Summary of Findings

The authors run six interlocking studies. Taken together, they form a chain of evidence linking state-controlled media to the behavior of frontier LLMs.

1. State-coordinated content is already inside the training data. A five-word-gram analysis of CulturaX — one of the largest open multilingual training corpora — found that roughly 3.1 million Chinese-language documents (about 1.64% of the Chinese subset) match Chinese state-coordinated media sources. That is roughly 41 times the match rate of Chinese Wikipedia. For documents that mention political leaders or institutions, the match rate climbs as high as 24%.

2. Commercial LLMs have memorized that content. When prompted with the first half of distinctive phrases from state-coordinated outlets, leading commercial models reproduce the expected continuation 3–10% of the time, matching or exceeding the rate at which they complete generic web text.

3. Adding state media to pretraining demonstrably shifts model output. Using the open-weight Llama-2-13B as a testbed, the authors show that with as few as 6,400 additional training documents, the model produces more pro-government responses to questions about Chinese leaders and institutions nearly 80% of the time when prompted in Chinese. The effect also spills over into other languages, with the largest spillover where writing systems (and therefore tokens) overlap.

4. Production models behave the same way. When the same questions are asked of major commercial models in Chinese versus English, human annotators judged the Chinese-language response more favorable to the Chinese government in 75.3% of comparisons. The effect holds with real-world user prompts harvested from WildChat and Chinese Q&A platforms, scales with model size (bigger models, bigger gap), and extends beyond China to prompts about Russia and North Korea.

5. The pattern generalizes globally. Across 37 countries where a single language dominates, models prompted in the local language produce more regime-favorable answers in countries with lower press freedom. In high-press-freedom countries, the local-language effect disappears or even reverses. Media freedom, in other words, is now a statistically significant predictor of LLM behavior.

Why It Matters

For two decades, debates about state media influence have centered on television, search rankings, and social platforms. This research moves the conversation into a far less visible and far harder-to-audit layer of the information stack: the pretraining substrate of general-purpose AI.

Three implications stand out.

First, neutrality is language-dependent. A multinational company querying the same model in English, Mandarin, Russian, and Turkish may receive systematically different framings of the same geopolitical reality — not because anyone configured it to, but because the underlying training data reflects the asymmetries of each country’s media environment. The model is not “biased” in the colloquial sense; it is faithfully reflecting the corpus it was fed.

Second, the attack surface is now upstream. Historically, influence operations targeted the consumer: a Facebook ad, a YouTube recommendation, a trending hashtag. State coordinated media in pretraining data influences the model itself, which then mediates every downstream interaction — search, customer support agents, internal copilots, research assistants. The authors put it bluntly: states and powerful institutions now have increased strategic incentives to flood the open web with content designed to be ingested by the next generation of training pipelines.

Third, the cost of influence is shockingly low. The pretraining experiment shifted model behavior with 6,400 documents. That is not a national-scale propaganda budget. That is a small team with a coordinated content operation.

What This Means for CEOs

Most enterprise AI strategies today focus on productivity, cost, and data privacy. This research adds a new category to the executive risk register: information provenance in generative AI. Five concrete implications for senior leaders:

1. Treat LLM outputs about geopolitics, regulation, and foreign markets as analytically suspect by default. If your strategy, due diligence, or country-risk briefings are being drafted or summarized by an LLM, the language of the prompt and the country in question now matter. Ask the same question in multiple languages and triangulate. A cross-lingual divergence is itself a useful signal.

2. Build a vendor due-diligence question set around training data and post-training mitigations. Every major model provider should be able to tell you, at least in broad strokes, how they identify and downweight state-coordinated sources, whether they have language-specific safety evaluations for politically sensitive content, and how they audit for the kind of cross-lingual valence gaps documented here. If they cannot answer, that is the answer.

3. Consider linguistic risk in any market-entry or M&A workflow that uses AI assistance. Analysts evaluating a target in a low-press-freedom market may be working with a model that has absorbed that country’s preferred narrative about its own institutions, regulators, and state-owned competitors. This is not hypothetical — the paper shows it across 37 countries.

4. Invest in retrieval-augmented and source-grounded architectures for high-stakes use cases. When the underlying model leans, grounding it in verified, attributed sources at inference time becomes more than a hallucination mitigation. It becomes an editorial control. For any application where the answer could influence a regulatory filing, an investment thesis, a board memo, or a public statement, retrieval over a curated corpus should be the default.

