Horizon Scanning and Strategic Intelligence: AI in Modern Decision Making

In an era of rapid change and ongoing unpredictability it becomes more important than ever for us humans to procure solid information from reliable sources, and to turn it into actionable strategic insights. Recent days and weeks on the international scene have epitomized how established international structures and seemingly predictable policies can be overturned all of a sudden, sending ripples and waves through all sectors in all countries. For any strategic decision, a tremendous amount of relevant information can be found distributed across disparate sources, far exceeding what human attention can track. While the rise of Generative AI has put much focus on generative text, the latest improvements in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) have opened the possibility to continuously monitor this vast sea of information, surfacing critical insights for human decision makers. This has the potential to transform both policy making and strategic planning through making available more and better quality information at higher speed and lesser effort than ever before, while keeping human judgment where it belongs – at the center of decision making. The foundation of informed decision making lies in understanding both established knowledge and emerging developments.

By building on comprehensive knowledge graphs, modern AI systems can perform continuous horizon scanning across multiple sources and domains. Experience with our Topic Feeds demonstrates how this systematic monitoring can help decision makers to identify patterns, relationships and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.

When monitoring strategic developments, a well designed AI system should consistently track:

• Evolving discussions and interaction across different institutions and forums, as in our
  Institutional Monitors
•  Connections between new information and established knowledge
• Emerging trends and shifting priorities
• Historical context and precedents for current developments
• In this way, business leaders can better anticipate regulatory impacts on their industry; public
  sector officials can understand the broader implications of their decisions; NGOs can track
  developments across multiple jurisdictions more effectively.

While systematic monitoring excels at connecting information and tracking developments over time, many decisions require immediate awareness of ongoing discussions. Real-time processing systems like StreamScope complement our horizon scanning solutions by analyzing live broadcasts and discussions as they happen, automatically identifying speakers, speech patterns, key topics, and alerting stakeholders when their areas of interest are being discussed.

This immediate access to processed information brings many advantages. For example, stakeholders no longer need to wait for filtered summaries or rely on incomplete analysis, while for the public, it enables a new form of democratic access to complex and hard- to-track procedures of modern policymaking and government.

The key to effective decision making isn’t just having information—it’s transforming that information into strategic insight. This requires understanding of historical context, identification of patterns and hidden correlations across different domains, recognition of emerging trends early, and evaluation of potential future developments through diverse analytical perspectives. One of the most challenging aspects of strategic decision making is anticipating how different stakeholders will respond to new initiatives or changes. The approach we are currently developing and preparing for the market combines knowledge graphs with synthetic panel assessments and quantitative analysis techniques to evaluate developments through multiple analytical lenses. This multi-perspective analysis helps to identify weak signals and emerging trends while providing nuanced, data-driven assessments of potential impacts and reactions. By measuring the future impact of current developments from multiple angles—economic, social, environmental, and technical—we can already provide valuable insights about the relative magnitude and direction of potential outcomes. Looking ahead, we are building towards a future where we help decision makers evaluate policy choices with unprecedented clarity.

Our development roadmap focuses on systems that will provide quantifiable confidence levels for different outcomes, allowing leaders to move from intuition-based to evidence-based strategic planning. This represents not just an evolution in decision support technology, but a fundamental transformation in how organizations can approach strategic choices. We are already making this vision accessible through intuitive chat interfaces that allow users to query complex information at different levels of understanding in order to reach forward- looking conclusions.

Whether accessing proprietary databases, real-time feeds, or specific historical data, users can engage in natural conversations to explore and understand the implications of various developments.  Combined with our automated reporting capabilities, this creates a comprehensive system where strategic insights can be both generated systematically and explored interactively.

In conclusion, strategic decision making today requires combining human expertise with intelligent information processing. By making vast amounts of information more accessible and actionable, we can support better decisions while maintaining transparency and accountability – importantly, in line with European ethical and legal standards, such as the AI Act. Veridien’s technology aims at transforming how organizations approach both policy making and strategic planning—not by replacing human judgment, but making it more powerful by equipping decision makers with better tools than ever. Therein lies arguably one of the greatest opportunities of our times for understanding ever more complex situations, developing effective strategies, and crafting equitable solutions in the interest of us all.