Changes are happening around us all of the time, even if we aren’t aware of them. Signs and signals are there—some subtle, others more obvious—and while not all changes will have an impact on your business, knowing what’s coming can help organizations prepare for the risks and opportunities that the future holds.
However, the proliferation of data and sources, especially unstructured data in the form of text, makes it difficult to distill what is contained into information available for insight and decision making. Here, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have a critical role to play when it comes to locating, correlating, analyzing and automating horizon scanning activities.
What Is Horizon Scanning?
Horizon scanning is a forward-thinking analysis that provides organizations with visibility of what’s ahead: trends, issues and any factors relevant to your markets or areas of your business that may have the potential to drive change, pose risks or spur innovation. It’s about transforming even weak signals into actionable insight that can be used for strategic planning.
Events like the COVID-19 pandemic, political conflicts, changing environmental conditions and technological evolutions (including ChatGPT and the rapid evolution and adoption of large language models) have impacts that extend to the economy and society at large, right down to the local supply chain, whose effects may not be seen for years to come, while others are already making themselves known.
This is why governments and organizations in a variety of sectors need to identify even the weakest signals in this increasingly unpredictable world. In this context, being able to take full advantage of all of the information relevant for your business is no longer optional, but mandatory.
The Critical Role of Data
Information, intelligence and analytics—stored in internal silos, present in external sources, or lost in the noise of typical internet information streams—have the potential to put every area of the business at a disadvantage, especially when it comes to decision making.
The vast majority of this information is in the form of unstructured language data—text from documents, reports, social media streams and email—and contained in a wide range of sources that are internal and external to an organization: open-source repositories on the internet, online forums, social networks, but also internal content management systems, intranets and other document repositories.
The potential that this information holds for insight and decision making can only be realized with advanced technology that is able to acquire, understand, process, distill and correlate the language data it contains.
Hybrid AI for Horizon Scanning
This is where AI technology can offer tremendous support, providing business processes with actionable information and the most comprehensive view of the market to support decision making, with proactive monitoring capabilities that identifies connections between targets as data emerges, in multiple languages. This is the expert.ai Platform.
Thanks to a unique combination of symbolic AI approach, machine learning and large language models, the expert.ai Platform leverages different techniques to ensure maximum performance for each use case. It does more than just bring all of your data together: it delivers the right information to the right people at the right time.
By seamlessly combining vast amounts of data from multiple internal and external sources and turning it into a distilled set of insight that is immediately actionable, we help you gain a competitive advantage. We offer seamless integration with your existing BI, ERP and other data management platforms to guarantee maximum business value.
Here are just some of the enterprise challenges that expert.ai Horizon Scanning can identify:
- What are the most probable key drivers of change that will impact my business?
- How can we manage so much data and identify threats before it’s too late?
- Are any of our suppliers or partners experiencing financial difficulties?
- Can the latest research and studies help us create a new product?
- How can we track our competitors and anticipate what they may do in the future?
- Are our legal documents in compliance with the recent changes in regulatory law?
- How can we extract insight from data to improve engagement with customers?
- What does this new trend mean for our business?
For more information on our solutions for Horizon Scanning, download the data sheet:
