What happens when you analyze college football like the CIA?
What happens when you apply CIA-style analysis normally used to understand China or Russia to your favorite sports team?
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From the team shipping AI forecasting and sensemaking systems used by government, defense, finance, and research teams.
Scenario Planning as a System, Not an Event
Scenario planning has shaped corporate strategy and investment research for decades, but in most organizations it remains an episodic exercise that quickly ages as the world moves on. What changes when scenarios become living models, continuously tested against measurable drivers and updated probabilities, is not just the analysis but the quality and timing of the decisions that follow.
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The Design Principles that Informed Our New AI Forecaster
Rather than optimizing for raw predictive accuracy, effective AI forecasting systems should support sensemaking by tracking probabilistic judgment, disagreement, and changing confidence over time.
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Introducing Cultivate's AI Forecaster
Cultivate Labs is announcing a new forecasting capability that uses AI to generate fast, continuously updated probabilistic judgments and integrate them into existing analytic workflows. The approach emphasizes combining multiple perspectives and pairing AI with human judgment to improve decision-making under uncertainty, rather than relying on any single model or replacing people.
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The Hardest Part of Analysis Is the Question
When something big happens in the world, it’s easy to ask questions that feel informed but don’t really help anyone decide what to do next. This post shows how I try to slow that moment down, using the Greenland episode to illustrate how better questions lead to better analysis.
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Will AI finally unlock the potential of probabilistic forecasting?
Tldr; - Hopefully, but it won’t be because of superhuman accuracy.AI forecasting systems are the talk of the forecasting world. AI forecasting tournaments are running, VC money is flowing, and benchmarks are being published. We’re building an AI forecasting system ourselves. As with the rest of crowdsourced forecasting’s history, most of the chatter is around accuracy. How accurate are the LLMs? When will they beat human and pro forecasters? Can you train models specifically for forecas
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Using AI and ARC to think like the other side
When geopolitical analysts wrestle with a complex geopolitical question, say the future of European financial support to Ukraine, they tend to begin with familiar sources: Western media, think tank reports, and official statements. But what if using AI they ran the same scenario-building exercise with Russian sources threaded in? The same Russian sources a Russian analyst might leverage as part of their own analysis? What might change in the narratives, framing, and assessed likelihoods?
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Moonshots and Power Plays: A Forecasting Workshop on Lunar Diplomacy in Tokyo
A forecasting workshop on lunar diplomacy, co-facilitated by the Bertelsmann Foundation and the European Space Policy Institute, explored how national interests, private investment, and international competition will define future activity on the Moon. Participants identified signposts and used crowdsourced forecasting to track three plausible scenarios: rival lunar coalitions, China cislunar primacy, and a pluralistic lunar order.
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How the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prediction Market Made Analysis Better
Recent disputes over Iran’s nuclear ambitions highlight the power of a now defunct internal U.S. intelligence forecasting capability, the Intelligence Community Prediction Market (ICPM).
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A few reflections on my time visiting Kyiv
Last month I had the opportunity to travel to Kyiv for some work we’re doing there. Since not many people are traveling to Kyiv these days from the US, I thought I would share a few reflections on my visit.
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2024 End of Year Retrospective
Before we close shop and take a few days off, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the challenges, milestones, and relevant events that defined the year for our company + a few extra musings if you will so indulge me. So let’s take a step back and reflect on what made this year what it was.
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Cultivate Labs Awarded As a Supplier on UK Crown Commercial Service's G-Cloud 14 Framework
After a detailed vetting process earlier this year, Cultivate Labs has been awarded as a supplier on Crown Commercial Service’s (CCS) G-Cloud 14 framework. This means any UK Government agency or UK non-profit or charity can easily access Cultivate's cloud hosted software and professional services.
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Introducing un-scored questions
The religion of probabilistic forecasting says SCORE EVERYTHING and we try to(!), but there are times when you want to ask a question that may not have good resolution criteria or the answer is 5+ years from being known so we've introduced unscored questions.
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Expert Q&A: Advancing wildfire predictions to protect Canada's forests
The Canadian Forest Service utilizes crowd forecasting program called Firesight to predict wildfire occurrences and damages across Canadian regions. We sat down with Forest Fire Research Scientist Mike Wotton to learn more about how Firesight is supporting the fire management community.
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Teaching future government leaders how to assess policy decisions using decomposition
Georgetown graduate students participate in a Cultivate decomposition workshop to learn how policy analysts break down an issue such as the Israel-Hamas War - and combine it with crowd forecasting to track future outcomes.
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How crowdsourced forecasting works
Crowdsourced forecasting is the process of soliciting quantitative forecasts (e.g. probabilities) about future events from a large group of people, then aggregating them into a "crowd" forecast. By harnessing the collective intelligence of a large, diverse group of people, crowd forecasting gives an analyst or decision maker valuable outside perspectives to consider.
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The value of crowd forecasting for government and industry
Cultivate supports government national security communities and multinational organizations in implementing crowdsourced forecasting. This methodology builds a cycle of information, in which experts can tap into the collective intelligence of their organization to bolster decision analysis.
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Citations enhance AI-generated rationale summaries on our Forecasts platform
Our AI forecast rationale summaries have been updated to include citations, so you can see the original context of the forecast and rationale contributed.
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Turning to crowdsourced forecasting when you’re not sure who or what to listen to
With the rise of AI, disinformation in mass media will only continue to grow and evolve. Turning our attention to crowd forecasting is one way that we can better understand, monitor, and respond to global uncertainty – together.
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New whitepaper: A roadmap for using AI in crowdsourced forecasting
New whitepaper explores how to use AI across different aspects of crowdsourced forecasting, including question development, reporting, engagement, and forecasting.
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Cultivate Forecasts platform now features AI-generated forecast rationale summaries
We released a new feature on our forecasting platform: AI-powered forecast rationale summaries using Anthropic’s Claude2. Read about how forecasters and analysts are already using this capability.
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Team forecasting lessons from Cultivate Labs
As a company, we hold small group forecasting sessions regularly. We’ve learned a few tactics to help other teams surface diverse viewpoints and avoid groupthink. Here are some recommendations for any teams forecasting together.
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Google experts join a forecasting meetup about the future of AI hosted by Cultivate’s INFER
Earlier this month, one of our client programs INFER – the crowd forecasting program supporting the U.S. Government – hosted a special forecasting event about the future of AI. The event was attended by select INFER forecasters and nearly two dozen forecasting enthusiasts who work at Google, joining in a personal capacity.
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Announcing a new service: Issue Decomposition Workshops
We are launching a service offering: "issue decomposition" workshops – a new way of methodically understanding how the future will impact your most important decisions and policies.
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New capability makes it easy to collect forecasts from wider audiences
Cultivate has released a new “request for response” capability that allows you to send any audience a simple survey, in which they can submit forecasts that will automatically get aggregated with your crowd’s on your Forecasts platform.
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