The business of sleep, future of unions and new stars of global trade: Predictions we got right — and wrong — in our Big Ideas for 2024

Sometimes it pains us to be right.

Bumpier skies was one of our Big Ideas for 2024, our annual list of what we expect the year ahead to bring. To compile it, our editors speak to experts around the world who are deep experts in their fields to get a peak into their worlds.?

This past year teetered from volatile to erratic as global conflicts erupted on the world stage and the relationship between employers and workers endured a tug-of-war, with both sides trying to gain the upper hand in shaping (or reshaping) post-pandemic workplace norms.?

Yet it was also a year where we continued to see technological progress, especially in the all-consuming drumbeat of new artificial intelligence products, and across entire industries such as healthcare and energy.?

For 2024, we made 34 big predictions, and hit the mark — at least to some degree — on 20 (or 58.8%) of them. Another three were clearly off-base. The rest were too soon to tell.

Here were some of the highlights:

• This year may well be one of the worst on record for turbulence-related injuries aboard flights, something that Jessi Hempel predicted at the end of last year. Tragically, six months later, a Singapore Airlines flight en route to London encountered such severe turbulence — dropping 54 meters (177 feet) in less than five seconds — that one person died and 71 other passengers were injured. While it was the worst incident, it wasn’t the only one.
• The sleep economy is booming, reaching a record high in 2024, with total spending across the sector amounting to $585 billion. Satoshi Ebitani predicted that a growing cadre of companies would fuel the growth.?
• More electric vehicles now offer bidirectional charging, meaning that they can be a backup power source during an outage. California’s legislature passed a bill in September legalizing the practice, and car companies are rolling out vehicles with the capability, including Tesla, which started shipping Cybertrucks last December. It was a trend that Josh M. Carney spotted, and has only become more top-of-mind during this year’s back-to-back hurricanes that pummeled Florida and North Carolina.
• Foreign investment in Mexico reached new heights in the first half of the year when it reached $31 billion. Viridiana Mendoza made the prediction as Mexico seemed poised to benefit from rising tensions between the U.S. and China that have helped spark the movement toward “nearshoring.”

Of course, not all predictions can be accurate — and some of our bets were widely off. Take for example the call that Walmart would emerge as the dominant player in the healthcare retail wars. Healthcare is a tough sector to win in, and while industry expert Robert Pearl, M.D. made a convincing argument, Walmart in April said it would be shuttering its health clinics and telehealth services.

A number of our Big Ideas tried to showcase what our future workplace could look like, especially as labor markets cooled from North America to Europe and Asia. Employers have taken advantage of the opportunity to ramp up return-to-office mandates and it’s unclear whether our prediction of an increase in “back-door remote jobs” will come to fruition. (That’s the problem with trying to predict something largely happening behind the scenes.)

One take that is gaining steam as a result is that collective bargaining activity has ramped up. In the U.S., the National Labor Relations Board received 3,286 petitions for union elections in fiscal year 2024, which ended Sept. 30. That’s double FY ‘21 and a 27% increase over last fiscal year. And new numbers from Europe show significant increases in worker strikes in countries ranging from Germany to the Netherlands and Spain.

Gen Z remains the most pro-union generation — yet it still remains to be seen whether that interest will mean more collective bargaining activity (so TBD on our prediction of a “Great Negotiation” between them and their employers.) They’ve also been forgoing full-time jobs entirely, instead opting for gig work and joining the growing creator economy (something even Ivy League schools are embracing — a prediction we did get right.)

So what will 2025 hold? Check out our Big Ideas for 2025 later this week from our LinkedIn News page.

What prediction or trend do you expect to have the biggest impact in the year ahead? And why? Share your thoughts in the comments or by posting a video with #BigIdeas2025.

— Written by Beth Kutscher