Happy New Year. May it be a great one for you personally and as an organization.
We are beginning a new extension to our service here designed to help you get the best out of ST, to let you know what we are working on and to elicit your ideas for further improvement. These occasional newsletters are expected to be produced about four times a year. Please feel free to share with your associates.
Getting the Best Out of Our Service
We know from our experience that our most successful clients are those who have integrated strategic foresight throughout their organization, or their clients, rather than relying on one-off research by central teams alone or as ad hoc use. Click here to refresh your memory on how these clients use Shaping tomorrow.
We are always available to help you too.
What we are working on looking forward, 2019 promises to be the most exciting development year since Athena was born in 2013. Our original intent was to create a robot scanner that could remove the drudgery and hit and miss scanning efforts by humans alone. We have mostly succeeded in that and will continue to improve
Athena’s data extraction and visualizations in 2019. In 2018 we began giving Athena more cognition. She is increasingly self-learning and can now evaluate missing emerging opportunities and risks in your own organization or another’s strategy in a few minutes. We believe this is a world’s first. And she is now capable of instantly suggesting potential solutions to any of your Challenges thus helping you to innovate and stay up to date with the best ideas to solve your issues. Again, a world’s first we think. This will go live at the end of this month, but we are happy to give you an advanced preview.
Both these advances are useful consultancy tools too for use with your clients.
Recently, the rise of Chat and Voice Bots led us to extend Athena as a digital assistant, coach and on the job trainer (Ask Athena). We now see that our future lies in developing Athena’s ability to converse with you on only that which interests you, providing the right information, knowledge and wisdom in the moment by a combination of text, voice and dynamic visuals. Currently, Athena looks like her brain is all over the
floor on our webpages and it's up to you to find what you need. But, Athena as a Chat and Voice Bot will change all this. In her future, she will dramatically change to acting more like a Digital Oracle, sharing what she knows only when asked. She will also passively listen to you alone, or in meetings, respond to your questions and thoughts, like Amazon’s Alexa, cook comprehensive, customized reports to order and facilitate workshops.
Athena will be your digital companion, always-on, alerting you to important emerging changes and helping you make robust and agile decisions when required.
This is going to take a lot of work that will need several iterations over the coming year. A lot of experimentation and testing is on the cards too, behind the scenes. We have the team, the tools and most of the know how to achieve this in the next two years.
We will keep you posted on progress with these developments in subsequent occasional client newsletters.
Ideas for Improvement
We may already have a full plate of 2018 developments but that won’t stop us developing your ideas for improvement at the same time. For instance, many of you have asked for the ability to create instant, one-click research reports and to be able print and save your visuals without the need to use external software from Snagit. The latter is scheduled for delivery in the first quarter of 2019 and will again speed up and remove drudgery from your day allowing far more time for strategic thinking and
action planning.
And, several of you have asked that we provide Shaping Tomorrow’s regular Trend Alerts to your colleagues. This is now available.
You can send us your ideas and requests here and give us feedback on this occasional newsletter.
or contact us for a demo update.
Wishing you a great 2019
The Shaping Tomorrow team.