A 2023 overview of macro tech trends, focusing on the e-commerce slowdown, layoffs, Amazon, 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' annual deck has become the tech industry's year-opening calibration exercise, and the 2023 edition marks a hard pivot from last year's Web3-and-metaverse-focused agenda to a post-boom reality: an e-commerce slowdown, widespread layoffs, Amazon under pressure, and advertising repricing.
The title, 'The New Gatekeepers', frames the strategic question — who controls distribution now — while flagging generative AI opportunities beyond text and images before they became mainstream. A companion overview published a day earlier covers the same ground, and subsequent editions show how prescient that pivot was: the 'AI eats the world' framing two cycles later and the capex-explosion analysis after it trace directly back to the shift first sketched here.
First-order effects
- Amazon sits at the center of the deck's slowdown narrative, with its e-commerce retrenchment and cost cuts standing in for the sector-wide correction the layoffs data confirms.
- Readers who used the 2021 edition to calibrate on Web3 and metaverse get a replacement map built around advertising weakness and early-stage generative AI instead.
Second-order effects
- Investors and strategists treating this deck as a consensus-setting document would have re-weighted attention away from metaverse spend toward AI applications beyond consumer chatbots at exactly the moment capital was still flowing elsewhere.
- The 'gatekeepers' framing primes the market to evaluate AI opportunity through the lens of platform control — who owns distribution of generated content — rather than model quality alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern across editions holds, the annual deck functions as a leading indicator of narrative rotation in tech: each year's marginal topic (cloud in 2021, generative AI in 2023) becomes the following cycle's dominant agenda item.
- An industry reading its own state through one analyst's synthesis risks herd behavior around whichever theme the deck elevates, amplifying both the FOMO-driven investment surges and the busts the later editions document.
The trend: Annual macro-trend syntheses are shifting from cataloging tech adoption cycles to narrating the generative-AI platform transition, with each edition retroactively marking where the consensus turned.