Now we see that China has taken the #1 position from the US.

At a conference 2 yrs ago a well-known economist said US innovates, China replicates and Germany regulates BUT now China takes the lead…

New OECD data shows China’s gross domestic expenditure on R&D hit $1.03 trillion in 2024, edging out the U.S. at $1.01 trillion—both crossing the $1 trillion mark as worldwide spending reached $3.8 trillion. China’s spending grew 9.7% that year, nearly triple the U.S. rate, with a clearer lead when adjusted for purchasing power parity.

While the U.S. holds advantages in GDP share, high-impact research, and innovation influence, China’s surge in fields like AI and biotech signals its rise as a scientific powerhouse.

The way the world works is being defined from China to Europe – water, energy, food, tech, peace (for those that believe in it), and more.

Read more in the OECD report here.

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.

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

The post China Becomes Global #1 in R&D Spending appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

A March 2025 MIT field experiment ran 1,258 human-AI teams through a real marketing task, then spent real money running the resulting ads on X. The findings reframe the question CEOs should be asking. It’s no longer “how much faster will my people be with AI?” It’s “what does the work itself look like when half the team is software?”

The study, Collaborating with AI Agents: A Field Experiment on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance, was conducted by Harang Ju and Sinan Aral at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.

The team built a custom collaboration platform called MindMeld — think Google Docs plus a chat panel, where two collaborators can edit copy, select images, and generate new images via DALL-E 3 in real time. They then recruited 2,310 U.S. participants from Prolific, a research platform, and randomly assigned them to one of two conditions: paired with another human, or paired with an AI agent built on GPT-4o. Participants didn’t know which.

The task was real. Teams had 40 minutes to produce display ads for a think tank’s annual report. Both partners — human or AI — could send messages, edit headlines and body copy, pick from a stock image library, or generate new images. Critically, the AI was an agent, not a chatbot. It could take independent actions on the shared workspace every ten seconds, not just respond to prompts.

The output volume is what makes this study unusual: 11,138 ads, 183,691 messages, nearly two million text edits, and 63,656 image edits, all logged with timestamps. The researchers then took 2,000 of those ads, ran them as paid campaigns on X over twenty days, and measured 4.9 million impressions worth of click-through rates, cost-per-click, and post-click engagement on the actual document. To my knowledge, no published study of generative AI productivity has combined this scale of granular collaboration data with this kind of real-money field validation.

A second layer of the experiment randomized the AI’s “personality” — using prompts to induce high or low scores on each of the Big Five traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism). This let the researchers test whether matching AI personality to human personality changes outcomes.

Why It Matters

Three findings stand out, and they cut against some popular narratives.

First, AI agents don’t just make individuals faster — they redistribute where the work happens. People paired with an AI agent sent 137% more messages than human-human teams overall, but spent 20% less time directly editing text. The AI did the typing; the human did the directing. Communication shifted from social and emotional (“nice catch,” “ha, true”) toward content and process (“try a shorter headline,” “use the second image”). Human-AI teams sent 23% fewer social messages. The mechanism behind the productivity gain isn’t speed. It’s the elimination of what the authors call social coordination cost.

Second, the productivity gain is real but lopsided in a specific way. Each person on a human-AI team produced 60% more output than each person on a human-human team. Two human-AI teams of one person each match the output of one two-person human team — with comparable quality on the metric that mattered most in the field experiment. Click-through rates and cost-per-click on the live ad campaigns were statistically indistinguishable between the two team types. The headcount math is striking, but only if you also accept the second part of the next finding.

Third, AI agents are uneven across modalities, and the unevenness matters. Human evaluators rated the text quality of human-AI ads higher than human-human ads. They rated the image quality lower. GPT-4o is excellent at writing copy and mediocre at judging whether an image will land. In the field experiment, text quality drove higher click-through rates; image quality drove lower cost per click. So the human-AI teams won on engagement but paid more per click than they should have. The ads performed equivalently overall, but for different reasons on each side.

The personality-matching finding is genuinely novel and genuinely messy. Some pairings helped (a conscientious human plus an open-minded AI produced better images). Some hurt (an extroverted human plus a conscientious AI degraded text, image, and click quality). The signal is real but the rule isn’t simple, and anyone selling you a “personality optimizer” today is ahead of the science.

What This Means for CEOs

The temptation is to read “60% more output per worker” and start modeling headcount reductions. That’s the wrong first move. The right first move is to recognize that this study shows AI agents changing the shape of work, not just its volume. Five concrete actions follow.

1. Pilot agents in workflows, not as chatbots. Most enterprise AI deployments today bolt a chat window next to existing tools. The MIT result depends on the AI being inside the workspace — editing the same document the human edits, taking actions, adapting to what the human just did. If your current AI rollout is a sidebar, you are measuring a different (and weaker) intervention than this study did. Within 90 days, identify one workflow where an agent could share an editable artifact with a human and start there.

