Institute for the Future

AI adoption is advancing at an unprecedented pace. It is nearly impossible to avoid the deluge of research, opinions, and debates about its impacts. Every organization and community, including IFTF, is asking: "What's our position with regard to this technology? How do we uphold our organizational values and principles, and how do we integrate AI into our work, or not?” Over the past few months, we engaged our staff and community in deliberations to start answering these questions.

Late one night in 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. sat alone at his kitchen table. He was 27 and leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott. His wife and baby daughter were asleep. The phone rang, and a caller threatened to bomb his house and kill his family if he didn't leave town. In his later account, King began thinking about how to get out of the boycott and return to being a pastor.

AI tools are entering many domains of our lives, including the practice of foresight. As an organization whose early work focused on understanding the social impacts of ARPANET — the predecessor to the Internet — and prototyping the first remote communications systems, we have spent decades exploring the opportunities new technologies open and the uncertainties they create for society. At IFTF, we are approaching AI tools with the same sense of curiosity, experimentation, and discernment.

On Tuesday, September 1, 2026 we enjoyed an inside look at one of the most forward-thinking graduate design courses being taught today. Professor Helen Maria Nugent, Dean of Design at the California College of the Arts, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at her course, Design Research for Speculation, where students learn to transform rigorous research into compelling, persuasive visions of the future. The course teaches students to move beyond traditional design skills and develop futures literacy.

We tend to frame today’s epidemic of loneliness and isolation either as a mental health crisis — rising rates of anxiety and depression— or as a political one, feeding polarization and the erosion of trust between groups. Both are true. But there is a third crisis running alongside those two: the crisis of vast economic inequality that has reached proportions we have not seen in over a hundred years.

What if boards were filled with visionary futurists who thought beyond the present-day confines of daily operations? In this webinar recorded August 5, 2026, IFTF's Andrew Hawn talks with Becky Cooperman, Principal Consultant at White Knuckle Futures, diving into how she successfully integrated foresight as a framework into the board of her neighborhood school.

Why did 20+ foresight practitioners across a dozen countries feel compelled by an off-the-cuff Whatsapp message to eventually get together in Singapore to produce ten rigorous, coherent forecasts on the transformation of the global landscape?

This one-of-a-kind course is designed to help individuals and organizations develop their skills in the art and science of foresight. You’ll learn to make sense of the constant stream of news and information; transform urgent foresight into actionable insights; disrupt short-termism; and develop and test your own experiments in future-making.

Whether it's AI, a national policy, a religious leader, or your own futures thinking practice, it's a worth question worth asking.

Institute for the Future partnered with the Episcopal Diocese of Texas (EDOT) to create Faith in the Future: A Book of Provocations from 2035 — a custom forecast report for church leaders on the forces that will affect their congregations over the next decade. The report applies the BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) framework, developed by IFTF Distinguished Fellow Jamais Cascio, to five areas — faith, climate, health, learning, and philanthropy.