Founder & Principal Analyst · Serious Insights
Daniel W. Rasmus
Strategist, futurist, analyst, author, and educator helping organizations put their future in context.
Dan works at the intersection of scenario planning, artificial intelligence, knowledge management, collaboration, organizational design, and technology evaluation. His work turns uncertainty into usable strategy.
Research and reviews from a strategist, futurist, and analyst.
- Scenario planning and strategic foresight
- Enterprise AI and governance
- Knowledge management and collaboration
- Technology reviews grounded in hands-on use
30+
Years of industry experience
1986
Writing about AI since expert systems and LISP
6+
Books across AI, strategy, management, and culture
Global
Keynotes, workshops, panels, and advisory work
What Dan does
Strategy for organizations that can no longer wait for the future to settle down.
Dan helps leaders explore what is possible, not just what seems probable. He uses scenarios to examine social, technological, economic, environmental, and political uncertainty, then converts those explorations into implications for products, services, investments, operations, and experiences.
Serious Insights combines advisory research, workshops, technology analysis, and thought leadership to help organizations rethink assumptions before those assumptions become liabilities.
The work starts with uncertainty, but it does not end there. The goal is disciplined imagination that creates better decisions.
Core expertise
Where strategy, technology, and organizational practice meet.
Scenario Planning
Foresight methods that help teams challenge assumptions, build alternative futures, and derive practical strategies from uncertainty.
Artificial Intelligence
Analysis of enterprise AI, agentic systems, governance, literacy, adoption, productivity, and the operational realities that follow deployment.
Knowledge Management
Research and advisory work on knowledge flows, communities, collaboration, organizational memory, and AI-enabled knowledge practices.
Future of Work
Workplace strategy, hybrid work, collaboration patterns, productivity models, learning, and the changing relationship between people and work systems.
Technology Advisory
Hands-on evaluations of hardware, software, platforms, and emerging technologies for business buyers, vendors, and decision-makers.
Thought Leadership
Market narratives, research reports, white papers, executive messaging, and content strategies that make complex technology legible.
The Serious Insights perspective
Trends are not strategy. Scenarios are not predictions. AI is not magic.
Serious Insights does not reduce the future to a single forecast. The firm maps plausible futures, tests assumptions, and identifies actions that remain useful across multiple outcomes.
Dan’s work blends evidence, pattern recognition, storytelling, and design discipline. Organizations do not act on data alone. They act on meaning, models, metaphors, incentives, constraints, and confidence.
Career arc
Analyst, strategist, technologist, executive, educator, and writer.
Serious Insights
Founder and Principal Analyst leading advisory, research, reviews, workshops, and scenario-based strategy engagements.
Microsoft
Led business insights and future-of-work thought leadership connected to Microsoft Office and the evolution of information work.
Forrester & Giga
Served in analyst leadership roles focused on knowledge management, collaboration, and enterprise technology.
workshops
Workshops that help teams rehearse the future before they meet it.
Agile thinking is not about moving faster for the sake of speed. It is about building the capacity to sense change, interpret ambiguity, and act before certainty arrives. These workshops help teams move beyond rigid planning habits toward a more adaptive way of working, one that connects strategy, experimentation, learning, and execution.
Innovation does not emerge from slogans or brainstorming sessions. It requires disciplined curiosity, shared context, and a willingness to test ideas against the real conditions shaping markets, customers, technologies, and organizations. Dan’s innovation workshops give participants practical tools for reframing problems, exploring alternatives, challenging assumptions, and turning insight into action.
Writing & research
Analysis across AI, strategy, technology, work, knowledge, and culture.
Dan’s work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Wired, NASA ASK, KMWorld, PC Magazine, Computers in Libraries, CIO, InformationWeek, Byte, AI Expert, MacUser, and many other publications.
AI research
Enterprise AI, governance, literacy, agentic systems, AI PCs, productivity, trust, and adoption.
Strategy & scenarios
Scenario planning methods, uncertainty analysis, strategic thinking, innovation, and implications for leaders.
Technology reviews
Hands-on reviews of business technology, laptops, audio, accessories, software, and emerging digital tools.
BOOKS
Books that connect imagination, management, AI, and strategy
Listening to the Future
Scenario planning as a way to put the future in context.
Management by Design
A design-oriented approach to management and workplace experience.
Empower Business with Generative AI
Harness the power of AI to drive efficiency, improve decision-making, and develop new products or services.
AI since 1986
Deep experience helps separate new capability from recycled hype.
Dan has been writing about artificial intelligence since 1986. His AI work spans early AI publications, editorial work, books, and current analysis of generative AI, enterprise AI, AI governance, AI-enabled work, and agentic systems.
That long arc gives Serious Insights a historical lens often missing from AI coverage: what changed, what returned under a new label, and what organizations need to learn before AI becomes infrastructure.
We don’t chase trends; we map the futures they may lead to.
Public Speaking
Presentations that challenge and inform
Dan speaks on scenario planning, AI, knowledge management, collaboration, innovation, the future of work, libraries, and the science of science fiction. His appearances include business, technology, academic, association, library, and popular culture events.
He was named a Distinguished Speaker by the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center and received speaking awards as an analyst with Forrester Research and Giga Information Group.
How you think about the future is Dangerous
AI and the Future of Work
Strategic Planning: The Story an Organization Tells Itself about Its Future
Media & resources
For event organizers, editors, clients, and collaborators.
Start a conversation
Bring scenario-based thinking, AI insight, and practical technology analysis into the next decision.
Invite Dan to speak, facilitate a workshop, advise a leadership team, review a product, or help frame a strategic technology narrative.