High in the forested hills above the Cote d'Azure and far away from the bronzed tourists sits - rather unexpectedly - the French technoland of Sophia Antipolis, perhaps the least industrial of industrial parks and home to dozens of les compagnies haut-technologies and their 20,000 employees.

Amongst them, in a low building with long expanses of windows that let workers fully enjoy the sweeping view down to the blue Mediterranean, is another surprise. Andersen Consulting, a division of the financial services company Arthur Andersen, nestles into the landscape along with the leading computer and telecommunications companies one might expect in such a place. Sophia is home to 400 employees at Andersen's technology park, where a core group of 30 people research the latest technologies and find ways of applying them, in often futuristic models, to business problems.

Andersen sends out a small army of consultants from the park to companies in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India. These men and women "bridge the gap", as the company says, between the mainstream business world and the often intimidating and sometimes arcane technologies, like wearable computers or computerised "intelligent agents" that fetch information off the Web according to an individual's particular interests.

Unsurprisingly, Andersen says it has few problems finding employees - who wouldn't be willing to relocate to blue skies and palm trees? It also seems to have little difficulty finding senior executives willing to come to Sophia in small groups each week to listen to Andersen consultants preach several visions of the future convergences of technology and business (Andersen consultants are very careful to point out they are not showing the future).

And nowhere is the thoroughly up-to-date melding of business and technology more apparent than in the language in which these "Technology Visioning Workshops" are described, a cross between marketing jargon, technospeak and Californian philosophising. As one brochure says: "Integrating focused technology competencies and creatively reusing knowledge capital, the Andersen Consulting Technology Park helps client teams deliver advanced business solutions". Andersen says it has "a vision of technology . . . that is leading us to a new world, a `connected world' . . ." Quite.

There are "value chains", "intellectual assets", "intellectual capital", "buyer-centric markets" and "technology-enabled solutions".

Andersen consultants also speaks of the e-Economy (electronic economy), v-Commerce (voice technology-based commerce), and disruptive technologies (technologies which completely change the way people do things, such as the shift from vacuum tubes to semiconductors in computers, or from slide rulers to calculators).

"Basically, we research and envision the business impact of new technologies," explains Andersen's Dror Orbach. "We want to challenge the embedded assumptions people have had for years and years on how business should be done." And challenge, they certainly do. Part of the remit of the research and development people at Sophia (a similar number works at similar tasks in facilities in Palo Alto, California and outside Chicago, Illinois) is to come up with experimental applications for emerging technologies.

So, the employees at the centre tell their visitors about the "Info! Wall", an intelligent wall which is actually a giant Web screen, which can sense when an individual enters the room and immediately projects information and websites relevant to that individual on the wall - snippets of information that Andersen terms "mental snacks".

Or, there's the employee "Awareness page" - a Web page which draws down and filters only the information a given employee might want off the Web or the corporate intranet. There's an "Awareness Machine" - a portable device which uses Web technologies for everything from updating a personal schedule to buying and paying for a cup of coffee.

It also will scan the Web regularly for information tailored to an individual (the working prototype used a Nokia mobile phone to do the job).

Technologies have already seeped deep into everyday life, he says. The average American already comes into contact with 70 microprocessors before lunch and the world of portable devices which feed us streams of Net-based information is just around the corner.

That poses fearsome challenges, he admits - people may soon be able to stand in a shop and scan in the barcode of an item to get the price and information on the product - and request that the Web query other online sites for prices on the same item. If it's cheaper somewhere else, the shop will lose that sale.

On the other hand, in one futuristic scenario dramatised on video by Andersen, shops could keep track of the clothes you already own and offer exactly the range of items you might like to purchase to go with them. Similarly, your computerised car might tell you which restaurants in the next town are open, and remind you that your mother's birthday is coming up. There are challenges, Mr Orbach notes, and an endless horizon of possibility, a new marketing world to colonise.

Many clients baulk at the company's visions.

Andersen's director of vision and research, Mr Martin Illsley, rattles off a list of reasons why: security concerns; corporate cultures which cannot accommodate technological change; interfaces between humans and computers which people find too exasperating; regulatory problems within given countries; and communication costs which make Web access an expensive option outside the US.

Andersen is not new to the visionary game. It claims it has predicted much of what's coming to pass - it pitched the idea of wireless devices back in 1993 and has been pushing the notion that speech will drive interaction with devices in the future. It predicted the integration of the Web with business applications like SAP's management software and, years back, came up with a prototype that demonstrated how Federal Express could let customers track packages over the Web - a capability FedEx eventually offered, with much fanfare.

And what does Mr Illsley think will be the next major technological trend? "Ubiquitous computing," he says without hesitation, referring to a world in which numerous devices, from your refrigerator to your mobile phone to your personal organiser, will be Net-linked and microprocessor-enabled. "For many companies, that's going to be a big opportunity."