad market replace the pandemic-era growth story, while generative AI enters the frame as the next opportunity, notably beyond text and images.
First-order effects
- Amazon and the other big layoff-and-slowdown names get a macro frame for their retrenchment: the deck treats their cuts as normalization after COVID-era overexpansion rather than idiosyncratic failure.
- Investors and operators reading the deck get an early map of generative AI framed around applications past text and images — before that thesis had a settled consensus.
Second-order effects
- The deck's own trajectory forced its subject matter to compete: within two years, the 2025 edition was almost entirely generative AI — LLMs, scaling challenges, and the capex surge — crowding out the ecommerce and advertising discussion that anchored this one.
- For Amazon specifically, the slowdown-and-cuts narrative here sits alongside the company's simultaneous push to defend engagement elsewhere, from device pricing moves to expanding Prime Air delivery footprints.
Third-order effects
- If the series' arc holds, it documents a structural hand-off in what constrains the industry: the 2021 deck worried about platforms and gatekeepers, while the 2026 coverage centers on a capex explosion, unprecedented chip demand, and supply bottlenecks — capital intensity replacing distribution as the strategic bottleneck.
- The recurring annual format itself becomes a measurement instrument: each year's emphasis shift — metaverse, then correction, then AI platform shift — traces how quickly the industry's center of gravity moved, and the 2026 'AI eats the world' framing suggests the current phase is being treated as a full platform transition, bubble dynamics included.
The trend: Tech's annual self-assessments have shifted from cataloguing platform gatekeepers and post-pandemic corrections to treating AI as a capital-intensive platform shift that now absorbs nearly every other strategic question.