In the fast-paced world of foresight and futures work, time is of the essence. Our customers, ranging from foresight teams in large organizations to individual practitioners, often expressed the need for a faster, more efficient way to produce trend descriptions and trend reports.
We listened.
Through active engagement and continuous feedback loops with our users, we identified the core need of quickly and repeatedly creating comprehensive trend drafts without sacrificing quality or depth.
Ultimately, it comes down to this: as a foresight professional, is your time best spent on the repetitive task of drafting initial trend descriptions, or on engaging stakeholders, analyzing and adding insight, and interpreting those trends—bringing the unique perspectives that only you or your team can offer?
We’re always on the lookout for ways to address the “jobs to be done” for our users. As we run hundreds of meetings each year with our current and prospective clients and users, we have a unique opportunity to drive our innovation and align our product roadmap with the real-world challenges faced by foresight experts and practitioners around the world.
In this blog post, I share the story behind our new AI-powered trend drafts, detailing how it was developed to meet your needs and revolutionize your foresight work. It is a real-life example of our commitment to customer-centric software product design and roadmapping.
It is AI but not for AI’s sake
Designing this feature was not just about adding an AI component on top of our existing app. The goal was to create a new tool that integrates seamlessly into our current platform, enhancing the overall user experience without disrupting established workflows.
Sure, it would be appealing to “ride the AI wave”, but we’re not about to put AI first, users come first always!
Our team crafted the feature to blend in with the existing functionalities, ensuring a cohesive and intuitive user experience. The result: just one button added where our users usually start writing their trend descriptions.
The AI engine works behind the scenes, analyzing trend titles and generating detailed descriptions that align with the user's needs and context.
Because the AI is integrated deep in our platform and not on the surface level, we can further improve the tool without affecting user experience. This allows us to upgrade to the best and most suited AI capabilities as they are developed. Furthermore, you only interact with FIBRES and not AI directly, which allows us to keep evolving our platform as a purpose-built tool for foresight and futures work.
Shaping the future together
Once we had a working prototype, we turned to some of our most engaged users for fast feedback. Their insights were invaluable. Users praised the tool's ability to produce high-quality drafts in seconds, significantly reducing the time spent on initial trend analysis.
At this point, we knew we were onto something big.
One user noted, "This new feature is really great and super helpful. The descriptions align with my expectations and even the AI generated context is accurate. It makes writing easier and faster. Thank you for this awesome feature!".
Feedback like this not only validated our efforts but also guided our final steps before launching the tool to our entire user base. We believe in iterative development, where real user input shapes the final product.
In this case, we didn’t need to iterate too much let alone get back to the drawing board. A few user experience tweaks and final adjustments were all that was required.
Transforming foresight work
The result speaks for itself. In just a couple of iterations we have a new feature available to all our users that allows them to draft trends in 60 seconds or less. All you need is to write a descriptive title and off you go.
This rapid generation of trend descriptions transforms how foresight professionals work. Instead of spending significant effort on the mechanical aspects of writing trend descriptions, you can focus on your own analysis and insights, connecting them with your organization’s strategy, context, and unique perspectives.
Imagine entering a trend title and, within moments, receiving a comprehensive draft filled with relevant content that you can immediately begin to refine and expand upon. And it doesn't stop there. As you work on the draft, FIBRES automatically pulls in related sources that you can link to and use to build the narrative further.
This isn't just about saving time; it's about unlocking new levels of productivity and effectiveness.
And this is just the beginning. We’re already working on future enhancements, such as automatically finding relevant sources and enabling more comprehensive trend analyses utilizing full trend networks and radars.
The value of generated drafts
While this new AI feature generates detailed descriptions, we intentionally refer to them as "drafts" rather than complete trend descriptions ready for publishing.
This distinction is crucial.
We believe that foresight work requires a human touch—context-specific sense-making that only our users can provide. If you’re interested in hearing more about our thoughts regarding the power of combining human and artificial intelligence, have a listen to a recent talk from our CEO Panu Kause.
The AI drafts serve as a robust foundation, but the true value comes from the user's expertise and contextual knowledge. Our goal is to empower foresight professionals, giving them a head start so they can spend more time on the nuanced, high-value aspects of their work.
Are you a foresight practitioner?
Looking ahead, we see a future where small foresight teams or even single practitioners can have a massive impact.
AI-powered trend drafting is a step towards this vision, enabling our users to allocate more time and effort to critical thinking and strategy rather than the process of writing or producing content from scratch.
We invite you to experience this game-changing feature yourself. Try our new trend drafting tool for free today and see how it can transform your foresight work, just as it has for many of our users.
Join us in shaping the future—one trend at a time.