5. Recognize this as the early surface area of a much larger problem. Today the evidence is clearest for Chinese, Russian, and a handful of other languages. But the mechanism — coordinated content + opportunistic scraping + downstream model deployment — is general. As more actors realize how cheap it is to influence pretraining, the volume of strategically placed content will rise. The companies that build governance for this now will be better positioned than those who treat it as a content-moderation afterthought.

Final Thoughts

This study does not argue that LLMs are propaganda machines. It argues something more subtle and more durable: that the AI systems we are wiring into the global economy inherit the information asymmetries of the world that built them — and that those asymmetries are now legible, measurable, and exploitable.

The executives who understand that early will make better decisions than those who don’t.

Source: Waight, H., Yang, E., Yuan, Y., Messing, S., Roberts, M. E., Stewart, B. M., & Tucker, J. A. (2026). State Media Control Influences Large Language Models. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10506-7. Interactive companion: https://state-media-influence-llm.github.io/

Other articles in ‘The CEO’s guide to AI’ series

Nikolas carefully scans and curates worthwhile research for the ‘The CEO’s guide to AI’ series – read more below:

• The CEO’s guide to AI: Beware the Agents of Chaos

• The CEO’s guide to AI: Social engineering is turbocharged by AI

• The CEO’s guide to AI: Black-hat LLMs and Cyber-threats

• The CEO’s guide to AI: We’re nowhere near AGI

• The CEO’s guide to AI: Young workers as the canaries in the coalmine

• The CEO’s guide to AI: The risk of vibe coding complacency

• The CEO’s guide to AI: The Case for Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI)

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist keynote speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas is an artificial intelligence expert and his 2026 keynote ‘The AI Leader: Create Incredible Productivity, Profit & Growth’ is the level up for the modern CEO and executive leader.

Please contact futurist speaker and consultant Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.

The post The CEO’s guide to AI: State Media Control Influences Large Language Models appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

His books “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” “This Is Not Propaganda,” and “How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler” have defined how a generation understands modern information warfare. A senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at John Hopkins University, Pomerantsev has spent decades documenting how autocratic regimes weaponize media, narrative, and, now, artificial intelligence to destabilize democracies and erode the very idea of truth.

AI and Propaganda: Nothing Is True, and Everything Is Generated | Wednesday, April 29, 2026

As AI reshapes the information landscape at breathtaking speed, this conversation asks the questions that matter most: How does AI-powered propaganda differ from what came before — and how do new technologies shape public reality? What happens to our collective capacity for critical thinking when personalized, algorithmically generated realities become the new normality? How can AI help us to protect ourselves from information manipulation? Who are the main actors in disinformation as a business, and what can the world learn from Ukraine, which has become an unexpected laboratory for countering disinformation under existential pressure?

Halyna Padalko, disinformation researcher, Fulbright scholar at MIT Center for International Studies, and instructor of the MIT course AI and Propaganda, moderated the discussion. This event is sponsored by the Center for International Studies, the MIT-Ukraine Program, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, in conjunction with the MIT course AI and Propaganda in Contemporary War taught by Elizabeth Wood and Halyna Padalko.

The MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) is a world premier, university-based research and education center. Learn more at https://cis.mit.edu/

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist keynote speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas is an artificial intelligence expert and his 2026 keynote ‘The AI Leader: Create Incredible Productivity, Profit & Growth’ is the level up for the modern CEO and executive leader.

Please contact futurist speaker and consultant Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.

The post AI and Propaganda: Nothing Is True, and Everything Is Generated appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

Email Nikolas to get a copy of the post-keynote report>>> click here

See articles in the ‘CEO’s Guide to AI’ series >>> click here

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Post-keynote Reading

Here are some selection articles and research that will help you continue your journey in exploring futures thinking and strategically thinking about foresight, and AI.

• Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis (Rohrbeck and Kim, 2018)

• Firm Data on AI (Hoover Institute)

• Why AI Will Not Provide Sustainable Competitive Advantage (MIT Sloan School of Management)

5 Minutes to Future

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with 5 Minutes to Future.

Step 1: Pick a signal that you think could change the world (this needs an open mind)

Step 2: Write down 3 positives and 3 negatives about its emergence

Step 3: Consider what if… it affects

• the world – people and communities

• our industry – the impact we are trying to have

• the work we do – the tasks we need to do

When you do that regularly then you are building the ability to imagine new worlds, anticipate change and build empathy for the people in our world.

