At the Frontier of Innovation

Cascadia Partners is a firm of innovators. Founded by two of the architects of the scenario modeling platform, Envision Tomorrow, we value intellectual curiosity and so do our clients. Our in-house Innovation Studio team supports cutting edge tool development and analysis across all our projects. We invest in expanding knowledge and capabilities across our entire team with biweekly Innovation Lab sessions. These investments keep us at the forefront of our profession and allow us to deliver quality work at a great value to our clients.

We adopt new tools when they make our work better, not just faster. We embrace technology that improves our ability to understand complex systems, produce more impactful work, engage diverse communities, and make the consequences of policy choices legible to decision-makers. The frontier-level artificial intelligence (AI) models available today represent a step change in capability unlike any previous technology. After rigorous evaluation we are integrating the best models across our practice in a structured and careful way.

We Maintain Control by Design

We take our craft seriously as planners. Critical thinking and decision-making are human responsibilities, and we do not delegate these to AI. Integrating frontier AI models into our practice helps us accelerate and scale the impact of analytical workflows that we design - enabling us to take on spatial and quantitative work that was previously out of reach, to build scenario and policy evaluation tools our clients could not otherwise get, and to reduce the time cost of repetitive workflows. We keep human wisdom in control by requiring that any AI-assisted workflow must be designed, validated, and documented by a senior staff person with prior experience doing this work.

Scaling Our Impact & Value

We’re data analysts, spatial planners, and visual storytellers. We believe that when data analysis and implementation ideas are conveyed with a clear, visual story it helps communities make better decisions. Our data-driven approach and visual storytelling has set us apart from the beginning, and AI-assisted workflows help us scale both of those capabilities.

The value proposition for clients is significant. We can now offer our sophisticated analysis, compelling narratives, digestible graphics, visual stories, custom tools, and interactive engagements to more clients in more places. Lowering the barrier to high quality work helps us scale up our impact, and as a values-driven company, this matters to us.

We Choose Models Carefully

Not all AI models are created equal. Most people engage with AI via web search tools or chatbots integrated into office software. These are not the tools of serious research and do not deliver the quality we require. Only in the last year have the top models from frontier labs become capable of dependable, rigorous analytical work.

Our firm leadership has invested significant time and resources testing different models. Anthropic’s Claude AI models have proven to be accurate, transparent, and capable of delivering the standard of excellence that we require. We will continue to test options and make informed decisions as technology evolves; for now, we exclusively use Claude to accelerate our analytical workflows.

We Support Public Oversight of AI

We recognize that as a profession and as a society, we are still working out the implications of and public policy responses to AI — for the workforce, for equity, for the environment, and for the integrity of public decision-making. We take those concerns seriously.

We are in the business of public policy evaluation, so we understand the value of policy guardrails and support strong, safety-oriented regulation of AI. Regulation is how societies capture the benefits of a powerful technology while limiting its harms. It would be a failure of government to not regulate this technology sensibly, but also a failure of human potential not to realize what it can offer. Holding both of those things as true is at the heart of our company’s motto: balancing what matters with what works.