2. Audit your AI for the multimodal gap. The single most important practical finding is that GPT-class models excel at text and underperform on images. If your team’s output is multimodal — marketing, product design, sales collateral, internal comms with visuals — pairing GPT with a specialized image-evaluation or generation model is not optional. Ask your CTO: “where in our stack are we using a text-first model to evaluate non-text output, and what’s the second-tool plan?”

3. Resist the headcount math, at least for one cycle. The productivity finding is per-task and per-individual, in a 40-minute lab task with no career consequences. Real teams have onboarding, institutional knowledge, client relationships, and the kind of tacit coordination that doesn’t show up in a Prolific study. Treat the 60% number as evidence that capacity is opening up, not as evidence that 40% of your headcount is redundant. Use the slack for higher-quality output before you use it for lower payroll.

4. Rewrite the questions you ask vendors. Vendor pitches will increasingly cite this paper or studies like it. The red flag is anyone claiming AI agents work “regardless of context” or pitching personality matching as a solved feature. Ask: “Show me the modalities where your agent underperforms. Show me the field-experiment evidence, not just lab benchmarks. What happens when our specific user type interacts with your specific configuration?” If the answer is hand-waving, you’re being sold.

5. Watch the social fabric. Human-human teams in the study did something the human-AI teams didn’t: they built rapport, made jokes, expressed concern, apologized. That work isn’t measured in click-through rates, but it’s how teams stay viable across years, not minutes. As agents absorb more of the task-coordination layer, the social and emotional layer becomes scarcer and more valuable. The CEOs who will run the best teams in 2027 are the ones thinking now about what humans should be doing more of as agents take on the mechanical work, not just less.

The one question to put to your senior AI leader this week: “If we paired one of our people with a capable agent on our most ad-creation-like task, what would the workflow look like, and what would we be set up to measure?” If they can’t answer concretely, you don’t yet have a strategy — you have a budget.

Bottom Line

AI agents don’t just speed up workers; they change which parts of the work humans do, and the gain comes from eliminating coordination overhead, not from raw machine speed. The CEOs who win the next two years will be those who redesign workflows around that fact, while staying clear-eyed about where today’s agents — particularly on visual judgment — still need a human in the seat.

Read ‘Collaborating with AI Agents: AField Experiment on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance’ – here

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: 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: Doubling worker output with AI Agents appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

It takes just ‘5 Minutes to Future‘

Here is a simple mental shortcut to thinking about our futures.

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.

Together we can look ahead to better and more hopeful futures.

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.

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

The post Do this every day: 5 Minutes to Future 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

Connect with Nikolas on LinkedIn >>> 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)

• Generative AI in the pharmaceutical industry: Moving from hype to reality (McKinsey)

• Firm Data on AI (Hoover Institute)

• Meet the man who designed a cancer vaccine for his dog (UNSW)

• How AI Impacts Skill Formation (Shen and Tamkin)

• Artificial intelligence in medicine: a scoping review of the risk of deskilling and loss of expertise among physicians (Heidelberg et al)

Hopeful Futures Challenge

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with The Futures Challenge.

Step 1 – Scan for signals of change – review the signals and trends discussed in Nikolas Badminton’s keynote, and any others that you observe that indicate that there is the potential of change (there’s a guide of how to scan for signals a little further down in this post as well). Then select one signal and think about how that could affect your industry in 5 to 10 years. Write down 2 or three things that will affect your strategic planning, the clients you connect with, and your organizations.

Step 2 – Think about impact – Then select a second signal and ask “what happens when that combines with the first signal?” – that will help you start to be curious about the effects it will have on the wider world and your business. Wonder, what is created, what is changed and what goes away. Ask, how you can adjust your strategic framing to be prepared for change in the short (0 to 3 years), medium (4 to 9 years), and long term (10+ years).

Step 3 – Share your ideas with colleagues and peers own your industry – Once you have these thoughts, share them. You’ll find that the conversations will be brighter and more dynamic, you’ll have more questions than answers and (hopefully) your passion to look beyond hype to hopeful futures informs your strategic planning.

Start igniting your imagination, building your anticipation and deepening your empathy for the future patient-focused solutions you will deliver.

We hope that you were inspired and amazed at the incredible AI futures that are just a few short years away. Here Nikolas provides a resource for you to start scanning for signals, exploring new trends and building scenarios to bolster your strategic thinking and to start futures work.

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

Build your futurist mindset

We can start simply 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.

Nikolas Badminton, Futurist & Hope Engineer™

Nikolas Badminton is a world-renowned global futurist and Hope Engineer™ that mentors top executives and the highest levels of government to create bold visions by exploring hopeful futures, anticipating disruption, and supercharging strategic planning.

