Crowdsourced forecasting for the questions that matter.
Cultivate Forecasts captures calibrated probability estimates from the people closest to your hardest decisions — and pairs them with our AI Forecaster so you get a sharper read on the future than either humans or AI alone.
A single expert's view isn't enough anymore.
Most decisions still rely on whoever is loudest, most senior, or last to weigh in. The research on forecasting has been clear for over a decade: a structured crowd consistently outperforms individual experts — and surfaces the dissenting signal that a single voice tends to bury.
Expert Bias
Overconfidence, optimism bias, motivated reasoning. Even your best individual forecaster has them. Aggregating across a crowd quietly cancels them out.
Hidden Information
Critical signal lives in the people closest to the work. Most decision processes never elicit it; the rest collect it as opinions, not as forecasts you can score.
No Accountability Loop
Without measured probability estimates, there's no way to tell who was right, who was confident-and-wrong, or whether your team is getting better over time.
Stale by Default
Static reports go out of date the day they ship. A forecasting platform updates as the world updates — and tells you when the consensus has moved.
Where serious teams point a forecasting platform.
After running enterprise and government programs for over a decade, four use cases keep coming up. The pattern: questions where dollars, deadlines, or strategy hinge on getting the probability right — and where one expert's opinion is no longer enough.
Portfolio Management
Forecast which projects in your R&D, product, or investment portfolio will hit their milestones — and which are quietly drifting. Reallocate before the quarterly review, not after.
Competitive Intelligence
Track competitor moves, M&A activity, regulatory decisions, and product launches with continuously-updated probability estimates from the people closest to the signal.
Internal Program Management
Get an honest read on whether milestones, deadlines, and project risks will land where status reports say. Surface slippage early enough to course-correct.
House View on Markets & Trends
Build a single organizational consensus on the markets, indicators, and geopolitical events that move your business — captured continuously, not just at quarterly off-sites.
Organizations forecasting on Cultivate Forecasts
A sampling of the commercial, government, academic, and non-profit programs that have run on the platform.
Forecasting exploratory well success and competitive activity in Gulf of Mexico lease sales.
Forecasting future product success in market and competitive product launches.
Forecasting the likelihood of success for early-stage drug compounds across the pipeline.
Crowdsourcing sales forecasts from across the sales and marketing organization for sharper revenue predictions.
Demand planning forecasts pooled from corporate planners and dealership management.
A public forecasting program soliciting diverse outside views to sharpen RAND's analysis.
A public forecasting program tracking the future of the transatlantic relationship.
Teaching kids critical-thinking and probabilistic-reasoning skills through structured forecasting.
Tapping the alumni network for forecasts on global business and political questions.
Fire managers across the service forecasting risk and severity for the upcoming fire season.
Quantifying nuclear and biological hazard risks to U.S. cities across multiple timelines.
Forecasting which research programs will transition into broader federal use.
A university-wide forecasting tournament teaching critical thinking and probabilistic reasoning.
Quantifying the likely outcomes of market-moving economic indicators.
A government-wide forecasting program ("Cosmic Bazaar") for high-impact geopolitical events. Profiled by The Economist.
How It Works
A complete lifecycle for asking forecast questions, gathering probability estimates, scoring outcomes, and learning from results — all in one platform your team actually uses.
Ask a Sharp Question
Author a binary, multi-choice, or numeric forecast question with a clear resolution date. Workflow tools let your crowd suggest and refine candidate questions before they go live.
Collect Forecasts
Participants submit probabilistic forecasts and rationales — anonymously or attributed — and update them as new evidence arrives. The platform aggregates each new submission into a single calibrated consensus that updates in real time.
Watch Consensus Move
Real-time aggregation produces a single calibrated consensus that updates as forecasts come in. Comments and supporting links surface the reasoning behind shifts so the why is never a black box.
Score and Learn
Once a question resolves, every participant is scored with Brier-style accuracy. Leaderboards, personal performance analytics, and exportable data make it easy to see where your team is sharp and where it's drifting.
Everything a serious forecasting program needs.
Most forecasting tools handle the easy half — gathering inputs. The hard part is everything else: getting good questions out, keeping forecasters engaged, scoring rigorously, and making the output usable across your organization. Cultivate Forecasts was built for the whole program, not just the form field.
Question Authoring That Actually Works
The hardest part of running a forecasting program is writing the right questions — clear, unambiguous, and resolvable. Cultivate Forecasts gives your team a complete authoring workflow with collaborative drafting, editor approval, and templates so questions go live faster and resolve cleanly. Binary, multi-choice, and numeric formats supported.
