Preparing for the Future: The Pillars of Digital Safety Foresight

Jun 3, 2026 Preparing for the Future: The Pillars of Digital Safety Foresight
undefined

Organizations are increasingly following safety-by-design principles, assessing how new products, feature updates, policy changes and model releases could create or amplify harm. Yet internal review alone is only one part of digital safety. Many of the conditions that shape digital safety now emerge outside the organization itself through advances in AI and other technologies, shifts in user behaviour, new adversarial tactics, changing regulatory expectations and broader ecosystem dependencies.

Preparing for the Future: The Pillars of Digital Safety Foresight highlights the fact that effective digital safety requires organizations to complement internal safety-by-design with a more outward-looking, anticipatory approach. The report presents six digital safety foresight pillars – Frame and govern, Sense, Model, Assess readiness, Install early warning and Synthesize – alongside four response pathways to help organizations translate foresight into practical action. Together, they offer an adaptable framework for strengthening preparedness, resilience and coordination in a rapidly evolving digital environment.

License and Republishing
World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.