Here is Nikolas speaking about the Future of Artificial Intelligence to 4400+ people in Houston in October 2025.

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 Millers Mutual Insurance 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

Connect with Nikolas on LinkedIn >>> 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)

• Generative AI in the pharmaceutical industry: Moving from hype to reality (McKinsey)

• Firm Data on AI (Hoover Institute)

• Meet the man who designed a cancer vaccine for his dog (UNSW)

• How AI Impacts Skill Formation (Shen and Tamkin)

• Artificial intelligence in medicine: a scoping review of the risk of deskilling and loss of expertise among physicians (Heidelberg et al)

Hopeful Futures Challenge

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with The Futures Challenge.

Step 1 – Scan for signals of change – review the signals and trends discussed in Nikolas Badminton’s keynote, and any others that you observe that indicate that there is the potential of change (there’s a guide of how to scan for signals a little further down in this post as well). Then select one signal and think about how that could affect your industry in 5 to 10 years. Write down 2 or three things that will affect your strategic planning, the clients you connect with, and your organizations.

Step 2 – Think about impact – Then select a second signal and ask “what happens when that combines with the first signal?” – that will help you start to be curious about the effects it will have on the wider world and your business. Wonder, what is created, what is changed and what goes away. Ask, how you can adjust your strategic framing to be prepared for change in the short (0 to 3 years), medium (4 to 9 years), and long term (10+ years).

Step 3 – Share your ideas with colleagues and peers own your industry – Once you have these thoughts, share them. You’ll find that the conversations will be brighter and more dynamic, you’ll have more questions than answers and (hopefully) your passion to look beyond hype to hopeful futures informs your strategic planning.

Start igniting your imagination, building your anticipation and deepening your empathy for the future patient-focused solutions you will deliver.

We hope that you were inspired and amazed at the incredible AI futures that are just a few short years away. Here Nikolas provides a resource for you to start scanning for signals, exploring new trends and building scenarios to bolster your strategic thinking and to start futures work.

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

Build your futurist mindset

We can start simply 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.

Nikolas Badminton, Futurist & Hope Engineer™

Nikolas Badminton is a world-renowned global futurist and Hope Engineer™ that mentors top executives and the highest levels of government to create bold visions by exploring hopeful futures, anticipating disruption, and supercharging strategic planning.

Here is Nikolas speaking about the Future of Artificial Intelligence to 4400+ people in Houston in October 2025.

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 Candescent Axis 2026 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

Connect with Nikolas on LinkedIn >>> 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)

• Generative AI in the pharmaceutical industry: Moving from hype to reality (McKinsey)

• Firm Data on AI (Hoover Institute)

• Meet the man who designed a cancer vaccine for his dog (UNSW)

• How AI Impacts Skill Formation (Shen and Tamkin)

• Artificial intelligence in medicine: a scoping review of the risk of deskilling and loss of expertise among physicians (Heidelberg et al)

Hopeful Futures Challenge

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with The Futures Challenge.

Step 1 – Scan for signals of change – review the signals and trends discussed in Nikolas Badminton’s keynote, and any others that you observe that indicate that there is the potential of change (there’s a guide of how to scan for signals a little further down in this post as well). Then select one signal and think about how that could affect your industry in 5 to 10 years. Write down 2 or three things that will affect your strategic planning, the clients you connect with, and your organizations.

Step 2 – Think about impact – Then select a second signal and ask “what happens when that combines with the first signal?” – that will help you start to be curious about the effects it will have on the wider world and your business. Wonder, what is created, what is changed and what goes away. Ask, how you can adjust your strategic framing to be prepared for change in the short (0 to 3 years), medium (4 to 9 years), and long term (10+ years).

Step 3 – Share your ideas with colleagues and peers own your industry – Once you have these thoughts, share them. You’ll find that the conversations will be brighter and more dynamic, you’ll have more questions than answers and (hopefully) your passion to look beyond hype to hopeful futures informs your strategic planning.

Start igniting your imagination, building your anticipation and deepening your empathy for the future patient-focused solutions you will deliver.

We hope that you were inspired and amazed at the incredible AI futures that are just a few short years away. Here Nikolas provides a resource for you to start scanning for signals, exploring new trends and building scenarios to bolster your strategic thinking and to start futures work.

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

Build your futurist mindset

We can start simply 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.

Nikolas Badminton, Futurist & Hope Engineer™

Nikolas Badminton is a world-renowned global futurist and Hope Engineer™ that mentors top executives and the highest levels of government to create bold visions by exploring hopeful futures, anticipating disruption, and supercharging strategic planning.

Here is Nikolas speaking about the Future of Artificial Intelligence to 4400+ people in Houston in October 2025.

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 CIO Association of Canada (CIOCAN) appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.