If you want to go one step further after doing this then identify one thing we need to start doing and one thing we need to stop doing because of that.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Signals, Trends and Scenarios

We can learn to master signals, trends and scenarios by undertaking 3 simple actions – and we’re going to share some simple ways to get going:

1. Scan for signals and trends
2. WHAT IF… scenarios
3. Anticipate horizons

1. Scan for signals and trends

Signal scanning can be simple and a fun way to level up your thinking on a daily basis. We scan academic journals, attend conferences, host podcast interviews, social media posts and discussions, read a lot of media articles and so much more. It’s our lifeblood.

Some simple steps can really level up what you are tracking and there are a number of ways to do so.

a. Set up Google Alerts for key areas of interest for your business – you just need a Google Gmail account to do this and you can enter whatever. Just go to https://www.google.com/alerts and type in the area of exploration as you would do a Google Search:

Set your options – we recommend for you to get emails ‘At most once a day’ and ‘Only the best results’. Over time you can refine using boolean logic in your phrases.

You can find out more at Google Help – link.

b. Spend 15 to 30 minutes each morning for coffee and scanning – just search on Google for areas of interest and read articles under the ‘News’ tab. This is ;ess refined than Google Alerts but allows for free-form discovery. We love jumping down into the rabbit hole.

c. Reddit – The ‘Front Page of the Internet’ has an incredible futures community and they share and discuss amazing developments in the world. It’s a free social media platform and you can find incredible references there and bookmark them for reading and sharing later. The core community for Future(s) Studies is https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/. You can enter search phrases in at the top of the page to focus in on specific areas and then click through to the articles and deeper discussions.

d. Podcasts – it’s so great to work and listen to incredible thinkers discuss our futures. Here are some of our favorites (we are sharing Apple Podcast links and they can be found on most platforms):

• Exponential Minds Podcast with Chief Futurist Nikolas Badminton – link

• Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff – link

• WSJ’s The Future of Everything by The Wall Street Journal – link

• The World Ahead from The Economist – link

• Switched On with Bloomberg Finance Talk – link

Of course there are many more out there and please feel free to share podcasts you love with us here. And, if you have a suggestion for Nikolas Badminton’s Exponential Minds Podcast then please contact us here.

2. WHAT IF… Scenarios

We can also take things to the next level by building scenarios of what may happen in our futures using the signals and trends and then really taking a deeper dive into the positive and negative implications of speculative future products.

We can start simply by asking what if is an invitation to be curious and consider all possibilities:

• What if AI supercharges (or burdens) our business function, our competitors, and consumers – cost, time, access, efficiencies?

• What if we invest in new technologies and take bigger risks to advance the thought leadership industry?

• What if we explore 10 or 20+ year future horizons to create bolder visions of our impact in the world, see unknown risks and create more robust organizational thought leadership?

• What if our hopeful futures work informs our innovation programs / R&D, organizational messaging, and excites our customers, investors and shareholders?

Just living with simple statements and exploring your futures more really starts to open up your thinking.

These what if…statements are just some example and we can use a simple scenarios framework to create short scenarios:

What if in the [future horizon] solutions [a, b, and c are implemented], which creates these [opportunities and risks], and impacts [dimensions of change].

The ‘dimensions of change’ are where we start to explore deeper dynamics and effects of change – financial, organizational, regulatory, cultural, experimental, political, technological, and social.

This is a little more nuanced.

You can read about the method in detail in Nikolas’ new book – ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ – here’s a link to order – grab a copy today.

3. Anticipate horizons

You can also take things to the next level by collating multiple areas of exploration, signals and trends, WHAT IF.. scenarios and considering the larger contact reflected again the current state of your business. This is deep futures work, a creative task, and needs some funding and definite focus.

Sitting here reading this you may not feel that anticipating horizons may be a simple or quick task as we may need to produce more artifacts to help us understand those futures. The truth is, it can be as involved, or as simple, as you want. We always start by posing 5 simple questions that help us speculate:

• Who are we (the organization and society) at that future horizon – what do we think and believe, where do we live, how do we live, what do our families look like?

• What does that future feel like? How does it look and smell? How easy does it feel?

• What cultural artifacts from today exist in that future – art, media, social media, transportation methods, architecture, historical artifacts and reminders of our past?

• What signals from today – that you’ve been tracking, or seen in a futurist keynote – have accelerated and how have they disrupted your work and industry? Have they been good or bad for business?

