Developing a Transformational Vision for AI and Beyond

Everyone’s figuring out their AI strategy now. But a strategy has to be guided by a vision — how the world will be different, for better or for worse, due to AI, and how these changes will affect your target market. Armed with this vision you can choose your part in the future (mission) and how you may guide yourself towards it (strategy). 

One way to develop a vision is to think forward — start with what’s already happening and project 2-3 years down the road. This is a useful approach, but it tends to produce an incremental vision: the world as it is today just with chatbots, co-pilots, and agents. This vision will be of value, but it also comes with some serious limitations.

American researcher, scientist, and futurist Roy Amara is famous for his namesake law: 

Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

In other words, the incremental vision is often less feasible, viable, or valuable than we expect in the short term. Self-driving cars are a famous example. Like with every hype cycle, AI will go through a phase of disillusionment and reckoning and many projects (and companies) will have to shut down.

Thinking Bigger – A Transformational Vision

The other part of Amara’s law is just as important. The most successful tech companies seem to be the ones able to develop a broader and deeper vision, one that is sometimes 5-10 into the future. These visions tend to be more transformational, ie bringing a major change and much more impact.

Here are some examples of the difference between incremental and transformational visions: 

The Web (mid-1990s)

• Incremental — Companies will display their catalogues online
• Incremental — Classified ads will be published online 
• Transformational — Every type of product will be sold online (Amazon, eBay, PayPal)
• Transformational — All the world’s information will be available online (Google)
• Transformational — Applications will run in a browser (Netscape, Sun, Hotmail, Google)

Smartphones (mid-late 2000s)

• Incremental — People will run miniaturized versions of Windows and Office on their phones (Microsoft)
• Incremental — People will send and receive email on their phones (Nokia, Blackberry)
• Transformational — A thousand mobile apps in your pocket (Apple)
• Transformational — A marketplace of smartphones built upon an open-source OS (Google) 
• Transformational — Ordinary people offering location-based services using smartphones (Uber, Lyft) 
• Transformational — People and businesses will pay and receive payment on their smartphones (Venmo, Square)

Both the incremental and the transformational visions have a place, but the incremental vision offers less competitive advantage because everyone has the same ideas; it also eventually loses out to the transformational vision. Sure, companies did put their catalogs on the Web, but the real power, as Amazon, eBay and PayPal had realized, was in eCommerce. Yeah, smartphones made by Microsoft, Blackberry, and Nokia sold well for a while, but then they crashed to nothing in the face of iPhone and Android devices that sort of “came from the future”. 

The Difference Between Transformational Vision and Science-Fiction

It’s tempting to confuse transformational vision with science fiction. The key difference is that sci-fi is all about telling an exciting or romantic story of the future, while a transformational vision is pragmatic and aimed at creating real value for real people. For example, 80 years ago the sci-fi version of home robotics was a metallic humanoid on wheels that does chores around the house. The less romantic but much more transformative vision was of single-purpose robots such as laundry machines and dishwashers. 

Given this distinction you can argue that Cryptocurrencies, Web3, personal assistants, self-driving cars, and AR glasses are more sci-fi than transformational. They’re exciting, but they didn’t make any dent in the real world even after years of development, most likely because they’re not solving big, burning problems for most people. On the flip side, companies like WhatsApp, Slack, or Stripe didn’t work towards very sexy visions, but they did solve some deep problems and transformed the behaviors of consumers and companies.

AI is especially evocative of sci-fi. Indeed many things we’re experiencing now feel like science fiction. But that does not mean that the future is necessarily going to be HAL 9000, or a know-it-all personal assistant a-la the movie She, or a, yet again, humanoid home robots that fold our clothes. Maybe yes, but I suspect there’s more to AI than trying to do human things better than humans, for example coding awkwardly in programming languages created for humans, or driving awkwardly in cars designed to be driven by humans. 

