Every organization inevitably reaches a moment when it’s ready—or compelled—to consider new strategic options for creating value or impact. Your technology becomes outdated, campaigns lose their spark, and products grow irrelevant. 

This isn’t pessimism, but the natural course of all things. Forum One was founded in 1996 with a clear mission: to harness the emerging World Wide Web as a tool for connecting people and solving problems collaboratively​. Over the decades that mission has evolved to embrace emerging technologies including, social networking, mobile experiences, digital marketing, personalization and now artificial intelligence. However, our focus on connecting people and solving problems remains. 

What Can We Create with AI?

AI gives us the opportunity to collectively reimagine what is possible with agents, content curation, and research. There is incredible potential to deliver more personalized experiences, and as an organization we are already collaborating with our clients to ethically build that future. This is WHAT we will build —what experiences and engagements we will make possible. 

For organizations starting to dip their toes into AI use cases to drive impact, there remains the need to ultimately solve audience problems. Because of this fundamental aspect of creating tools and experiences for people, design-thinking isn’t going anywhere, but it now has multiple highly adaptive, creative, and fast AI collaborators.  

Using AI in Product Discovery

Founded on human-centered design, product discovery uncovers real user needs, tests hypotheses, and shapes a product’s direction before committing to large-scale development. In essence, it is an iterative process of exploration, ideation, and refinement, more specifically defined here:  

• Research & Problem Framing: Gathering insights from users and stakeholders to define the problem space.
• Ideation & Conceptualization: Generating potential solutions to the identified challenges.
• Prototyping & Validation: Quickly building prototypes to test assumptions and collect feedback.
• Iterative Refinement: Continuously adjusting based on learnings and user insights.

In practice, taking a product or design-thinking approach is difficult for most organizations. It costs time and resources, but outcomes are never guaranteed. This is especially difficult when there are pressing priorities with current operations. 

Additionally, the discovery process is filled with the need to make decisions— determining which audience segment to focus on, what functionality to prioritize, how to market it etc. For teams with rigid processes for decision-making and/or complex stakeholder priorities, this can be painful, steer focus away from the user and even halt progress altogether. 

While AI alone can not (currently) solve all organizational problems, it can supercharge key aspects of product discovery. 

AI as an Augmented Brainstorming Partner & Faster Prototyping

AI has emerged as a powerful collaborator during the earliest stages of product discovery, where creativity and rapid iteration are essential. By leveraging AI-based language and image-generation tools, teams can break out of their habitual thinking patterns to explore unconventional ideas, features, and design angles they might otherwise overlook. 

This heightened ideation phase becomes even more effective when paired with AI-driven prototyping, which can transform basic sketches or written concepts into working models in minutes. Rather than spending weeks refining a single idea, teams can now create multiple prototypes simultaneously and launch automated feedback loops—such as quick A/B tests or instant user surveys—to gather valuable insights in real time.

Streamlined User Research & Ethical Alignment

Beyond fostering creativity and accelerating prototyping, AI optimizes the research and validation phases of product discovery. Tools that transcribe and analyze qualitative data enable teams to sift through interviews, survey responses, and user feedback at remarkable speed—extracting critical insights without the manual time sink. Predictive analytics can also anticipate user behavior, flagging which features are most likely to succeed. Nevertheless, it’s crucial to integrate clear ethical and mission-aligned guidelines throughout this process. 

Organizations should use AI responsibly by protecting user data and preserving human oversight, ensuring that algorithms serve as an extension of empathy and insight rather than a substitute for them.

How Forum One is Experimenting with AI

Organizations of all sizes—and particularly mission-driven ones—can find their stride by embracing AI to augment user-focused practices. By weaving AI into product discovery, teams can move faster, learn more efficiently, and craft solutions that truly serve their audiences. The potential for meaningful impact grows when we combine thoughtful, ethical AI use with the core principles of design thinking and collaborative problem-solving.

At Forum One, we’re already experimenting with a host of AI capabilities to propel this transformation forward. For example, our product design sprints leverage AI prototyping tools—like Lovable.dev—to produce and test interactive prototypes connected to live databases, giving us improved feedback on concept viability. 

We also use deep research models to kick off initial marketplace analysis and explore audience “jobs to be done.” This accelerates our ability to identify user motivations, pain points, and opportunities. On top of that, AI-driven text analysis lets us dig into qualitative survey results with impressive speed, helping us capture deeper nuances in user needs. 

Finally, product teams can turn to generative AI to kick off concept creation and brainstorming. While AI doesn’t replace human-led brainstorming and concept creation entirely, it provides a valuable starting point or source of inspiration.

As new AI tools and approaches continue to evolve, staying experimental and open-minded will be key. This next wave of innovation isn’t about replacing human insight and empathy but amplifying it—ensuring that future products, services, and experiences resonate deeply and endure in a rapidly changing world.

Unlock AI’s Potential With Forum One’s New Digital Transformation Capabilities

Forum One has launched an innovative AI Strategy and Enablement partnership with Exchange Design, specifically designed for mission-driven organizations facing increasing pressure to do more with less. This new offering combines Forum One’s expertise in digital strategy with Exchange Design’s specialized AI capabilities to help government agencies and nonprofits harness artificial intelligence in practical, mission-aligned ways.

Rather than overwhelming organizations with complex technologies, Forum One takes a practical approach that includes AI Acceleration, AI-Powered Website Enhancements, AI-Ready Data Transformation, and Agentic Workflow Optimization—all tailored to the unique needs of the public and nonprofit sectors.

Ready to transform how your organization works? Discover how Forum One’s AI Strategy and Enablement capabilities can help your mission-driven organization maximize resources, extend reach, and deepen stakeholder relationships.