• What new organizations, services and products will be needed in that future?

Overall, we hope that you have found this article to be useful as a primer to kickstart your futures thinking. You’re already a futurist by the virtue that you turned up to the discussion and participate in life. You are already an active participant in our futures – either through positive exploration and action towards it, or through inaction – both are contributory.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton will publish ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Igniting Hopeful Futures Thinking for BFL Canada appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

Email Nikolas to get a copy of the post-keynote report>>> click here

See articles in the ‘CEO’s Guide to AI’ series >>> click here

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Post-keynote Reading

Here are some selection articles and research that will help you continue your journey in exploring futures thinking and strategically thinking about foresight, and AI.

• Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis (Rohrbeck and Kim, 2018)

• Firm Data on AI (Hoover Institute)

• Why AI Will Not Provide Sustainable Competitive Advantage (MIT Sloan School of Management)

5 Minutes to Future

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with 5 Minutes to Future.

Step 1: Pick a signal that you think could change the world (this needs an open mind)

Step 2: Write down 3 positives and 3 negatives about its emergence

Step 3: Consider what if… it affects

• the world – people and communities

• our industry – the impact we are trying to have

• the work we do – the tasks we need to do

When you do that regularly then you are building the ability to imagine new worlds, anticipate change and build empathy for the people in our world.

If you want to go one step further after doing this then identify one thing we need to start doing and one thing we need to stop doing because of that.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Signals, Trends and Scenarios

We can learn to master signals, trends and scenarios by undertaking 3 simple actions – and we’re going to share some simple ways to get going:

1. Scan for signals and trends
2. WHAT IF… scenarios
3. Anticipate horizons

1. Scan for signals and trends

Signal scanning can be simple and a fun way to level up your thinking on a daily basis. We scan academic journals, attend conferences, host podcast interviews, social media posts and discussions, read a lot of media articles and so much more. It’s our lifeblood.

Some simple steps can really level up what you are tracking and there are a number of ways to do so.

a. Set up Google Alerts for key areas of interest for your business – you just need a Google Gmail account to do this and you can enter whatever. Just go to https://www.google.com/alerts and type in the area of exploration as you would do a Google Search:

Set your options – we recommend for you to get emails ‘At most once a day’ and ‘Only the best results’. Over time you can refine using boolean logic in your phrases.

You can find out more at Google Help – link.

b. Spend 15 to 30 minutes each morning for coffee and scanning – just search on Google for areas of interest and read articles under the ‘News’ tab. This is ;ess refined than Google Alerts but allows for free-form discovery. We love jumping down into the rabbit hole.

c. Reddit – The ‘Front Page of the Internet’ has an incredible futures community and they share and discuss amazing developments in the world. It’s a free social media platform and you can find incredible references there and bookmark them for reading and sharing later. The core community for Future(s) Studies is https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/. You can enter search phrases in at the top of the page to focus in on specific areas and then click through to the articles and deeper discussions.

d. Podcasts – it’s so great to work and listen to incredible thinkers discuss our futures. Here are some of our favorites (we are sharing Apple Podcast links and they can be found on most platforms):

• Exponential Minds Podcast with Chief Futurist Nikolas Badminton – link

• Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff – link

• WSJ’s The Future of Everything by The Wall Street Journal – link

• The World Ahead from The Economist – link

• Switched On with Bloomberg Finance Talk – link

Of course there are many more out there and please feel free to share podcasts you love with us here. And, if you have a suggestion for Nikolas Badminton’s Exponential Minds Podcast then please contact us here.

2. WHAT IF… Scenarios

We can also take things to the next level by building scenarios of what may happen in our futures using the signals and trends and then really taking a deeper dive into the positive and negative implications of speculative future products.

We can start simply by asking what if is an invitation to be curious and consider all possibilities:

• What if AI supercharges (or burdens) our business function, our competitors, and consumers – cost, time, access, efficiencies?

• What if we invest in new technologies and take bigger risks to advance the thought leadership industry?

• What if we explore 10 or 20+ year future horizons to create bolder visions of our impact in the world, see unknown risks and create more robust organizational thought leadership?

• What if our hopeful futures work informs our innovation programs / R&D, organizational messaging, and excites our customers, investors and shareholders?

Just living with simple statements and exploring your futures more really starts to open up your thinking.

