Marketers get very excited by change, often presented as pervasive, fast and difficult to predict.

AI is the current hot topic – will it produce popular unrest and alarming challenges to the capabilities of states, or gradual change and something more benign? There is no consensus. The late Stephen Hawkins said: “Success in creating AI could be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.” Feeling anxious? Me too.

Some perspective may help. The belief that we live in times of accelerated change is, in fact, ancient. It typically provokes apocalyptic thought and a febrile mood that things are skittering out of control. A feeling that the ground is shifting from under our feet in disturbing ways.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who grew his business through restless innovation, recommends instead that we focus on what is not going to change. The solid ground for planning is human nature. Technologies may be new, but to succeed, they typically satisfy needs that are innate and basic. Stand on this ground and we can make our plans with more confidence.

Here are my 10 predictions of things that are not going to change – not fundamentally anyway:

The perception of popularity will still sell: Humans outsource risk to the crowd. Consumers want (most of the time) to make a ‘good enough’ rather than a ‘perfect for me’ choice, and so they use other people like them as a guide. Mass communication will remain powerful because it is also a form of public affirmation that a brand is popular and widely used.

Brands that make it easy to buy will win: Humans don’t like to think or try too hard or too long when buying stuff. Ease increases response (this has always been true of direct marketing). Ease is also a good way to engender trust. As Daniel Kahneman explains, ease takes less effort and “feels familiar, feels true and feels good.” Ease and simplicity of design will continue to drive out complexity. Much of Amazon’s restless innovation (Prime’s drone delivery) serves our lazy, spontaneous selves.

Brands will continue to invest in instantly recognisable icons: As John Berger put it in Ways of Seeing: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.” We process information visually first and fast. Brands will continue to create a large cast of jolly characters, particularly those targeting children. Brands engaged in partnership marketing – most charities, for example – will win the battle for attention with red noses and teddy bears with eyepatches. They are the ones you recognise first and feel familiar with. Brands will still have to communicate quickly and in all shapes and sizes. Big on a poster and tiny on a smartphone.

Branding will still be colour-coded: Coke will be that particular shade of red. Cadbury’s will still be purple because the dye was once so ruinously expensive that only royalty could afford it and so the colour will forever be associated with luxury. Facebook will still be the blue one and Easy Jet will be orange.

Only a few elite brands will be really good at digital personalisation: You already know who they are – the likes of Amazon, Google and Instagram. It takes a combination of huge volumes of recent data, including location data, and heavy investment in machine learning to be consistently relevant. But the gap between the hype and reality of personalisation will persist. It will be frequently dumb (“I went to Berlin a month ago and I no longer need travel insurance”) and sometimes just plain insensitive (“I may have hit a milestone birthday but I really, really don’t want a funeral plan”). Consequently, well-delivered personal service from human beings will not go out of fashion (even if they are looking at a screen with information about you on it at the time).

People will want flexible and immediate services: Armed with our smartphones, we are living lives of semi-planned spontaneity and expect services to be as immediate and flexible as possible. Like Booking.com, you can make a booking right now, but you don’t have to pay until you settle the bill. Or Netflix – you can access it from the screen, cancel it without penalty and give access codes to five friends. Immediate and flexible service are the norm for today’s digital natives and brands will have to evolve their services to reflect their expectations.

Brands will continue to be concerned about ethics: Social purpose is experiencing something of a backlash – if the pundits are to be believed. Yet generational change means it will not go away. Brand owners have recruited a whole generation of managers on the promise that they are going to both make profits and do good in their work. Companies will be held to account, with any falling away being readily exposed (often by disenchanted employees using social media for whistleblowing).

The polysensual pleasures of print: Humans spend a lot of time staring at screens for work and pleasure. But all trends have countertrends, and print has fought back. My local newsagent’s shelves groan with glossy magazines on a dizzying range of interests. When Google wants to promote itself as super smart, what does it do? It publishes hardback books and, personally, I am delighted that e-books have failed to shutter my local bookshop.

The high street will not be killed by e-commerce: Humans are social animals. We like to see and be seen. We like to touch and smell the fruit and vegetables, as evidenced by the fact that there are now more farmers’ markets than Sainsbury’s stores. Marketplaces are social spaces. People who live alone (a number that will inevitably increase over the next decade) will want to get out of the house and see faces, and not just receive a drone delivery from Amazon.

Changes in form but not substance on your smartphone: Have a look at the icons on your smartphone. This surely will continue to be one of the most Darwinian of marketplaces. Restless innovation will keep us in the habit of regular use. It is a life-or-death issue as big tech is (mostly) in the business of selling attention. My guess, though, is that the line-up of players will be similar in 10 years’ time because a) they are paranoid, b) rich, and c) heavily invested in data and AI. The needs they will satisfy can mostly be written down now: finding information quickly, buying stuff, booking things, finding places to go nearby, being nosey, showing off, communicating with friends, hooking up with potential partners, playing games and generally being distracted in moments of boredom. And so on.

Tech-driven disruption fuels speculation about a radically different future arriving fast. Yet, the innovations that will affect more of us are likely to be incremental in nature. I don’t expect self-driving cars any time soon. More likely are electric bikes and cars due to improvements in batteries, thus evolving and combining existing and widely used technologies. Designs will mutate (constantly in the super-competitive world of smartphone apps), but human needs are (mostly) immutable. And that is your solid ground for planning.

Julian Saunders worked in an innovation team at Google and for the UK government after a career in advertising.