A change of leadership is not a strategy moment. It is a handover moment. And precisely because of that, a question surfaces that could remain beneath the surface for months: which assumptions underlying the strategy still belong to the outgoing management, and which automatically carry over to the new one.
For most parts of a strategy, this is not a problem. A market assumption, a pricing assumption, an assumption about a competitor: these are handed over in a file, a final meeting, a set of sheets. They have been made explicit, so they can also be picked up again.
The assumptions behind work taken over by AI are often not like that. They were never formulated as an assumption. At some point, someone estimated that a task, a team, or a layer of the organisation continued to work in a certain way, and that estimate was never separately identified, let alone dated. It is woven into the budget, into staff planning, into what was taken for granted about turnaround times. Outgoing management hands over what it knows it knows. What it assumed without knowing it, it does not hand over, because it cannot.
The new management inherits the plan, not the context in which the plan arose. It sees the figures, the goals, the milestones, but not the moment when someone thought: this part is not yet done by AI, so we count on human work for that. That thought may be a year old. In a year, a task may have shifted from category 3, human work, to category 2, partly automatic with human oversight that approves or rejects with reason, or to category 1, where taking it over is itself no longer an open question.
The new management therefore has two choices, usually without experiencing it as a choice. It adopts its predecessor's assumptions, including the date on which they arose, or it starts with a clean slate and reassesses what underlies the plan. The first route is faster and feels loyal to the previous team. The second route is more thorough, but is rarely chosen consciously, because there is no fixed moment at which someone asks: which assumptions date from before I took office, and do they still hold.
In some organisations, this is already arranged. Assumptions about automation are noted separately, with a date and an owner, apart from the rest of the strategy document. There, a change of leadership means a handover of a list, not a guess at what still holds. This usually happens in companies where an earlier change, a reorganisation, a system change, a disappointing quarter, had already shown that an assumption could lapse unnoticed. The lesson has then become procedure.
In other organisations, that list does not exist. Assumptions about what AI does and does not take over are scattered across job descriptions, budgets, and separate notes from team leaders. No one has ever laid them side by side, let alone dated them. This is not necessarily carelessness: it is often simply that previous management never had a moment when it felt necessary. A change of leadership is such a moment, but only if someone recognises it as such.
During a handover, you can establish which assumptions about automation have been made explicit and which have remained implicit. You can establish when an assumption was last confirmed, and by whom. And you can establish whether the classification used by the previous plan, task taken over by AI, task partly taken over with oversight, task still human work, still matches what is happening in the sector and for comparable roles.
What you cannot establish at this moment is whether a task will be taken over during the new period. That depends on the sector, on the nature of the work, on available applications that themselves also change. A change of leadership is a good moment to ask the question, not a moment at which the answer is already fixed.
This inevitably touches on personnel, and there is a boundary here that this page does not cross. Whether a shift in tasks has consequences for people, and how those consequences are shaped, is a decision for the employer, with its own legal requirements for justification and process. What is discussed here is only the factual question: which assumption is stated, and does it still hold.
A change of leadership is one of several moments at which this question naturally surfaces. Comparable pressure points arise halfway through a multi-year plan, when the interim results no longer match the starting assumptions, in the run-up to a shareholders' meeting, where assumptions must be justified out loud, and during annual planning, where a new cycle often unknowingly builds on old figures. What sets a change of leadership apart is that the person who once made the assumption is no longer the one who has to carry it. If you recognise that a strategy is already ageing regardless of who is at the helm, you can read more about the signals that a strategy has become outdated, even before the figures show it, or about how to set up a periodic outside view of the sector yourself.
The underlying question, which work in this company can genuinely be taken over by AI right now, is answered per task with the work scan from FTE TO AI.
Upon taking office, new management can ask for an overview of the assumptions underlying the current plan, with the date of the last review per assumption. If that overview does not yet exist, creating it is already the first step, regardless of the outcome.
As a starting point, there is a free assumption check: a short round in which you identify your key assumptions and see, per assumption, when it was last confirmed. The full proof-testing, with the outside view alongside your own self-assessment, is under construction.
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Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.