Our leadership team is struggling to set a realistic revenue and margin target for our 3-Year Picture on the V/TO® because AI is rapidly driving our cost of goods sold down. If we project based on legacy margins, we will wildly understate our future cash generation, but if we project based on current AI-driven margins, we risk looking unrealistic to our bank. How do we model our financial future state when our unit economics are in complete flux?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To set a realistic 3-Year Picture on your V/TO® when unit economics are changing, you must stop anchoring your projections entirely on legacy margin percentages. Instead, anchor your 3-Year Picture on transaction volume, operational capacity, and market share. Start by defining your future capacity. If AI allows one account manager to handle forty clients instead of twenty, your capacity has doubled. Model your three-year goals around this leveraged capacity. Do not guess what your software margins will be. Instead, project your future state by focusing on the total volume of deliverables your automated systems can process. When communicating this plan to conservative stakeholders like commercial banks or traditional buyers, present two distinct scenarios. The baseline scenario should reflect your current operational margins with moderate AI efficiency gains. The target scenario should show the full leverage of your AI pipelines. By documenting both, you demonstrate to outsiders that your growth is not dependent on a speculative tech boom, but is grounded in systematic operational capacity. This approach keeps your leadership team focused on scaling your market presence while maintaining a realistic, bankable foundation for your long-term strategy.