As the new year dawns, we here at NEXT allow ourselves something very rare: permission to look backwards. NEXT has always been about the trends and digital insights that will change your working life in five years, 10 or 15 years. But every so often, it’s interesting to see what was catching people’s attention in the year just gone.

So, here’s our countdown of the top 10 most popular posts in 2024 from NEXT Insights. There’s some intriguing new entries — but also some deeply revealing older pieces pulling in good traffic.

Sit back, and enjoy learning which of our insights resonates most deeply with you this year…

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A few interesting facts about our most popular digital insights:

• The newest piece is from this year
• The oldest piece is nearly 13 years old
• Only two pieces from 2024 made it into the top 10 this year
• 2021 wins this year — with three pieces in the top 10, followed by 2017 and 2024 with two pieces each
• Martin Recke retains the MVP insight writer crown, with 70% of the top 10, and the top spot. I’ll get you next year, Recke…
  

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10. Physical AI might be the truly transformative technology

Adam Tinworth, 2024

The first of two pieces from this year to hit the top 10, this piece was themed around the work of NEXT24 speaker Dr Ivan Poupyrev. His company, Archetype AI, is training AI on the real world. This is truly future-looking; right now, much of the focus of AI work is on information management, but when you start applying machine learning to the real world, whole new fields open up.

This is classic NEXT territory: the technology that will change your life in a decade, not today. And it should be read in conjunction with Poupyrev’s talk at NEXT24.

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9. The Dopamine Loop is Dead. Long Live the Experience Loop!

Martin Recke, 2018

This piece from Martin, launching from NEXT co-founder Matthias Schrader’s book Transformational Products, marked the beginning of the end for building products that hacked the brain’s weaknesses to create addiction. And it also heralded the start of a movement to build a more experience-based product framework.

Companies that paid attention back in 2018 were putting themselves ahead of the curve, but six years on, these ideas are becoming well and truly mainstream — especially as both government and consumers become more sceptical of the old ways. That said, see what’s in the #2 slot…

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8. What is digital humanism?

Martin Recke, 2017

A good question from Martin, and one that (perhaps) the industry has yet to answer well:

Digital Humanism refers to the age-old concern to put humankind, in all its aspects, at the centre of our work. The early, 14th-century humanists started a cultural revolution that peaked in the Renaissance era. Maybe it is time for a new cultural revolution, a new Renaissance. Or is it already happening?

Well, seven years ago, Google Trends didn’t recognise the term. Now, it shows steady searches for the past three years. And you can see its influence in recent trends, like those identified in the Accenture Song Trends 2025, particularly rewilding and the parent trap.

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7. What is post-digital?

Adam Tinworth, 2012

My very first piece for NEXT Insights, and a curtain-raiser for that year’s conference theme, has been in the top ten ever since. To answer the question, post-digital is the condition where digital itself is no longer noteworthy, only what we do with it. “Digital” is no longer a separate category, but threaded through everything we do.

Describes today’s world pretty well, doesn’t it? And maybe that’s what we do: provide digital insights for a post-digital world.

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6. How long and how deep will tech winter be?

Martin Recke, 2023

An excellent question from 2023, that still isn’t completely answered. Yes, the buzz around AI has disguised a general malaise in the world of tech. The big tech companies shed over 150,000 jobs between them last year, adding to the already substantial layoffs from 2023. The message seems to be that traditional “tech” is now dull — post-digital, one might say — and so the industry has placed a huge bet on AI.

The coming years will tell us how good that bet will prove to be…

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5. A biological computer that can play Pong

Martin Recke, 2024

This is a great companion piece to our #10 spot — and is our highest-ranked piece from 2024. Another curtain raiser for NEXT24, this looked at what could be the next wave of AI beyond ones that understand the physical world: biological computers.

Andy Kitchen of Cortical Labs took to the main stage at NEXT24 to explore what this future could look like, once it moves beyond its very early nascent stage. This is a prime candidate for a piece that could still be in the top 10 in a decade’s time, as biological computing develops…

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4. Why our crises are interconnected

Martin Recke, 2021

Slightly depressingly, parts of this piece read as if it could have been written today. In a world increasingly buffeted by complex crises, we’re still trying to implement small, local fixes:

We’re continuously optimising our small piece of the puzzle, while losing sight of the whole picture. This breeds all kinds of interconnected crises, which we fail to recognise as such. This is a failure of management. We need systems thinking and systems design to avoid those pitfalls.

Three years on, there’s not much sign of the world moving this way. Indeed, politically, we’re seeing a move towards more isolation and independence. That’s going to make banging what we should probably call a permacrisis challenging.

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3. The dual strategy of horizontal and vertical integration

Martin Recke, 2021

It turns out that plenty of people just love a bit of horizontal and vertical integration. With the dawning realisation that not everyone can become an Amazon-like platform (and yet, see the #1 spot…), people are seeking to understand the profoundly transformative nature of digital on traditional businesses, and the hard choices that they entail. And so they seek out digital insights — and find this piece.

Three years on, that process is still very much an ongoing one.

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2. Ludic Loops: what you need to know

Adam Tinworth, 2017

As we battle with mobile phone addiction, and a desire to rewild ourselves, the underlying design concepts of much mobile app design, and especially the addictive ludic loops that derive from gambling, have become more prominent in people’s awareness. This piece has been steadily growing for years, and has taken an especially big leap forward this year.

We warned you seven years ago. Now everyone’s paying attention.

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1. Amazon, the pioneer of horizontal and vertical integration

Martin Recke, 2021

Well, I did tell you that people love a bit of horizontal/vertical integration, didn’t I? And it’s a strategy that works for Amazon, as it increased its dominance in 2024. Sure, some splits are starting to emerge in its model: sellers are getting more wary of the platform, for example. And younger, hotter competitors like TikTok Shop, Temu, and Shein are eating away at the business.

But there’s still a hell of a lot of business to eat away at — and this piece shows you why. The sheer depth of the impact of these transformative businesses and their models makes it clear why this tops our list of digital insights — again.

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Image by Moritz Knöringer (Unsplash)