It’s impossible to predict the future. But it is possible to identify what’s probable and to discount what’s highly unlikely. To help leaders with this task—which is critical for strategic planning and positioning organizations today—we have developed four visions of how the world may evolve by 2050. These representative scenarios are grounded in detailed analysis of 100 megatrends, more than a century of historical data, and dozens of expert interviews.
What Will Life Be Like in 2050?
Click within this interactive image to step into the four scenarios and learn more about the key factors that define them.
BCG Henderson Institute: Discover new thinking shaping the business landscape
What Does a Plausible Future Look Like?
High-profile figures, including Elon Musk, have predicted that exponential growth based on robotics and AI will create a future dramatically different from the present—one that is almost beyond imagination. While this is possible, our analysis suggests it is not the most likely trajectory for the next 25 years. Although economic leaps and technological breakthroughs are expected, the path to 2050 is likely to still be recognizable and not far beyond historical norms. For leaders, planning for these plausible futures offers a better use of resources and is where our four scenarios focus.
For example, in our AI Abundance scenario, the rise of AI technologies has reshaped work and leisure and led to globally enforced regulatory standards. Labor productivity growth in high-income countries is at 5.7%—exceptional compared with the 2% of today and sufficient to support an aging population with an enlarged social safety net. Average working hours per year have fallen in this scenario from 2,100 to 1,600. This 25% drop is due to the automation of many tasks, enabling workers to reduce their working hours while still enjoying high quality of life. These relatively small changes result in a very different relationship between work and identity in this scenario. Ultimately, they transform the society we know today.
The Battling Blocs scenario presents a very different world. A tense stalemate exists between economically decoupled blocs, comprising major nations and others in their spheres of influence. In this scenario, governments’ average defense spending has increased substantially, from 2.4% today to 7%. Although significant, this is not far beyond Cold War spending, which peaked at 6.2%. In fact, individual countries have at times spent far more. In 1952, during the Korean War, US defense spending was at 12%.
The remaining two scenarios are distinct in other ways.
In Climate Coalition, a series of extreme weather shocks have prompted nations to form multilateral agreements on carbon standards, striking a new balance between resilience and economic growth. Although fossil fuels continue to be part of the energy mix in this scenario, technologies like carbon capture and storage reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The share of unabated fossil fuels has fallen from 81% today to 35%. Multilateral efforts to decarbonize the economy have succeeded in stabilizing global temperatures at 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels, compared with 1.3°C in the present. And while structural headwinds from an aging population and other factors remain, the focus on decarbonization and resilience is supporting slow but steady GDP growth of 2.5% per year on average.
In Digital Darwinism, governments and institutions are in retreat. In their place, corporations dominate a low-regulation, rapidly warming world where the divide between rich and poor is high, and humans spend most of their work and leisure time in virtual reality platforms with AI companions. In this scenario, global GDP grows at 4% per year on average from 2025 to 2050—resulting in a near tripling of GDP. But this prosperity is not shared evenly: the AI boom means that compute-rich regions extract rents and resources from weaker economies, while the richest 1% of the population hold nearly half of global wealth. That’s a rise from approximately one-third today, and a share not seen since the industrial societies of the early 1900s.
By understanding the range of distinct but plausible futures, leaders can make decisions today on future-sensing capabilities and how best to capture value over the next 25 years. Shocks or “black swan” events will continue to capture the imagination and the headlines but are outliers for strategic planning. By focusing on what’s probable, leaders can create a stronger plan for the future of their organizations.
Identifying Low-Regret Moves to Make
Some decisions that make sense in an AI Abundance world will be unhelpful if, for example, the future tilts toward Digital Darwinism. But common threads and trends across the four scenarios can provide low-regret moves to help leaders position their organization to prosper.
- Enhance structural resilience. Rebalance in favor of resilience over efficiency to ensure the continuity of operations in a more volatile world.
- Reimagine talent for aging populations and AI. Build strategies and models for intergenerational work, more flexible roles, and talent mobility—and to recruit more widely, especially from emerging labor markets.
- Build digital flexibility and trust. Take a modular approach to tech and data stacks that accounts for rapidly changing technologies.
- Sharpen sensing and influencing capabilities. Develop sensing capacities along multiple dimensions—for example, regulation, geopolitics, resources, and technology—and the capability to act on them via shorter decision loops and rapid experimentation.
- Embrace a broader societal role. Prepare to shoulder more responsibility for workers’ well-being, local resilience, crisis management, and community needs.
Looking ahead to 2050 can seem like a distraction from near-term challenges. Although predicting the future is impossible, decisions made by leaders in the next 5 years will shape the next 25. Developing future-sensing capabilities and flexibility in the face of the wide range of possible futures is key for the next phase of strategic planning and for securing long-term competitive advantage.
