Artificial Intelligence in Strategic Foresight – Current Practices and Future Application Potentials

Abstract

The amount of data and information is growing rapidly and exponentially. A similar degree of change applies to market dynamics, volatile customer requirements, shortened product lifecycles and the amounts of environmental uncertainties in the context of organisational innovation management. Strategic Foresight (SF) offers an approach to deal with environmental uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has huge potential to support SF by means of collecting and analysing data as well as automatizing information research and analysis tasks. The current paper analyses the potentials and organisational practices at the nexus of AI and SF. In the form of expert interviews, current practices and expected future application potentials of AI in SF are analysed. Furthermore, challenges and potential weaknesses of AI in this context are discussed and an outlook on potential future visions of AI in SF from practitioners’ points of view is provided. The results show that currently AI is only applied in a very limited way to support SF, mostly in terms of supporting trend and customer data analysis. However, the results also indicate high future potentials of AI in SF. Experts agree that AI will have a high impact on SF, mainly in terms of automatizing information research and data analysis tasks and subsequently allowing employees to focus on more complex tasks in SF which require human abilities like intuition, creativity, courage and entrepreneurial thinking.t.