Behind the build: How we turned AI into a teammate for foresight work

Foresight professionals are under more pressure than ever. They’re expected to deliver meaningful insights quickly, stay ahead of change, and support strategic decisions. And all this with limited time and resources. The volume of information is already challenging, but turning that flood of data into something useful is the real hurdle.

At FIBRES, we set out to solve this problem in a bold new way.

We didn’t want to build just another AI feature. We wanted to create something that truly helps foresight professionals do what they do best without being buried in busywork: make sense, interpret, and lead.

This is how Foresight Agents were born.

Real pain, real opportunity

We’ve spent years listening to our users. One theme kept coming up: Foresight work takes time. A lot of time. Especially in the early stages of horizon scanning, sorting signals, and building radars.

These are essential steps, but also repetitive and resource-intensive. “From countless conversations with foresight professionals and FIBRES users, it’s clear the pressure to deliver high-quality outputs, fast, has never been greater”, Dani Pärnänen, Chief of Product at FIBRES, points out.

We saw an opportunity to shift how this work gets done. Instead of asking professionals to do more with less, we asked: What if AI could take care of the groundwork so people could focus on higher-value thinking?

Panu Kause, the CEO of FIBRES sees this as the foundation for this new feature family: “One of the core ideas behind Foresight Agents is to speed up the scanning work, make it far more versatile, and free up our users' time for the truly valuable: sensemaking, collaboration, and driving action.”

Not another chatbot

Foresight Agents aren’t just a chat interface or a generic AI bolt-on. They’re built specifically for foresight work.

They are task-driven, they adapt to your specific context, and they are embedded directly into the FIBRES platform. “We didn’t want to wrap any of the off-the-shelf AI models in a new interface and call it innovation. Instead, we built an agentic system that works like a real teammate performing actual foresight tasks in a structured way, and at scale”, Dani Pärnänen describes.

The benefits of building the Foresight Agents natively on the robust FIBRES foresight platform are clear. As Panu Kause puts it, “FIBRES isn’t just about sourcing data or chatting with AI. It’s a robust, secure, corporate-grade environment where teams can work with their own data across the entire foresight cycle from collection to collaboration to action.”

This is what sets FIBRES Foresight Agents apart. They work with your strategic context, using real-time, high-quality sources, and deliver outputs you can use without jumping and copy-pasting between tools, writing prompts, or managing custom integrations.

From overload to clarity

Before Foresight Agents, teams spent days or weeks gathering data, scanning reports, clustering signals, and formatting trend radars. All of this had to happen before any real sensemaking could begin.

You couldn't put that amount of work into just anything, so doing more explorative or experimental foresight work was just a dream for many.

Foresight Agents completely flip that model. The very first version of the system is able to scan over 200,000 publications, surface relevant content, cluster trends, and build initial trend or technology radars in less than an hour.  “The volume and speed these agents operate on is simply not possible for a human. It’s at least a 100x increase in capability", Panu Kause points out.

Sakari Nisula, Head of Customer Success and Foresight at FIBRES, reflects on this capability with his recent experience in corporate foresight work: “I could never manually scan that much content, find the right signals, and then turn it into something usable in a reasonable amount of time. Now I can.”

More importantly, the time saved can now be spent where it matters most: understanding what the trends mean, engaging others in discussion, and helping teams act on insight. Panu Kause emphasizes that “it is about unlocking time for strategic thinking, creating shared understanding, and making real progress toward decisions”.

Built for trust, designed for collaboration

Strategic foresight work demands credibility. That’s why transparency and traceability are baked into how the Agents operate. Dani Pärnänen describes how this works in practice: “Every insight Foresight Agents produce can be traced back to a real source. Users can see what was done, how it was done, and make adjustments. Nothing is hidden, nothing is off-limits.” Esa Heikkinen, the CTO of FIBRES, adds:  “It’s essential that humans remain in control. The AI agents support you, but you guide the process. You validate the findings, you decide what matters.”

But beyond trust, we also focused on making Foresight Agents collaborative. This isn’t foresight for one expert in a silo. It’s about bringing more people into the process so that insight leads to shared understanding, and shared understanding leads to action. “We’ve designed these agents to encourage more human engagement, not less. That’s critical. Strategic foresight only works if people are included and aligned”, Panu Kause explains.

More people. More access. More possibility.

One of the most exciting outcomes of this work is how it lowers the barrier to actionable foresight. You don’t need to be a methodology expert. You don’t need to know where to find the right signals. With Foresight Agents, more people can start doing meaningful foresight work, right away. “This is a big step toward democratizing futures intelligence. Whether you’re in strategy, innovation, policy, marketing, or sales, you now have access to quality insight, fast”, Panu Kause notes.

That accessibility unlocks new use cases, from innovation pipelines and tech scouting to risk monitoring, stakeholder engagement, and even B2B sales intelligence. It’s not just for foresight teams anymore. "Imagine a sales leader preparing for meetings across multiple industries or a top risk officer tracking signals across their sector. Foresight Agents offer huge value, fast, and in context", Panu Kause continues.

This is not a simplified version of foresight, it’s an expanded version. A system that brings more people in, enables better collaboration, and supports strategic decisions with greater confidence.

What’s next?

The first version of FIBRES Foresight Agents is just the beginning. They’re part of a growing family of AI-powered features in FIBRES that help you build, maintain, and activate your trend libraries and radars over time.

We’re already expanding what these agents can do, from monitoring ongoing changes to helping users build rich future narratives and strategic deliverables. "This isn’t a one-off feature. It’s the beginning of something much bigger: a smarter, more scalable way of doing futures work", Dani Pärnänen visions. Panu Kause adds: “We’re building a system where humans and AI work hand in hand each doing what they do best, across the entire foresight lifecycle.”

Start working smarter on the future

You don’t need more data. You need insight: fast, relevant, and easy to act on.  Let Foresight Agents handle the basic scanning and structuring. You focus on the conversations, the clarity, and the choices ahead. Book a demo to start building your next radar with FIBRES Foresight Agents.