Forrest will shape community and convening at Erisian, a comparative intelligence company building a new analytical layer for high-stakes decision-making.
Austin, United States (PRUnderground) October 27th, 2026
Hugh Forrest, former President and Chief Programming Officer of SXSW, will join Erisian as Strategic Partner, Community & Convening and founding shareholder of Erisian. Forrest spent more than three decades building SXSW into one of the world's most influential platforms for technology, innovation, culture and ideas, including pioneering the crowdsourced approaches to programming that enabled SXSW to identify emerging ideas at scale.
"Some of the most meaningful moments I saw over decades at SXSW happened when people from very different backgrounds, disciplines and points of view encountered one another and made connections that would not otherwise have happened," said Forrest. "What caught my attention about Erisian is that same respect for difference. The scale and complexity of the information Erisian can bring into view, and the potential applications of that intelligence, are kind of mind blowing. I'm excited to help build the environments where those differences become productive."
Erisian is building what it describes as the world's first scaled dialectic: a comparative intelligence engine designed to surface the convergent and divergent relationships between narratives, assumptions and logics across issues, geographies, organizations, sources and systems shaping consequential decisions. It preserves divergence and makes it navigable at scale. Erisian's premise is simple: "the insights live in the fault lines." Conflict as data that contains some of the most important strategic information available.
Named for Eris, the Greek goddess of creative discord, Erisian deliberately uses the fault line metaphor as places where different forces collide to produce something new. Erisian works alongside Erisian Institute, an independent global foresight institution built on the same ethos.
"Hugh embodies something fundamental to the ethos of Erisian: the most interesting things often happen when different worldviews collide," said Eva Oloumi, Erisian's Founder and Group CEO. "Hugh spent decades creating one of the world's most influential collision environments. I wanted him involved with real ownership in what we are building."
By bringing together the analytical capabilities of the commercial platform and the Institute's mandate for pluralistic, independent inquiry, the two organizations are pursuing a massive mission: to give the world alternative ways to make critical decisions. Forrest's role will help shape how the convening environments are designed and how communities form around them. The objective is not to reproduce SXSW or to build another conventional conference but to build a completely new format that applies Hugh's experience in community architecture, participation and emergent programming augmented by data that was previously inaccessible.
"Every day, foresight practitioners, governments and capital allocators make decisions that move billions of dollars and shape billions of lives. Most of those decisions are made through aggregation, which isn't neutral," said Oloumi. "It's increasingly dangerous as AI does it faster and more invisibly. The synthesized answers we get look complete and correct, but we can't see or question what was left out and most of the time we aren't even aware our choices are narrowed this way. We think we have agency. But think about the implications for mass control: entire governments make decisions on flattened perceptions of reality, carrying narratives they never ratified and cannot even see."
Erisian does not tell users which position is correct, which side to believe or what decision to make. "We know that even the act of choosing which fault lines count is itself an act of synthesis. What we can do is make the choosing visible, make it pluralistic and encourage public challenge to our data," said Oloumi.
"It means we don't pick sides. We will work with any government, institution or organization, and yet none of them will get to decide what we surface. We won't exclude a legitimate perspective because we or someone we work with disagree with its politics, worldview or agenda," said Oloumi, who sees the main applications for the platform in strategic foresight and scenario planning, negotiation, diplomacy and geopolitics.
That independence is reinforced through Erisian's Strategic Council and its integration into the governance of Erisian Institute. The Council brings together people who have spent their careers inside contested decisions: Ziad-Alexandre Hayek, who chairs both the Council and the Erisian Institute Board and has advised four prime ministers and was a World Bank Presidency nominee; Sohail Inayatullah, who originated Causal Layered Analysis, the world's most widely used foresight methodology; and Steven Kenney, who spent more than three decades inside national-security circles.
Organizations interested in limited-release access can request it at erisian.tech/access. Erisian is also speaking with organizations interested in strategic and institutional partnerships, and with investors interested in the long-term development of a new category of comparative intelligence infrastructure.
Media inquiries: press@erisian.org
Investor inquiries: investment@erisian.tech
Websites: www.erisian.tech , www.erisian.org
