The truthful meta-answer which you probably don't want to hear: We only have a statistical likelihood (of dubious confidence) of what will transpire in the futu

The truthful meta-answer which you probably don't want to hear: We only have a statistical likelihood (of dubious confidence) of what will transpire in the future. We have no knowledge of the future. None. Same is true of your knowledge of your future problems. Use some basic bayesian logic and guess in an educated manner, like with most prediction problems. More practical advices: Find out what problems you're interested in working on, then google, read books, engage people working on those problems to tell you more about how they solve them. Another great place to start is to look at your business' biggest inefficiencies and informational gaps, and determine which of them could potentially be addressed with prediction or statistical inference. This used to be called Business Intelligence. Even a coffee shop can benefit from understanding simple seasonality.