# Megatrends One Year Later – #19: Temporal Commerce – What I Predicted, and What’s Actually Happening
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“The future of commerce isn’t about selling products, but selling time. The winners will deliver value before it’s requested.” - Futurist Jim Carroll One year ago, in July 2025, I published Megatrend #19: Temporal Commerce as part of my 30 Megatrends series. Time to grade myself. Here's how I set it up back then: Time is becoming the scarcest resource. Business models built around time efficiency, anticipatory delivery, and frictionless transactions create premium opportunities in virtually every sector. The finite, non-renewable, and constantly depleting nature of time for every individual and organization is elevating it to the status of the scarcest resource. And from this fundamental scarcity, a new economic paradigm is materializing: temporal commerce. So is temporal commerce actually happening? Yes — and the delivery-speed number I quoted a year ago is only one-third of the story. Frictionless payments went from feature to default: roughly 80% of digital wallets now run biometric authentication out of the box, 84% of consumers have used a fingerprint or face scan to pay for something, and digital wallet users worldwide grew from 4.5 billion to 5.2 billion in a year, a $68 billion market. QR and biometric checkout didn't stay a demo. They became the rail everything else runs on. The "someone drives it to your door" piece is being quietly automated too. Serve Robotics now runs more than 2,000 sidewalk delivery robots across US cities, wired directly into Uber Eats and DoorDash. Zipline passed a million autonomous drone deliveries and 100 million flown miles, and is adding Austin, Phoenix, and six more metro areas this year. Amazon's Prime Air is scaling out of Chicago-area fulfillment centers toward 30 million reachable customers by year-end, aiming for 500 million packages annually by decade's end. Walmart and Wing are racing each other to 60 million households. Last-mile got its driver, and the driver is a robot. The edge cases I flagged — the body as marketplace, the fridge that reorders itself — haven't shown up on schedule; those are still mostly pilots. But "fix it before it breaks" is already real money: predictive maintenance is a $17.5 billion market this year, growing almost 28% annually, led by manufacturing floors rather than home kitchens. Verdict: Ahead of schedule on payments and delivery, still early on the household edge cases. The checkout and the courier disappeared before the smart fridge ever showed up.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/08/megatrends-one-year-later-19-temporal-commerce/