Future fluency is becoming a core design skill. Jonas Lempa explores how megatrends build that fluency, helping product teams spot real change early, ignore distractions, and design with intent instead of instinct.

Designing with a clearer view of the future

Megatrends may sound like yet another overused buzzword, but they are anything but. The term comes from the Greek “mégas” meaning “great,” “powerful,” and “significant,” and that is exactly what they are: massive, long-term forces that reshape society, technology, the economy, and culture. For designers and strategists, they are not noise. They are the context that gives meaning to everything they build. Set against the opposite micro-trends and hypes, megatrend fatigue makes it easy to miss the deeper shifts that define important decisions and the future of UX.

SAP invited Jonas Lempa, Managing Director of Future & Innovation at Taikonauten, to unpack megatrend fatigue and explain how teams can overcome it by using these long-term forces to design with a clearer view of the future. The Berlin-based innovation & design consultancy, founded by CEO Maik Fahldieck, has been continuously reinventing itself for nearly two decades – helping organizations from startups to global enterprises build future-ready digital services and products.

Jonas opened the session with a disarming truth: designers are not in the business of predicting the future, but of preparing for it. Trend work fails when teams treat megatrends like horoscopes or glossy inspiration decks. It succeeds when it helps them ask better questions, admit uncertainty, show unfinished ideas, and resist the temptation of overly optimistic narratives. In other words: megatrends are not about fortune-telling; they are about future fluency.

This mindset matters even more at a huge company like SAP. With 100,000+ employees and products that power entire industries, design decisions echo across thousands of customers, billions of data points, and countless business processes. SAP cannot afford headless trend-chasing. Trends must be understood, not worshipped. And SAP must leverage them without being overwhelmed by them. That is exactly why megatrends resonate inside SAP: they give teams a compass, not a map.

The 4 steps out of the fatigue

Jonas framed this compass through four steps – a simple pattern that helps large organizations make sense of long-term change without drowning in noise.

Step 1: Discover. What is the status quo?

Before looking ahead, teams need a sober view of where they actually stand. Jonas reminded the audience that a megatrend is not necessarily “new.”

Accessibility, for instance, has existed for decades, yet momentum around it is accelerating because the definition of “access needs” is expanding. It is no longer limited to disabilities. It includes:

• people without stable internet
• non-native speakers
• individuals with anxiety or attention challenges
• aging populations

Despite this, accessibility is still treated as an add-on in many organizations. SAP has seen the same pattern in enterprise software: the intent exists, but adoption of guidelines and inclusive patterns is inconsistent. By confronting reality and identifying gaps between vision and practice, megatrend fluency starts.

Step 2: Discover. What if…? What becomes possible?

Once teams know where they stand, they can explore possibilities.

Jonas illustrated this with sustainability: a megatrend that is not just moral but strategic. A company like Henkel, built on chemical manufacturing, must constantly prove its commitment to sustainability. Instead of answering thousands of customer questions individually, Taikonauten created an interactive sustainability quiz – a playful tool that educates users while transparently communicating Henkel’s progress.

This “what if?” thinking mirrors what SAP has also been doing with its customers. Take Henkel’s transformation using SAP AI and SAP Fiori:

Henkel optimized its return processes by integrating AI into everyday workflows – reducing waste, improving logistics, and lowering environmental impact. SAP’s role here is not to dictate what sustainability should look like, but to enable organizations to experiment, model possibilities, and operationalize the megatrend in their own context.

Step 3: Develop. Create something that truly wows

Exploration must eventually lead to creation.

Jonas highlighted AI as the perfect example of a space overflowing with hype yet brimming with meaningful potential. “Wowing” is not about gimmicks, but about usefulness, clarity, and trust.

For SAP, this means building AI that respects enterprise complexity: AI that explains decisions, integrates with business processes, enhances human expertise, and avoids superficial features that create more noise than value. As Jonas states, in Taikonauten’s world, this might look like an immersive prototype or a radically new interface.

Step 4: Deliver. Make the whole product coherent

The final step is about wholeness. Not just shipping, but delivering a complete, meaningful experience.

Jonas pointed to the megatrend “new education” as an example. Traditional categories like “audio learner” or “visual learner” no longer capture how people learn today. In Taikonauten's R&D Lab, the team has been experimenting with AI-personalized training experiences, prototyping in areas like Mixed Reality and beyond. The questions they ask go deeper than sensory preferences: What kind of voice do users trust? What pace keeps them engaged? How do explanations shift understanding?

He also referenced Flowkey, the Berlin-based piano-learning app that uses polyphonic pitch recognition, so learners receive real-time feedback on complex chords. It merges technology, pedagogy, and user psychology into one coherent whole.

SAP faces similar challenges, but on a global scale. Delivering at SAP means aligning product, engineering, UX, accessibility, compliance, and customer expectations into a single experience that works for everyone. The megatrend lens helps SAP define what “wholeness” means in a world of AI, multimodal interfaces, lifelong learning, sustainability, and accessibility.

Mega-company vs. megatrends

Trend fatigue comes from reacting without reflection. Future fluency emerges when teams use megatrends not as predictions, but as lenses that sharpen decisions. Jonas’ framework shows how: start with reality. Explore possibilities. Build something meaningful. Deliver it as a complete experience.

The irony is that megatrends are often seen as something only small, flexible studios can work with. Yet SAP demonstrates the opposite: the larger the company, the more essential megatrend fluency becomes. And that is how SAP – a mega company of more than 100,000 people – continues to design for a future that is not accidental, but intentional.

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