AI Doomsday Reports May Be Wrong. Still, They Might Save Your Company.

Read in Forbes

The year is 2028, and panic has gripped the nation. The US unemployment rate just reached 10%, the highest it’s been since the Great Recession. The stock market has collapsed, with the S&P falling 38% from the high it reached in 2026.
 
The widespread adoption of tireless and increasingly capable AI agents has begun to wreak economic and social havoc. Corporations are replacing humans with intelligent systems at a pace few predicted. To make ends meet, legions of white-collar workers have turned to part-time gigs. The collapse in wages is cratering federal tax receipts, adding to an already ballooning debt. The mortgage market has cracked. Consumer spending has plummeted. Our economy has started to feed on itself.
 
These were the headlines from the future that were put out in a report this week by macroeconomic analysis firm Citrini Research. Citrini envisioned the rise of coding agents that collapsed the barrier to launching a new food delivery or ride-sharing app. This would shatter the business models of companies like DoorDash and Uber. Traditional payment providers like Mastercard and American Express would be gutted as agents switched to cryptocurrency and its cheaper transaction costs.
 
Normally, a report like this would have barely received a mention. Citrini is a little-known firm, and the report was purely hypothetical. But such is the state of anxiety over AI right now. The report went viral, triggering a selloff in the stock market. Many of the companies identified in the report took an even bigger hit.

Preparing Over Predicting

The Citrini report isn’t important because it’s necessarily right. No one knows what the future will hold. The report matters because it demonstrated the power of a thought experiment: a scenario for the future that investors and business leaders would be wise to prepare for, even if it never comes to pass. That’s incredibly useful in a world where most people aren’t future-focused. The 70% of us who focus on the present struggle to imagine a world that’s very different from today. And that leaves us unprepared for the day when a very different future arrives. The Citrini report caused a panic because it made the future real.

At the same time, those who sold shares based on Citrini’s doomsday predictions would be wise to remember that the report was just one scenario of what the future might look like. We can easily imagine other possible futures, including ones where we’ve moved into a new era of prosperity. In his new book, The Next Renaissance, my friend Zack Kass puts forward a far more optimistic view of what an AI-transformed world might look like. As he sees it, the question isn’t whether we’ll build a better future. It’s whether we’ll build an exceptionally better future. I sure hope he’s right.

Future-focused leaders recognize that it’s a fool’s errand to bet on one future or another. The real answer is to choose preparing over predicting: envision multiple possible worlds and figure out how you’d thrive no matter which world comes to pass. Smart investors do the same thing: they maintain a portfolio that accounts for a range of possible outcomes. They don’t just bet it all on red.

When Technology Eats Technology

There’s no better example of this than what’s happening with software-as-a-service. Business-to-business SaaS companies like Salesforce and Workday have taken a beating in recent months over fears that AI will destroy their business models. Analysts are calling it a SaaSpocalypse.
 
In one scenario, the ability of managers to “vibe code” their own software using AI will make off-the-shelf solutions a thing of the past. A few engineers inside any company could just describe what they need to an LLM and have it spit out a homegrown, highly customized version of Salesforce.
 
For many of us, this threat has been on the radar since ChatGPT was first released in November 2022. But it took Anthropic’s early February release of a new breed of AI plug-in tools to jolt most of the world into realizing how real the danger is. Software was supposed to eat the world. Now, the fear sweeping markets is that software itself will be eaten by AI.

But then, there’s an even more dramatic scenario where companies won’t need sales software because they won’t need salespeople. In that world, AI agents will handle customer relationships and sales opportunities without the need to look at a separate database.

Of course, there’s an even crazier possibility. In that world, companies themselves won’t exist because AI will just handle everything. Maybe we’ll spend our days pursuing spiritual or religious enlightenment on a universal basic income while AI does all the work. Maybe we’ll all end up looking like the drink-slurping couch potatoes in Pixar’s Wall-E.

Skeptics and past-focused observers may cross their arms. To them, it seems unlikely that large enterprises will cede their right to exist. And will any Fortune 500 CEO trust their company’s customer accounts or payroll to some system that was vibe-coded over the weekend?
 
Maybe not… but the point is that we don’t have to take that bet. The only way for companies to effectively respond to these doubts is to imagine how they would survive in future worlds, and to start running experiments and pilots to show investors they have a game plan for it.

With any luck, SaaS company leaders have already started to play out those scenarios. They’ve envisioned what might happen as the LLMs improve. They’ve redefined how they can continue to provide value in the future. And rather than relying on their investor relations teams to allay investors’ fears, they’re already hard at work building new prototypes that demonstrate where they’re headed.
 
Adobe, for example, has been building AI-powered features into its product line-up since at least 2021. That was well before the release of ChatGPT. The company trained its models on images that didn’t violate third-party copyrights and integrated AI features into its existing creative suite. While the company still has significant work to do, it seems short-sighted to value Adobe similarly to others who have been asleep at the wheel

Our Brains Lie to Us

Taking a scarily different future seriously isn’t something that comes naturally to most of us. We’re hard-wired to assume that the near future will look pretty similar to today. We assume continuity—the stock market will keep going up; the political temperature will keep rising; my SaaS business will always be viable.
 
A few years ago, the chief operating officer of a major insurance company told me that AI would never replace human agents. He was adamant that people would always want to talk to a human being for their most important financial decisions. Perhaps he’s right. But it’s also exactly the type of present-focused thinking that leads companies to their doom—betting on one, reassuringly familiar version of the future instead of preparing for the many possible versions.

In fact, people are already showing a willingness to work with chatbots rather than humans to choose insurance policies and other financial services. Over 90% of insurtech firm Lemonade’s policies are now sold through its Maya AI interface, which guides customers through a conversational flow, assesses their risk, and provides a personalized quote.
 
My COO friend’s confident prediction highlights a deeper problem: the people most susceptible to it are often the ones running companies. People with strong, clear views of the future and the ability to achieve their forecasts tend to rise through the corporate ranks. They plan to sell 10,000 widgets and duly hit or surpass that target. This signals confidence and earns promotions. It makes them look and feel sane in a present-focused world. But it leaves businesses unprepared when the future stops resembling the past.

A Little Doomsday Goes a Long Way

Every leader has to become adept at painting a long-term vision about where they’d like to head. A vision can help galvanize a team. But future-focused leaders realize that the goal of envisioning futures isn’t just to get teams excited. This isn’t a Super Bowl spot. The point is to articulate potential threats and elicit creative responses from your teams. Fear has a way of focusing attention in a way optimism rarely does. That’s why the Citrini report went viral.
 
If you’re a leader, start by gathering your team and envisioning the scenarios that could genuinely kill your business. Don’t just highlight the comfortable risks. Articulate the ones that are often laughed off or too uncomfortable to normally say out loud. Then ask how you would survive and take advantage if that risk actually happened.
 
If you’re lucky, you’ll do this well before the threat is clearly visible. Right now, many companies don’t need much imagination to see how they might die. That’s what makes this moment both terrifying and helpful.

You would hope that somewhere inside Salesforce, Uber, and Mastercard, there’s a team that’s been asking hard questions about the AI threat since before 2022. You would hope they’ve been wargaming different scenarios and placed bets on multiple futures. And you would hope that those scenarios include the one where you or I could whip up enterprise-grade software, a delivery app, or a payments network in an afternoon. If they have, they’ll be in a much stronger position by 2028 than those who are only now starting to think about it.

The companies that endure won’t be the ones that guessed the future correctly. They’ll be the ones who prepared early.