A financial plan’s assumptions are tested during execution. When AI is part of how a company builds and sells its products, we generally see four assumptions in the plan most likely to fail, giving a finance team a clear set of items to monitor throughout the year.
Across the companies we work with, these four assumptions come up consistently:
Engineering Outpaces the Rest of the Business
These four assumptions share a common pattern. AI has accelerated engineering, while the parts of the business that run on human relationships and human time have not changed at the same pace.
Enterprise sales still takes months of relationship-building to close a deal. A senior hire still takes time to identify and onboard. A complex deployment still consumes real engineering hours. A plan built on the assumption that the whole company has benefited equally from AI adoption will need correcting throughout the year.
