The Friday Thing #876
Thanks for all the feedback on last week's edition. Less division, more joy. ??
The Friday Thing 876 is a website I read about in a couple of newsletters recently and is all about trends.
For many years, I would fastidiously download trend reports from a variety of companies and try to digest, synthesize and come to my own conclusions about the "next big things" based on reading lots of these reports. Sometime during the last few years, I stopped doing this. I think perhaps because it's easy to be overwhelmed by the amount and length of the reports, but occasionally I still read one or two.
Last month, Ben Evans (I think) collated over 150 of these types of reports and dropped them in to a Google Drive folder so I downloaded them and made a mental note to skim a few when I got chance (haha). The image below is a selection of some of the reports and yes, that's a lot of reading. It's a lot of skimming.
Step forward Narain Jashanmal, who had the bright idea of using AI to make sense of all of this. He created a custom GPT trained on over 30 of these reports to generate industry specific snapshots - in written form and then in a podcast using Notebook LM.
The result is 2025 Trend Forecasts, and the summary alone had me intrigued.
Topics covered are
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It's a pretty cool use of AI and a good way to summarize, synthesize and digest a lot of material. I will say, I switched off the podcast after a few minutes as it was a bit too formulaic, but the summaries are really quite good. And it gave me another idea.
I have now built my own agent using the Create Agents Feature in Microsoft Teams to digest all 150 reports and conversationally interrogate them. For Microsofties who are interested, let me know and I'll send you the link. (I tried to do this with OpenAI's GPT Builder too but hit a document limit).
Anyhow, for now, have fun with 2025 Trend Forecasts.
Wishing you all a wonderful year ahead and happy Friday.
Music this week is Rebel Soul by Michael Kiwanuka.
cheers,
Steve
Global Foresight Strategist | Founder of FIG | Looking Outside podcast
4 周My goodness that AI summary is surprisingly generic. Which is strange because my expectations were already so low.
Integrated Communications Analytics | PRWeek Dashboard 25 Class of 2023
4 周Steve - check out what our friends at Codeword did. Bit of a meta take on the art and science of trend reports. https://www.codewordagency.com/reports/the-report-on-trend-reports/
Communications Director | Executive & Internal Communications | Generative AI
1 个月Oh, wow. I hadn’t seen this. Very cool.
Culture builder. Transformation advisor.
1 个月Well done Steve Clayton! It is amazing to see how much innovation has already occurred with generative AI and imagine the possibilities in the future.
I would love to have access to the Agent, thank you so much Steve!