How To Spot Trends with AI

After Sarah DaVanzo and I leveraged NWO.ai’s invaluable AI to score and re-rank the META Trends, we were left stuck with one finding:

Both the global and U.S. AI data-driven ranks were significantly different from the original human rank. The AI declared that what we humans thought was most important was not actually the case.

Were we just splitting hairs of importance here, or were these divergent rankings a signal that our META Trends (which came from source material) were not as important as we once thought? Maybe more influential cultural shifts are out there waiting to be exposed.

And if so, how can we find them?

We debated important but missing META Trends for weeks — but, how important could these be if the experts couldn’t agree upon their importance by not collectively highlighting them within their reports which we analyzed? But simultaneously, according to our work analyzing the last five years of META Trends, the “most important trends” being reported haven’t changed much.

There was no denying, though: important, nuanced cultural shifts were missing from our list of 14 META Trends. So, how could we identify and highlight these overlooked trends... and further, in a way that isn’t subjective (Sarah’s opinion against mine)?

We considered just naming our favorite cultural phenomenon not included in the original META rank, or we could have just surfaced interesting leftover trends from the 40+ reports that didn’t make their way into one of the 14 META Trend themes, but both approaches would have thrown us into the same trap which we immediately called out after publishing the most recent annual Meta Trend report: the prevalence of bias and scarcity of risk in the trends and foresight field is concerning at best...

While Sarah and I both have historical proof and a pedigree of accurate trend forecasting, our life experiences and methods differ. Just listing our favorites felt too qualitative. So we designed another experiment with NWO.ai.

Experiment 04.AI META Trend Identification_ Comparison

Left on its own, could AI identify similar or different — perhaps missing — META Trends?

This time we fed all of the text from the original 40+ sourced trend reports into the NWO.ai AI platform. Nearly one million words of text. We figured that the AI could process this information with a different, extraordinary comprehension than us humans, who attempted to do the same when creating that original 2022 rank. We hypothesized the AI would make more connections