Foresight Meets AI: Navigating What’s Next for Recognition Tech
Building confidence and strategic focus in a cutting-edge tech company through scenario-based design and foresight sprinting.
Challenge
How do you define a meaningful direction when your technology could power a wide spectrum of future innovations?
Our client—a deep-tech company in the AI-vision space—was at a strategic crossroads. Their hardware had vast potential, from security to smart cities, but they needed clarity on where to focus next.
We designed and facilitated a future scenario-based design sprint to guide early strategic choices. Using speculative futures, we explored diverse societal and technological shifts impacting visual AI. This process helped the team step beyond current assumptions and imagine radically different worlds where their tech could play a role.
Key Activities
Our duo of design strategists took the lead in:
Co-creating future scenarios to stretch thinking and uncover unexpected use cases
Mapping technology implications across each scenario with partner cloud engineering consultants
Designing and validating hypothetical service concepts to assess desirability and feasibility
Facilitating a strategy workshop to align on focus areas and customer segments
Foresight Design Sprint
In the divergent phase, we guided the team through scenario exploration using three core questions:
What conditions must be true for the tech to thrive?
What events and behaviors take place in these contexts?
What problems or opportunities emerge?
This helped stakeholders imagine beyond conventional use cases while also surfacing critical implications—for users, for their business, and for society.
In the convergent phase, we evaluated each opportunity using a desirability–feasibility–viability lens:
Desirability: Would users or customers value this?
Feasibility: Is the technology ready?
Viability: Can the organization support it?
The process led to the selection of a strategic lead use case, a prioritized set of three user flows for prototyping, and a clear action plan that all stakeholders aligned around.
Discovery and Alignment
We began with interviews across engineering, business, and sales, identifying a key insight: while the team believed in the tech, there was no shared understanding of where or how to apply it. This ambiguity stalled decision-making and diluted ownership.
We designed a 5-day inception sprint with two core objectives:
Explore a wide range of strategic use cases through divergent thinking.
Create alignment by involving influential decision-makers across functions.
We partnered with the futurology studio Monnik to co-create two opposing narratives—one where recognition tech expands capabilities, and one where it restricts them. These were paired with four potential application contexts, based on our own research. Together, they formed a matrix that helped the team assess not only what’s possible—but what’s desirable, feasible, and viable.
Approach
Results and Lessons Learned
✅ Strategic Clarity: Surfaced and prioritized key use cases in strategically relevant contexts.
✅ Team Alignment: Engaged critical actors across departments and established shared direction.
✅ Momentum to Act: Delivered a tangible roadmap and prototypes to validate the concept.
✅ Proof of Concept: our team developed a functional PoC and presented it with our client to potential customers and partners to be further developed.
Radical innovations often suffer from one core challenge: they’re too intangible for clear decision-making. When the implications are unfamiliar, cross-functional teams need a structured yet creative way to imagine futures and stress-test options.
This project demonstrated how a foresight-based design sprint can reduce risk by creating a shared understanding of emerging opportunities—and by turning ambiguity into aligned, strategic action. The outcome wasn’t just ideas—it was traction.