- Collaborative authoring with editorial workflow and reviewer approval
- Binary, multi-choice, and numeric formats with built-in resolution criteria
- One-click replication for recurring weekly or quarterly cycles
Aggregation You Can Trust and Audit
Forecasts only matter if the consensus is calibrated. Cultivate Forecasts uses aggregation techniques honed across a decade of IARPA-funded research — including time-weighted aggregation, accuracy-weighted ensembles, and full calibration analytics — with complete transparency into how every number is calculated. Your data scientists can verify the math; your decision-makers can trust the output.
- Multiple aggregation methods (mean, median, accuracy-weighted, recency)
- Brier-style scoring with calibration analytics across questions, topics, individuals, and cohorts
- Full transparency: every consensus number is explainable and auditable
A Crowd That Stays Engaged
The biggest failure mode for enterprise forecasting programs is participation drying up after week three. Cultivate Forecasts is designed to keep your forecasters in the loop: discussions and rationales build a sense of shared work, leaderboards create healthy competition, optional anonymity lowers the cost of dissenting, and email + mobile notifications keep questions on people's radar without pestering them.
- Discussion threads, rationales, and team-level collaboration
- Optional anonymous forecasting so junior voices can disagree with senior ones
- Native iOS + Android apps and configurable email and text reminders so participation stays alive
Built to Plug Into Your Stack
Cultivate Forecasts isn't another silo — it's meant to be the source of probabilistic truth your other systems pull from. SAML/OIDC single sign-on integrates with your existing IAM. The REST API and webhooks push forecasts into BI tools, internal dashboards, and analytical models. Full CSS theming and multi-language support make it look and feel like part of your environment, not a third-party tool.
- REST API and webhook events with full documentation for downstream integrations
- SAML 2.0 and OIDC single sign-on; SCIM provisioning for managed user lifecycles
- Full white-label theming, multi-language support, and CSV/JSON exports
AI and human forecasters, working on the same questions.
Most platforms make you choose: a community of human forecasters, or an AI agent that runs on its own. Cultivate Forecasts is one of the only platforms that runs both — natively. The Hinsley AI Forecaster participates alongside your human crowd, contributes its own probability estimates with full reasoning, and gets aggregated into the same consensus. The combination consistently outperforms either method alone.
Always-On AI Coverage
The AI Forecaster monitors evidence continuously and revises its estimate as the world changes — so every question has a live machine forecast, even when your human crowd hasn't refreshed in a few days.
AI + Human Ensemble
Aggregate human forecasts and AI forecasts together, weighted by historical accuracy. Two independent systems cross-checking each other, with neither becoming a single point of failure.
Transparent Reasoning
Every AI forecast ships with a structured rationale — base rates, current evidence, time remaining — visible to your forecasters. No black boxes, no unexplained numbers.
Deploy it the way your environment requires.
Some teams need to be up and running by next Monday. Others have data classification, residency, or compliance constraints that rule out shared infrastructure entirely. Cultivate Forecasts ships in four hosting postures — same platform, same capabilities, different security and operational profiles.
Why teams choose Cultivate Forecasts over public forecasting platforms.
Public forecasting communities are useful for general questions and public attention. But when the questions are proprietary, the answers feed real decisions, and the data has to live inside your perimeter, you need a different kind of platform.
Private to Your Organization
Your questions, your forecasters, your data — never visible to a public community. Run on our SaaS, on dedicated infrastructure, on-prem, or fully air-gapped when classification requires it.
Fully Branded & Localized
Match your brand with full CSS customization. Translate the entire experience into other languages. Run multi-language versions of the same question for international programs.
Integration-First
REST API, CSV exports, pre-packaged executive summaries, and webhook events. Cultivate Forecasts is built to be a source of probabilistic truth your other tools can pull from.
Methodology Support, Not Just Software
Our team has run more enterprise and government forecasting programs than anyone. Workshops, training, decomposition methodology, and program design come standard — your forecasters succeed faster.
Deployment Flexibility
SaaS for the standard case. Dedicated environments for sensitive programs. Fully air-gapped deployment for classified workflows. One platform, three deployment postures.
Built On a Decade of Research
IARPA ACE, Good Judgment Project, RAND's public forecasting site, Bertelsmann's leaderboard — when serious institutions run serious forecasting programs, they've often run them on our platform.
See how serious forecasting works.
Schedule a 30-minute demo and we'll walk through how Cultivate Forecasts fits the questions, decisions, and team you actually have.
