As we barrel into the new year, companies across all industries are busy unveiling trend forecasting for 2024. But let’s face it: these predictions often arrive too late to be of real strategic value. By the time they reach you, the year has already begun, leaving little room for proactive planning. What’s more, these generalized forecasts rarely align with the specific needs and nuances of your organization.
At entrapeer, we understand that to truly stay ahead, you need more than just a year-end trend report. You need predictive insights and strategic foresight that can identify and validate emergent tech and novel use cases years before they hit the mainstream. That’s why we’re excited to lift the veil on our latest innovation: entramind, our AI-powered trend forecaster.
In a departure from standard trend forecasting, entramind analyzes startup pivots and news relevance to determine which trends have lasting power long before mass adoption. As we explain in more depth below, our AI prediction engine can accurately calculate the success of a tech trend with a remarkable lead time of up to four years.
Best of all, entrapeer hands you the keys to our platform – so you can tailor these predictive insights to your organization’s focus areas, pain points, and existing initiatives. Read on to learn how entramind came to be, and how you’ll soon be able to leverage this tool and secure your position as an industry leader – not a trend follower.
Introducing Entramind: Your AI-Powered Trend Forecaster
Even the most established and cutting-edge market intelligence platforms now lag behind the rapid pace of tech evolution. In today’s accelerated market, by the time a trend surfaces on conventional radars, the opportunity for first-mover advantage has often already passed, leaving enterprises and venture capitalists to play catch-up.
Enter entramind, entrapeer’s proprietary AI prediction engine.
This blog introduces the breakthrough methodology that empowers corporate innovation stakeholders to anticipate (and invest in) the tech trends that will shape our future. With AI-powered predictive capabilities, entramind equips decision-makers with the foresight needed to make strategic investments and partnerships, ensuring they are the pioneers disrupting their sectors – not the organizations left behind.
Our Hypothesis on Trend Forecasting
After training our proprietary AI prediction engine – entramind – to comb thousands of news sources and millions of startup websites to identify novel use cases for emergent technologies, we felt confident that we could apply the same approach to historic news and investment data to accurately identify successful technological trends long before they became public knowledge.
To test our hypothesis, we chose the tech trend dominating global headlines at the time: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI. It’s important to note that while the acronym LLM is frequently used in our graphs, it encompasses a broader range of topics, including Foundational Models and Generative AI
By Q2 of 2023, the peak of LLMs and Generative AI was evident, capturing widespread interest. Our goal was to develop a system capable of anticipating such trends, ideally as early as mid-2022.
Our Methodology
We began our experiment by combing millions of news and investment data points related to LLMs from over the last 3 years (dating back to the beginning of 2020). But we didn’t just select any LLM-related news.
We consulted experts from The Wall Street Journal and Tech World to better understand their approach to news analysis and trend prediction. Based on these insights, we developed a sophisticated method to assess news relevance, determining if a piece of news is merely informative or truly indicative of a trend.
For instance, a news story about the FTX founder’s legal troubles might be significant for the cryptocurrency world, but it doesn’t necessarily signal a trend in that field. In contrast, our technique discerns news that is both positive and indicative of a developing trend in areas like LLMs and Generative AI.
The moving average graph below illustrates the percentage of LLM news on each day compared to the previous six months:
As evidenced by Graph 1, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI began to emerge as a true trend in early 2023. Although there were earlier movements, they weren’t as pronounced in the graph. However, 2023 stands out as the pivotal year for these technologies.
While innovation stakeholders stand to benefit from such real-time trend monitoring, we believe that news and investment data merely provided late signals of an established trend. Our ultimate aim was to forecast these trends far enough ahead of time to give enterprises a real competitive advantage.
Just imagine: How advantageous would it have been to know – with certainty – by mid-2022 that LLMs would dominate discussions by 2023?
To achieve this, we examined the variance in moving averages, much in the same way that Twitter lags a topic as “trending” when applying a novel technique to smooth out these averages. This enabled us to more accurately and promptly identify trend spikes, as illustrated by the graph below:
Analyzing this graph, we observe two distinct trend spikes: one in early 2022 and another towards the end of 2022. Our trend spike indicator effectively provides early signals about future developments.
Despite this success in validating a trend’s success as early as one year ahead of the trend’s widespread public adoption, we knew that we could do better. After all, news is the result of action. So we asked ourselves: what actions could serve as verifiable signals of a growing trend?
Since startups are the catalysts for novel use cases in emergent tech, we identified startup foundations and pivots as precursors to emerging trends. Building upon our proprietary, AI-powered use case creation models, we compiled comprehensive timelines for various companies and employed AI to interpret each company’s strategic pivots. By plotting these pivotal changes, we obtain the following graph:
Graph 3 represents the cumulative number of pivots across 700 companies from various technology topics to LLMs/Generative AI. The graph demonstrates strong trend signals from 2021 to 2022, indicating the emergence of a significant trend in 2023.
Our methodologies clearly serve as reliable early indicators of emerging trends and hype cycles. Now, imagine ourselves at the end of Q2 2022, trying to determine whether to invest in generative AI. Imagine if you had Graphs 4 & 5 at your fingertips, projecting the acceleration of this trend?
How cool would that be?
What This Means for Innovation Stakeholders
Entramind’s success in predicting trends not one, but four years before mass technological adoption has the potential to revolutionize the way enterprises and investors approach corporate innovation. Equipped with the critical capability of foreseeing tech trends and validating investment hypotheses, stakeholders will be able to navigate the turbulent waters of technological innovation with unprecedented accuracy and agility.
For Enterprises
For enterprise stakeholders, entramind heralds a new era of strategic foresight. Its ability to pre-emptively identify technological trends offers a unique competitive edge. With one to four years of lead time, innovation teams will be empowered to pioneer market solutions, optimize R&D investments, and drive innovation leadership before these trends hit the mainstream. Such prescient insights could redefine market readiness, placing enterprises at the forefront of technological adoption and market disruption right alongside their startup partners.
For Investors
Venture capitalists and investors can leverage entramind’s predictive prowess to ensure the success of their portfolios. Entramind’s validation of LLM and Generative AI trends as early as 2019 serves as a testament to its potential to pinpoint high-growth opportunities well before they peak in the public consciousness. This foresight facilitates informed decision-making, allowing VCs to back pioneering startups and technologies, thus securing their position as early investors in the next wave of tech revolutionaries. Entrapeer’s AI doesn’t just follow trends – it forecasts the future of tech investment.
Ready to Validate Your Next Investment?
We are eager to continue testing and refining our new AI-powered trends prediction engine.
Whether you’re an existing entrapeer customer or not, we invite you to reach out with your trend or technology of interest. We will then build a report highlighting the historical signals supporting this trend to demonstrate just how early you could validate your investment thesis using entrapeer’s proprietary technology.
Contact us to request your customized report.