These what if…statements are just some example and we can use a simple scenarios framework to create short scenarios:

What if in the [future horizon] solutions [a, b, and c are implemented], which creates these [opportunities and risks], and impacts [dimensions of change].

The ‘dimensions of change’ are where we start to explore deeper dynamics and effects of change – financial, organizational, regulatory, cultural, experimental, political, technological, and social.

This is a little more nuanced.

You can read about the method in detail in Nikolas’ new book – ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ – here’s a link to order – grab a copy today.

3. Anticipate horizons

You can also take things to the next level by collating multiple areas of exploration, signals and trends, WHAT IF.. scenarios and considering the larger contact reflected again the current state of your business. This is deep futures work, a creative task, and needs some funding and definite focus.

Sitting here reading this you may not feel that anticipating horizons may be a simple or quick task as we may need to produce more artifacts to help us understand those futures. The truth is, it can be as involved, or as simple, as you want. We always start by posing 5 simple questions that help us speculate:

• Who are we (the organization and society) at that future horizon – what do we think and believe, where do we live, how do we live, what do our families look like?

• What does that future feel like? How does it look and smell? How easy does it feel?

• What cultural artifacts from today exist in that future – art, media, social media, transportation methods, architecture, historical artifacts and reminders of our past?

• What signals from today – that you’ve been tracking, or seen in a futurist keynote – have accelerated and how have they disrupted your work and industry? Have they been good or bad for business?

• What new organizations, services and products will be needed in that future?

Overall, we hope that you have found this article to be useful as a primer to kickstart your futures thinking. You’re already a futurist by the virtue that you turned up to the discussion and participate in life. You are already an active participant in our futures – either through positive exploration and action towards it, or through inaction – both are contributory.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton will publish ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Igniting Hopeful Futures Thinking for HDR appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

Email Nikolas to get a copy of the post-keynote report>>> click here

See articles in the ‘CEO’s Guide to AI’ series >>> click here

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Post-keynote Reading

Here are some selection articles and research that will help you continue your journey in exploring futures thinking and strategically thinking about foresight, and AI.

• Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis (Rohrbeck and Kim, 2018)

• Firm Data on AI (Hoover Institute)

• Why AI Will Not Provide Sustainable Competitive Advantage (MIT Sloan School of Management)

5 Minutes to Future

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with 5 Minutes to Future.

Step 1: Pick a signal that you think could change the world (this needs an open mind)

Step 2: Write down 3 positives and 3 negatives about its emergence

Step 3: Consider what if… it affects

• the world – people and communities

• our industry – the impact we are trying to have

• the work we do – the tasks we need to do

When you do that regularly then you are building the ability to imagine new worlds, anticipate change and build empathy for the people in our world.

If you want to go one step further after doing this then identify one thing we need to start doing and one thing we need to stop doing because of that.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Signals, Trends and Scenarios

We can learn to master signals, trends and scenarios by undertaking 3 simple actions – and we’re going to share some simple ways to get going:

1. Scan for signals and trends
2. WHAT IF… scenarios
3. Anticipate horizons

1. Scan for signals and trends

Signal scanning can be simple and a fun way to level up your thinking on a daily basis. We scan academic journals, attend conferences, host podcast interviews, social media posts and discussions, read a lot of media articles and so much more. It’s our lifeblood.

Some simple steps can really level up what you are tracking and there are a number of ways to do so.

a. Set up Google Alerts for key areas of interest for your business – you just need a Google Gmail account to do this and you can enter whatever. Just go to https://www.google.com/alerts and type in the area of exploration as you would do a Google Search:

Set your options – we recommend for you to get emails ‘At most once a day’ and ‘Only the best results’. Over time you can refine using boolean logic in your phrases.

You can find out more at Google Help – link.

b. Spend 15 to 30 minutes each morning for coffee and scanning – just search on Google for areas of interest and read articles under the ‘News’ tab. This is ;ess refined than Google Alerts but allows for free-form discovery. We love jumping down into the rabbit hole.

c. Reddit – The ‘Front Page of the Internet’ has an incredible futures community and they share and discuss amazing developments in the world. It’s a free social media platform and you can find incredible references there and bookmark them for reading and sharing later. The core community for Future(s) Studies is https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/. You can enter search phrases in at the top of the page to focus in on specific areas and then click through to the articles and deeper discussions.

d. Podcasts – it’s so great to work and listen to incredible thinkers discuss our futures. Here are some of our favorites (we are sharing Apple Podcast links and they can be found on most platforms):

• Exponential Minds Podcast with Chief Futurist Nikolas Badminton – link

• Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff – link

• WSJ’s The Future of Everything by The Wall Street Journal – link

• The World Ahead from The Economist – link

• Switched On with Bloomberg Finance Talk – link

Of course there are many more out there and please feel free to share podcasts you love with us here. And, if you have a suggestion for Nikolas Badminton’s Exponential Minds Podcast then please contact us here.

