AI in Strategic Foresight 2025

Executive summary Innovations in AI have opened the door to possible future scenarios that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The technology affects decision-makers around the world, and perhaps none more than practitioners of strategic foresight – the field where experts explore multiple plausible futures and develop strategies to help organizations, governments and others prepare for events to come. To evaluate AI’s impact on strategic foresight, this white paper presents the results of a survey of 167 foresight experts from 55 countries, drawn from the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, the OECD Government Foresight Community and the Dubai Future Foundation. The results show that a majority of foresight practitioners now use AI in their work. Practitioners report that the technology is useful for essential elements of foresight such as trend analysis, future scenario development and identification of emerging themes and issues. Experts primarily value AI for saving time, saying it streamlines their work by handling repetitive and labour-intensive tasks. Respondents also appreciate AI’s ability to process and analyse large datasets, uncovering trends and insights that would be difficult or time- consuming to identify manually. However, the survey reveals diverging opinions in the field about the technology’s usefulness, accessibility and reliability. Many respondents express concerns about the quality and trustworthiness of AI-generated content, noting that it is prone to hallucinations, operates without transparency and can produce biased results. AI is also reported to have limited capacity for inductive reasoning, as the technology draws from existing knowledge and struggles to embrace the forward- looking perspectives needed for strategic foresight. The survey also highlights gaps in how AI technologies are seen by practitioners in the public and private sectors, academia and civil society, with those in the private sector feeling most confident in their abilities to use AI in their strategic foresight work. Furthermore, respondents say that in some cases – for example with public sector workers operating under data security and confidentiality restrictions – a lack of established AI usage guidelines can hamper foresight practitioners’ ability to fully realize the opportunities AI can offer. This white paper includes recommendations to take advantage of areas where AI can augment foresight, and to limit its potential pitfalls. These include increasing AI literacy among the global foresight community and encouraging experimentation to move beyond simple use cases of the technology. AI tools can help supplement – but not replace – human efforts in the field of strategic foresight, with AI handling tasks such as data processing and initial drafts, thereby freeing up time for experts’ higher- level analysis, interpretation and critical thinking. AI’s intersection with strategic foresight offers both opportunities and challenges.