Should you generate your vision with AI?

The apocalypse is coming. And college term papers will never be the same.

If you’re under the impression that the press has been leaning hard into stories about artificial intelligence (AI) ending life as we know it, you’re not imagining things. The references to Skynet and The Matrix alone have gotten out of control. Everyone seems to have an opinion about AI and its impact on society, creativity, personal privacy, and safety, and most appear to be based on hype and misinformation about what AI is, how it works, and what it can do.

Most of us are not computer scientists, and AI is incredibly complex. Still, in oversimplified terms, AI uses software algorithms and “machine learning” to collect massive amounts of data, predict events, and solve problems based on the identified patterns. AI is cool and powerful because it becomes better and faster at predicting outcomes, creating content, and analyzing information to reach conclusions as it’s exposed to more data.

But AI doesn’t think, at least not how we think. It doesn’t make intuitive leaps or propose innovations that have nothing to do with logical preconditions. It can write convincing essays and, based on a vast database of information, make Amazon recommendations that seem darn-near telepathic, but it can’t think around corners. It can’t dream up a long-term vision for a company. If you’re leading a team or an organization, that’s your job.

Vision, it turns out, is the most critical ingredient for executives who aspire to implement transformative policies or champion disruptive innovations. Sure, having a clear idea of what the future should look and feel like is helpful if you want to build that future, but that’s not the only reason vision matters. Nothing rallies the troops or electrifies the air in the room like declaring, “This is what tomorrow looks like. Getting there will be scary and take incredible hard work, but I believe we can do this.”

Could AI help leaders formulate and field-test their visions? What would that even look like? We tried to figure that out by plugging the requisite ingredients for a Motto vision statement into an AI from Wordkraft, and the resulting vision statements were…well, to call them vanilla would be an insult to a delicious ice cream flavor. Test number one: FAIL. AI might excel at regurgitating talking points into palatable press release-ready statements, but sharp, playful, Jay Chait-esque wordplay is beyond its capacity just now. We needed a better test.

Most of what’s in the news right now is generative AI—algorithms that can create content such as text, video, and images in response to written or voice commands. Maybe that would provide better results. We plugged the phrase “corporate vision for a bold, fearless branding agency” into the DALL-E image generation AI…and, for our trouble, got a gibberish of mashed-up logotypes and fonts. Bust.

A rethink was needed. Visions often start with bold statements, right? Could AI help us produce one? We found a copy-centric AI with a “Motto Generator,” of course, we couldn’t pass THAT up. We plugged in info about our book, Rare Breed, and the resulting mottos were…meh. The only one that is even worth the trouble read “Minefields. Outlaws. Live ammunition.” Quite fun, but it doesn’t say much. We tried to create something for a fictional clothing company and got platitudinous junk.

We were going about this the wrong way. The trouble with generative AI is that it doesn’t create things independently. Its outputs depend entirely on its inputs—the user’s ideas and the size and quality of its database of facts and interconnections. It doesn’t have “Eureka!” moments. Vision isn’t just personal; it’s often ineffable and difficult to describe in words. When they come to us, many of our clients have a vague idea of the star they want to steer by, but they can’t articulate it—at least, not yet. Regarding vision statements, “I’ll know it when I hear it” is a common refrain.

But what about using AI to gather intelligence that shapes a corporate vision? No compelling vision exists in a vacuum; you must lead an organization toward something. To do that, you need to know what’s happening in the field where you aspire to play: who’s innovating, what’s failed, research in the pipeline, who’s investing, and more. Maybe AI could help us collect and collate raw data and turn it into…vision fuel? Given our flops to this point, it was worth a shot.

Well, we got an education. It turns out there’s AI, but also BI—business intelligence. BI uses the powerful algorithms of AI to collect and analyze massive amounts of business data and process it at hyper speed. Sounds promising, so we checked into AI market research…and were immediately overwhelmed. It seems everyone is getting into the market intelligence space, making the landscape confusing for people who don’t write code and aren’t data analytics specialists. So we dug deeper and found a few companies using AI for honest-to-god market research—brand positioning, competitor analysis, brand awareness, and so on.

After sifting through dozens of AI tools that were either a poor fit or too complex, we found several that gave us the data we were looking for market sentiment, market activity by location, real-time sales intelligence; you name it. If you’re looking to apply AI to the question, “What’s my vision for my organization?” AI market intelligence is a sounding board but not a replacement.

But how does having an algorithm find relevant intel in your industry help you formulate a long-term vision? In our experience, vision is about the white spaces in the marketplace—the areas where needs go unmet and nobody’s asking the right questions or offering acceptable answers. AI is excellent at identifying hidden patterns in terabytes of data revealing unserved territories and unhappy customers. That’s where to begin. What new things can your people create to solve problems? What in your world needs changing or improving? How can you help people? AI can help you answer those questions.

An algorithm won’t distill your vision down to a line of poetry that transforms your company from a business into a calling. That’s still the purview of human creativity and passion, at least for now. But mining for raw material? There’s an AI app for that.