2. WHAT IF… Scenarios

We can also take things to the next level by building scenarios of what may happen in our futures using the signals and trends and then really taking a deeper dive into the positive and negative implications of speculative future products.

We can start simply by asking what if is an invitation to be curious and consider all possibilities:

• What if AI supercharges (or burdens) our business function, our competitors, and consumers – cost, time, access, efficiencies?

• What if we invest in new technologies and take bigger risks to advance the thought leadership industry?

• What if we explore 10 or 20+ year future horizons to create bolder visions of our impact in the world, see unknown risks and create more robust organizational thought leadership?

• What if our hopeful futures work informs our innovation programs / R&D, organizational messaging, and excites our customers, investors and shareholders?

Just living with simple statements and exploring your futures more really starts to open up your thinking.

These what if…statements are just some example and we can use a simple scenarios framework to create short scenarios:

What if in the [future horizon] solutions [a, b, and c are implemented], which creates these [opportunities and risks], and impacts [dimensions of change].

The ‘dimensions of change’ are where we start to explore deeper dynamics and effects of change – financial, organizational, regulatory, cultural, experimental, political, technological, and social.

This is a little more nuanced.

You can read about the method in detail in Nikolas’ new book – ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ – here’s a link to order – grab a copy today.

3. Anticipate horizons

You can also take things to the next level by collating multiple areas of exploration, signals and trends, WHAT IF.. scenarios and considering the larger contact reflected again the current state of your business. This is deep futures work, a creative task, and needs some funding and definite focus.

Sitting here reading this you may not feel that anticipating horizons may be a simple or quick task as we may need to produce more artifacts to help us understand those futures. The truth is, it can be as involved, or as simple, as you want. We always start by posing 5 simple questions that help us speculate:

• Who are we (the organization and society) at that future horizon – what do we think and believe, where do we live, how do we live, what do our families look like?

• What does that future feel like? How does it look and smell? How easy does it feel?

• What cultural artifacts from today exist in that future – art, media, social media, transportation methods, architecture, historical artifacts and reminders of our past?

• What signals from today – that you’ve been tracking, or seen in a futurist keynote – have accelerated and how have they disrupted your work and industry? Have they been good or bad for business?

• What new organizations, services and products will be needed in that future?

Overall, we hope that you have found this article to be useful as a primer to kickstart your futures thinking. You’re already a futurist by the virtue that you turned up to the discussion and participate in life. You are already an active participant in our futures – either through positive exploration and action towards it, or through inaction – both are contributory.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton will publish ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Igniting Hopeful Futures Thinking for Building Service Contractors Association International appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

Email Nikolas to get a copy of the post-keynote report>>> click here

See articles in the ‘CEO’s Guide to AI’ series >>> click here

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Post-keynote Reading

Here are some selection articles and research that will help you continue your journey in exploring futures thinking and strategically thinking about foresight, and AI.

• Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis (Rohrbeck and Kim, 2018)

• Firm Data on AI (Hoover Institute)

• Why AI Will Not Provide Sustainable Competitive Advantage (MIT Sloan School of Management)

5 Minutes to Future

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with 5 Minutes to Future.

Step 1: Pick a signal that you think could change the world (this needs an open mind)

Step 2: Write down 3 positives and 3 negatives about its emergence

Step 3: Consider what if… it affects

• the world – people and communities

• our industry – the impact we are trying to have

• the work we do – the tasks we need to do

When you do that regularly then you are building the ability to imagine new worlds, anticipate change and build empathy for the people in our world.

If you want to go one step further after doing this then identify one thing we need to start doing and one thing we need to stop doing because of that.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Signals, Trends and Scenarios

We can learn to master signals, trends and scenarios by undertaking 3 simple actions – and we’re going to share some simple ways to get going:

1. Scan for signals and trends
2. WHAT IF… scenarios
3. Anticipate horizons

1. Scan for signals and trends

Signal scanning can be simple and a fun way to level up your thinking on a daily basis. We scan academic journals, attend conferences, host podcast interviews, social media posts and discussions, read a lot of media articles and so much more. It’s our lifeblood.

