Vision in the AI Era: Throwing the Dart When the Target Keeps Moving

The old advice was simple: throw an intelligent dart into the future, then work backward to figure out what you need to do today. Good advice. Still true.

What Actually Changed

Here's what's changed: the target itself now includes a mix of people and agents, and it keeps moving faster than it used to. You can't just aim for where your team, your market, or your industry will be — you have to account for how the tools available to everyone will keep shifting the whole landscape underneath you.

Consider how quickly the baseline capability of AI tools has moved in just the last couple of years. A vision built eighteen months ago, one that assumed certain tasks would always require a human, might already be outdated — not because the vision was wrong when it was made, but because the target it was aimed at has moved. That's a genuinely new problem. Visions used to age slowly, over years. Now some of them age in months.

That sounds harder. In some ways it is. But it also means your blind spots have changed shape, not just grown. It's not just "what am I missing about the market" anymore — it's "what am I missing about what my tools can and can't actually see." A blind spot about your competitors is bad. A blind spot about the actual current capability of the tools you're relying on is arguably worse, because it can lead you to either underuse a tool that's more capable than you assumed, or overtrust one that isn't as capable as it seems.

Staying Humble About Both

Good vision in this era means staying humble about both. Keep improving it — more education, more experience, more willingness to challenge your own assumptions about what AI is actually capable of. You're never done. That part, at least, hasn't changed at all.

Practically, this might mean actually testing your assumptions periodically — trying a tool on a task you assumed it couldn't handle, or double-checking one you assumed it could. Vision that doesn't get re-tested against reality isn't vision. It's just an old snapshot you've stopped updating.

This essay is part of The Hybrid Leader's Field Guide.