Strategic trend forecasting: anticipating the future with artificial intelligence
Nassim Taleb’s best-selling 2007 book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” was meant to offer a blueprint for more resilient business strategies in a networked world. Instead, the title has become a shorthand for any event that caught us unprepared. But are these types of events quickly labelled as black swans really unpredictable, or is it our inability that keeps us from connecting the dots at scale to spot and prepare for them? Could machines do better than humans at spotting them, given their near infinite capacity to read, absorb, and assimilate? And could we help communities and stakeholders to “look around the corner” a little on the topics that have greatest potential to impact their organisations, to build the kind of resilience that Taleb called for?
Why a serendipity mindset is crucial to make AI a success
The potential opportunities that AI could enable will remain mostly untapped if we don’t hone our ability to connect the dots and “cultivate serendipity”.
We were delighted to partner with the Serendipity guru Dr. Christian Busch on this article published on Swiss Cognitive which sheds light on how to develop a “serendipity mindset” in order to maximise our potential.
Serendipity is the key that unlocks strategic advantage
The future is already here, it is just not very evenly distributed”, said William Gibson famously. One can debate the accuracy of the statement but it is, nevertheless, quite straightforward to find examples of asymmetry in our ability to harness the latest technologies.
In November 2021, the Financial Times reported that the UK National Health Service is “sending X-rays abroad in vast quantities due to an acute shortage of radiologists”. There are now many examples of artificial intelligence outperforming radiologists at analysing X-rays for health issues but this seems to have been overlooked as a solution in this case. Similarly, during the recent shortage of heavy goods vehicle drivers in the UK, news reports were almost entirely focused on how quickly new lorry drivers could be trained, rather than thinking of the possibility of harnessing autonomous trucks to leapfrog the current infrastructure, a solution which has been trialled in many countries including the United States and Singapore.
How is it that we can miss solutions like these, which are already here and which offer the potential for huge strategic advantage, let alone ones just around the corner?