Some simple steps can really level up what you are tracking and there are a number of ways to do so.

a. Set up Google Alerts for key areas of interest for your business – you just need a Google Gmail account to do this and you can enter whatever. Just go to https://www.google.com/alerts and type in the area of exploration as you would do a Google Search:

Set your options – we recommend for you to get emails ‘At most once a day’ and ‘Only the best results’. Over time you can refine using boolean logic in your phrases.

You can find out more at Google Help – link.

b. Spend 15 to 30 minutes each morning for coffee and scanning – just search on Google for areas of interest and read articles under the ‘News’ tab. This is ;ess refined than Google Alerts but allows for free-form discovery. We love jumping down into the rabbit hole.

c. Reddit – The ‘Front Page of the Internet’ has an incredible futures community and they share and discuss amazing developments in the world. It’s a free social media platform and you can find incredible references there and bookmark them for reading and sharing later. The core community for Future(s) Studies is https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/. You can enter search phrases in at the top of the page to focus in on specific areas and then click through to the articles and deeper discussions.

d. Podcasts – it’s so great to work and listen to incredible thinkers discuss our futures. Here are some of our favorites (we are sharing Apple Podcast links and they can be found on most platforms):

• Exponential Minds Podcast with Chief Futurist Nikolas Badminton – link

• Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff – link

• WSJ’s The Future of Everything by The Wall Street Journal – link

• The World Ahead from The Economist – link

• Switched On with Bloomberg Finance Talk – link

Of course there are many more out there and please feel free to share podcasts you love with us here. And, if you have a suggestion for Nikolas Badminton’s Exponential Minds Podcast then please contact us here.

2. WHAT IF… Scenarios

We can also take things to the next level by building scenarios of what may happen in our futures using the signals and trends and then really taking a deeper dive into the positive and negative implications of speculative future products.

We can start simply by asking what if is an invitation to be curious and consider all possibilities:

• What if AI supercharges (or burdens) our business function, our competitors, and consumers – cost, time, access, efficiencies?

• What if we invest in new technologies and take bigger risks to advance the thought leadership industry?

• What if we explore 10 or 20+ year future horizons to create bolder visions of our impact in the world, see unknown risks and create more robust organizational thought leadership?

• What if our hopeful futures work informs our innovation programs / R&D, organizational messaging, and excites our customers, investors and shareholders?

Just living with simple statements and exploring your futures more really starts to open up your thinking.

These what if…statements are just some example and we can use a simple scenarios framework to create short scenarios:

What if in the [future horizon] solutions [a, b, and c are implemented], which creates these [opportunities and risks], and impacts [dimensions of change].

The ‘dimensions of change’ are where we start to explore deeper dynamics and effects of change – financial, organizational, regulatory, cultural, experimental, political, technological, and social.

This is a little more nuanced.

You can read about the method in detail in Nikolas’ new book – ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ – here’s a link to order – grab a copy today.

3. Anticipate horizons

You can also take things to the next level by collating multiple areas of exploration, signals and trends, WHAT IF.. scenarios and considering the larger contact reflected again the current state of your business. This is deep futures work, a creative task, and needs some funding and definite focus.

Sitting here reading this you may not feel that anticipating horizons may be a simple or quick task as we may need to produce more artifacts to help us understand those futures. The truth is, it can be as involved, or as simple, as you want. We always start by posing 5 simple questions that help us speculate:

• Who are we (the organization and society) at that future horizon – what do we think and believe, where do we live, how do we live, what do our families look like?

• What does that future feel like? How does it look and smell? How easy does it feel?

• What cultural artifacts from today exist in that future – art, media, social media, transportation methods, architecture, historical artifacts and reminders of our past?

• What signals from today – that you’ve been tracking, or seen in a futurist keynote – have accelerated and how have they disrupted your work and industry? Have they been good or bad for business?

• What new organizations, services and products will be needed in that future?

Overall, we hope that you have found this article to be useful as a primer to kickstart your futures thinking. You’re already a futurist by the virtue that you turned up to the discussion and participate in life. You are already an active participant in our futures – either through positive exploration and action towards it, or through inaction – both are contributory.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton will publish ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Igniting Hopeful Futures Thinking for the Board of Canadian Registered Safety Professionals appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.