Strategic trend forecasting: anticipating the future with artificial intelligence

Nassim Taleb’s 2007 bestseller The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable set out to help organisations build resilience by preparing better for rare events. Two decades later, the term has been flattened into shorthand for any surprising occurrence.

But are these events really unpredictable, or do humans simply lack the capacity to identify warning signals at scale? The thesis of this piece is that artificial intelligence — capable of ingesting and pattern-matching across volumes of information no individual or team can absorb — might excel exactly where people struggle.

If the signals were always there but buried in noise we couldn’t process, then technology that processes noise as its native medium should let organisations and communities anticipate emerging issues before they become crises. That’s the foresight Taleb advocated for — and the operational problem we built Serendipity AI to address.

The complete discussion is published in LSE Business Review.