Why Every Organisation Needs a Target Picture of Their AI-Enabled Future
by Esben Toftdahl Nielsen, Co-Founder / CEO
Ask most leaders what their organisation will look like in three years — once AI has had time to reshape how work gets done — and you will get one of two answers. Either a vague gesture toward productivity gains and cost savings, or an honest admission that nobody has really sat down to think it through.
That absence of a concrete target picture is a bigger problem than it might appear.
Decisions without direction
Every week, organisations are making choices about AI. Which tools to adopt. Which processes to automate. Which pilots to run. Which vendors to evaluate. These decisions are not waiting for strategy to catch up — they are happening regardless.
Without a clear picture of where you are heading, those decisions have no anchor. Each one gets made on its own merits, optimised for the immediate problem, without reference to the organisation you are trying to build. The result is an accumulation of tactical choices that may or may not add up to something coherent.
A target picture changes this. It gives individual decisions a direction to point toward.
The questions worth asking
Developing a target picture does not require certainty about how AI will evolve. It requires a willingness to think seriously about a set of questions that most organisations are not yet asking with enough rigour.
What tasks will be handled by AI, what will remain with humans, and what will become a genuine collaboration between the two? This is not just a question about efficiency — it is a question about where human judgement, creativity, and accountability remain essential.
How does the role of leadership change? If AI handles more of the analytical work, more of the synthesis, more of the routine coordination — what does that free leaders to focus on? And what new demands does it place on them?
Who owns AI decisions, and who provides oversight? As AI takes on more consequential work, the question of accountability becomes sharper. The organisations that think this through in advance will be better placed than those who discover the gaps after something goes wrong.
What new skillsets will the organisation need? Not just technical skills, but the capacity to work effectively alongside AI — to set direction, evaluate outputs, catch errors, and maintain the human relationships that AI cannot replicate.
These are not easy questions. But they are the right ones.
Not a prediction — a deliberate exercise
The goal of a target picture is not to predict the future with precision. It is to do the deliberate work of imagining how your organisation will be different, and to use that image as a reference point.
This distinction matters. The future will not arrive exactly as you imagined it. AI will develop in ways that are hard to anticipate, and your organisation's circumstances will change. A target picture is not a forecast you are held to — it is a thinking tool.
What it gives you is coherence. A sense of the organisation you are trying to become, against which you can test the decisions you are making today. It means that when a new AI capability emerges, you have a frame for evaluating it. When you are deciding whether to automate a process or redesign it, you have a direction to reason from.
The cost of not doing it
The organisations that are doing this work — thinking carefully about the target picture, not just the next use case — are building something the others are not. They are developing strategic clarity at a moment when most of their peers are operating on instinct.
That clarity compounds. The decisions they make today are better calibrated. The capabilities they build are more intentional. The culture they develop is more prepared.
The window to do this as a deliberate choice, rather than a reactive scramble, will not stay open indefinitely.
This post expands on a question Esben raised on LinkedIn: what does your future AI-enabled organisation actually look like?