Customer assumptions
Your plan may depend on direct discovery, brand preference, visible buying journeys, and access to customer intent. What changes when customers delegate research and selection to an AI assistant?
Strategy for an AI-mediated economy
AI enablement is no longer enough. Stress-test the plan behind your business.
Putting AI into existing workflows can improve execution. But AI is also changing the assumptions those workflows—and your business—depend on.
How customers find you. Why they choose your product. What they are willing to pay for. And who controls the relationship.
Preparing for 2027 and beyond requires more than an AI-everywhere initiative. Leaders need a clear way to understand how AI could change the business model, translate that exposure into strategic choices, and bring those choices into the operating plan.
The shift
Your team can execute the plan perfectly. The assumptions can still break.
Every business plan contains assumptions about how the market works:
- Customers will find us through channels we understand.
- Buyers will experience the differentiation we have built.
- Our customer relationships will support retention and growth.
- The value we provide will sustain our pricing and margins.
AI gives leaders a reason to revisit each one.
When an assistant researches, compares, recommends, negotiates, transacts, or acts for a customer, it can change how a business gets considered, how its products are used, and where economic value is captured.
Previous model
Company
Channels
Customer
Emerging model
Company
Data, products and services
AI agent
Customer
The stress test
What does your plan assume AI will not change?
Product assumptions
Your differentiation may depend on content, features, or an interface customers use directly. What changes when AI provides the answer or completes the task through another experience?
Economic assumptions
Your model may depend on subscriptions, advertising, referrals, cross-sell opportunities, or direct control of the transaction. What changes when AI bypasses those interactions or makes alternatives easier to compare?
The impact will differ across products and business lines. Some assets may lose value. Others—such as proprietary data, unique inventory, trusted relationships, embedded workflows, and the ability to deliver real outcomes—may become more important.
Interpose
Make the assumptions visible before they become failures.
Interpose is being developed to help leadership teams examine a company, business line, or product against plausible AI-intermediation scenarios.
Surface the assumptions
Identify the customer behaviours, product advantages, and economic conditions the plan expects to hold.
Apply intermediation scenarios
Examine how AI-led research, recommendation, execution, and transactions could change those conditions.
Assess exposure and control
Determine what AI can bypass, what becomes substitutable, and what economic value the business still uniquely controls.
Bring the findings into the plan
Turn strategic exposure into clearer questions, decisions, priorities, and operating-model implications.
The goal is not to predict one certain future. It is to find the assumptions that deserve leadership attention now.
Why it matters
This is an operating-model question.
AI intermediation can affect what a company builds, how it reaches customers, how it prices, which capabilities it needs, and where it invests.
That makes it more than a marketing, technology, or AI-adoption issue. It belongs in business strategy, product planning, investment decisions, and executive operating reviews.
A company can make meaningful progress on AI enablement while leaving the assumptions underlying its plan unexamined. Interpose is intended to close that gap.
In development
What economic value will your business still uniquely control?
Interpose is in its early stages. Follow the work as the framework and assessment system are developed for leaders planning for 2027 and beyond.