The 10-Years-From-Now Exercise

So perhaps a better place to start is with the world as it may be in 5-10 years as experienced by your users and customers. Think of AI, but consider also other trends in technology, economy, geo-politics, and your specific industry. Then pick a target market segment. You may realize that your current market will shrink or disappear altogether, while other segments (some that don’t yet exist) will emerge and grow. So part of the exercise is to choose who you’re focused on. You may want to repeat the exercise for more than one segment. 

Once you have a market segment in mind ask these questions:

• Jobs — Will they have the same needs (functional, social, emotional)? Will some go away? Will new ones emerge? Are some jobs that are currently too hard or too costly, become attainable?
• Pains — Will they have the same problems? Same things holding them back or costing too much? Would these pains burn more or less? Would there be new pains? 
• Gains — Would their aspirations and fantasies change? Would they be gratified by different things? What would be a great success for them 10 years from now? 

I’ll give you an example from my target market—I teach and consult technology companies of all sizes. I’m guessing that 10 years from now:

• There will still be a big tech sector, though some segments, the ones that are mostly about developing software or content for others, will drastically shrink. 
• The main jobs of developing products, selling, and supporting them will persist, but due to AI they’ll require fewer resources (including people) and have faster cycle times. 
• Tech companies will face more uncertainty, complexity and change due to several factors: 1) With AI the barriers to entry and costs of product development will drop sharply and markets will become much more dynamic and competitive. 2) Geopolitical tensions between superpowers and blocs may intensify causing more wars and immigration, increasing political instability (I really hope to be wrong on this one) 3) Global warming will introduce new challenges and uncertainty, but perhaps also a massive investment in new technologies. 
• The core leadership jobs of defining missions, strategies, goals, and metrics will persist and become much more important, and yet much harder because of the intensified uncertainty, complexity, and rate of change.
• The now thriving industry of consulting, coaching and training will likely face pressure from AI that will eat up (at least) its lower tiers. 

That’s a view of the world I’m gradually building. It’s surely wrong in some aspects and it will have to evolve over time. Still it is already giving me some important food for thought about what I should be doing to be ready (I have some ideas, but I’m not going to share — do your own thinking). 

Bring The Vision to Life

Once you have 5-10 year vision (or maybe more than one) you can try to visualize it and see if it makes sense. One option is to create a slide deck, storyboard, or short video (using AI maybe) that describes the experience of the user/customer with the product in the future. This can be a day-in-a-life story, or a user flow in completing certain tasks — often called a Product Vision. Don’t try to hammer out feature lists and design details, just use broad strokes and lots of assumptions to get a sense of what life might be like in the future. 

Another approach, suggested by Paul Graham of Y Combinator, is to “live in the future and see what’s missing”. So for example, if you think that in the future AI will replace 99% of programmers, designers, and marketers, try to develop a tech product without these professions and see where things come short. This will help you identify gaps that you can maybe fill with your product. You may also realize that the future you envision doesn’t really make sense. When I was working at Google in the early 2010s, we observed that many consumers were going mobile-only, and hypothesized that the same trend will happen in the office. So we attempted to live in this future by replacing our PCs and laptops at work with tablets and phones one day a week (Tablet Tuesday). The conclusion was very clear: mobile devices were too limited — laptops and PCs were here to stay. 

Iterate on Your Vision

It’s very unlikely that you’ll get the vision right on the first go. Vision is something that evolves over time. Often it comes about through a process of trial and error and you may have to pivot entirely. For example, Apple’s Post-PC vision emerged from various far-less visionary attempts to protect the iPod business from smartphones. Along the way Apple created the building blocks of the modern smartphone — multi-touch interface, hardware, and powerful OS. At some point it became clear that this device isn’t just a better phone, but mobile computing device. You can read more about the history of the iPhone here.

The Power of Vision

Developing a transformational vision is very hard, but it offers many advantages. Once you have a long-term vision you can work your way backwards and ask what you can achieve in 1-2 years that moves you towards this future. What would be a minimum-viable version? How you can capture a niche that will later turn into a massive market. You’ll see less competition because most companies will not see the sea change until much later. 

 If you need help, developing visions and missions is one of my favorite parts of consulting. Please feel free to reach out to me (startups in advisory mode included).