Building the future with foresight: How EY scaled trend intelligence with FIBRES

In May 2025, we sat down with the leaders of EY’s Future Insights team to learn how they are transforming the way foresight is done at one of the world’s largest consulting firms. In a world where change moves faster than ever, the ability to anticipate what’s next is a competitive necessity.

For EY’s Future Insights team, foresight is central to their work. And until recently, even the most skilled foresight professionals at one of the world’s leading consulting firms were grappling with some familiar pain points: slow manual processes, fragmented data, and limited scalability.

That changed when they started using FIBRES. This is the story of how EY modernized its foresight capabilities: scaling up, moving faster, and going deeper than ever before.

From fragmented signals to scalable strategy

EY’s Future Insights team operates at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and transformation. Their mission is to help EY and its clients stay ahead by identifying the signals and forces shaping tomorrow’s world and translating those insights into action.

The team’s work spans industries and sectors, bringing together long-horizon foresight with sector-specific expertise. But that breadth also created challenges.

Before adopting FIBRES, much of the team’s work depended on time-intensive, manual research. Valuable insights were trapped in static documents and siloed data sets. Each new foresight request often meant starting from scratch, even when prior work could have been reused or built upon. This not only slowed down turnaround times. It also limited how widely and consistently foresight could be applied across the organization.

The result: powerful insights that weren’t always reaching the people who needed them most, at the right moment.

A turning point: choosing FIBRES

What first drew EY to FIBRES wasn’t just the technology – it was the partnership. The team was looking for a solution flexible enough to meet their unique use case, but also a team that could move fast, iterate, and co-develop new capabilities.

EY’s foresight leaders needed a platform that could adapt to their expansive scope across industries and service lines, and help them organize, scale, and deliver foresight in a smarter, more efficient way. FIBRES provided just that.

Key reasons for choosing FIBRES included:

• Custom configuration for sector-specific use cases

• Unlimited read-access with scalable permissions to enable broader use across the organization

• Continuous product evolution, including collaboration on new feature development

• Integration of AI capabilities, allowing faster research, analysis, and insight generation

• Flexible data sourcing, with tailored RSS feeds and AI-generated data sets aligned to strategic priorities

The match was both strategic and cultural: a capable, customizable tool backed by a responsive, human-first team that understood the complexity of foresight work at enterprise scale.

How EY uses FIBRES today

With FIBRES, the Future Insights team has fundamentally transformed how they deliver foresight both internally and with clients.

One core use is in scenario planning and transformation workshops. The team builds interactive radars and network graphs using curated insights, enabling workshop participants to explore future possibilities through a hands-on, immersive experience. These sessions are used to challenge assumptions, surface new ideas, and align leadership around shared visions of the future.

As of May 2025, another key application is in industry-specific foresight initiatives. EY’s sector leadership teams around the world are currently updating their perspectives in response to accelerating developments in AI. With FIBRES, the foresight team can quickly surface relevant signals, build sector-specific future scenarios, and generate thought leadership content—dramatically reducing preparation time while improving strategic relevance.

The platform’s AI features have become a cornerstone of the team’s process. From surfacing relevant content and generating summaries to creating visually engaging assets and assembling comprehensive data sets, AI has enabled the team to do in hours what once took days or weeks.

From reactive to proactive: what’s changed

Since adopting FIBRES, EY’s foresight capability has grown from a valuable niche to a core component of strategic transformation.

Major improvements include:

• Centralized access to trend and signal data, eliminating the need to start from scratch

• Faster turnaround times, allowing the team to respond to more requests, more quickly

• Greater depth and traceability, enabling deeper insight into the trajectory of key disruptions

• Improved team collaboration, with shared visibility into consistent, up-to-date datasets

• Increased internal visibility and credibility, elevating foresight as a trusted, value-adding practice

By embedding foresight earlier in strategic processes, and by linking insights directly to the opportunities and ideas they inspire, the team is creating stronger narratives and better decision support for clients and internal stakeholders.

Expanding foresight from niche to core capability

Before adopting FIBRES, the Future Insights team was often viewed as a specialist resource: valuable, but not essential to every strategy conversation. With limited capacity and long lead times, their involvement was sometimes seen as optional or supplementary.

That perception has changed dramatically.

By building a scalable, AI-enabled foresight capability with FIBRES, the team is now embedded earlier in more strategic projects. Their insights directly shape transformation agendas, and their presence has become expected—not optional—at the table where long-term direction is being set.

The shift wasn’t just about technology. It was about reframing foresight as a central driver of innovation and competitive advantage, and proving its value across the firm.

A more connected, insight-driven EY

One of the most powerful changes has been the shift from isolated research projects to a living foresight system. The work no longer exists in a vacuum. FIBRES connects trends, scenarios, insights, and actions across the entire organization. Strategic bets and innovation ideas can be traced back to the foresight that sparked them.

This increased traceability and context helps build trust, especially with senior stakeholders. When leaders can see not just the idea, but also the reasoning behind it—grounded in signals, scenarios, and data—they’re more confident in making bold moves.

And as interest in futures thinking continues to grow within EY, FIBRES plays a key role in helping the practice scale. From new training programs to flexible system configuration, the platform is being adapted for broader adoption across the firm.

The future of foresight at EY

Looking ahead, EY’s vision is clear: foresight should become a common language across the organization. It’s not just for specialists, it’s a mindset and methodology that can empower every strategic leader to think more creatively, more critically, and more proactively.

FIBRES enables that by making futures thinking more accessible, scalable, and integrated into day-to-day strategy work.

For EY, foresight is no longer just about seeing what might come next. It’s about actively shaping what comes next, with confidence and clarity.

Building a foresight culture across the firm

The long-term vision is to democratize futures thinking across the organization, so that teams beyond the core foresight group can confidently use and apply these principles in their own work. The goal isn’t for a few experts to predict the future. It’s for many professionals to engage with it, prepare for it, and help shape it. EY’s foresight leaders aren’t just scaling their tools. They’re scaling a mindset.

That means making foresight more accessible, intuitive, and integrated into how teams plan, collaborate, and innovate. FIBRES plays a key role in this by enabling self-service insight exploration, flexible content structures, and configuration options that fit a wide range of users and use cases.

Ultimately, the future EY is building is one where foresight is not a siloed function—but a shared capability that empowers every team to think ahead.

Lessons for other teams

For organizations looking to embed foresight into their strategy and innovation work, EY’s journey offers a few clear takeaways:

• Invest in the right tools to support scalability, collaboration, and repeatability

• Use foresight as a starting point, not just a validation tool

• Empower more people in your organization to engage in futures thinking

• Lean into AI and automation to expand your capacity and reach

• Work with partners who understand your context and co-develop with you

Foresight is no longer an isolated function. It’s a powerful enabler of long-term thinking, innovation, and strategic clarity. With the right approach and the right platform, it can become a core driver of transformation across any organization.

Ready to scale foresight in your own organization?

FIBRES helped EY turn fragmented research into a living, collaborative foresight system. If you’re looking to build a future-ready strategy function — one that moves faster, goes deeper, and engages more stakeholders — we’d love to show you how FIBRES can help.

Book a demo to explore what’s possible for your team.