A shareholders' meeting calls for a story that adds up. Not only the figures, but also the reasoning behind them: why this strategy, based on which assumptions about the market, the competition and the organisation itself. Shareholders and supervisory board members ask questions about the future, and those questions often touch on an assumption that was recorded two years ago and has not been reopened since.
AI taking over work is exactly the kind of assumption that can quietly have shifted. A strategic plan often assumes a certain staffing level, a certain pace of cost development, a certain lead time for processes. If part of that work is now being done by AI, or is eligible for that, the basis under those figures changes, even if no one has adjusted the plan. The question comes up right now because a meeting is the moment at which someone speaks that assumption out loud, and you want to know whether it still holds before that happens.
AI is already taking over work today, not everywhere and not to the same degree. In some companies this has by now become a fixed part of how work is organised: for each task it is recorded whether AI can do it fully, whether AI does part of it with human oversight approving or rejecting with reason, or whether it remains human work. In other companies that classification does not exist, and AI is treated as a separate project alongside the regular work rather than as something that changes the composition of that work.
That difference explains why the same plan has already been adjusted in one company and still runs on the old assumptions in another. It does not depend on the sector alone, but on whether someone has taken the trouble to look, task by task, at what has actually changed. Companies that did this are not necessarily further ahead with AI; they are further ahead in knowing what still stands of their plan.
For a shareholders' meeting, the distinction between these two questions matters:
The first question can be answered: it is an inventory, not a prediction. The second question yields a simple answer per assumption: confirmed, expired, or not yet tested. That is what you can determine ahead of a meeting: not whether AI will deliver on the strategy, but whether the assumptions on which the strategy is built still stand.
What you cannot determine at this moment is an exact share of the work that AI will take over, or a timeline for when that happens. That differs by sector, by process and by choices the company still has to make itself, and figures you do not have yourself do not belong in the meeting documents as established fact.
This check says nothing about who keeps which position. If a board is considering decisions about personnel based on a changed division of tasks, its own legal requirements apply to that, and those do not follow from an overview of which work AI can handle. This is a picture of the assumptions underlying the strategy, not a basis for a personnel decision and not advice on what the company should do.
The same kind of check comes back at the annual planning, after a disappointing quarter or ahead of an investment decision, but the shareholders' meeting requires something extra: the story must not only add up internally, it must also be defensible to people who do not follow the plan on a daily basis. That is a different kind of pressure than with internal annual planning, where adjustments can be made without an audience.
The underlying question, which work in this company can genuinely be taken over by AI, is answered task by task with the work scan from FTE TO AI, separately from the question of when you use that outcome. For the meeting itself, it is at least as important why the views within a management team diverge: if the CFO and the operations director have a different estimate of what AI is already taking over, that difference is likely to surface during the meeting sooner than you would want.
Not every supposition in a strategic plan is an assumption in the sense that matters here. An assumption is a statement that, if it no longer holds true, affects the plan itself. How you make that distinction and how you check whether an assumption still holds is described on the page about what a strategic assumption is and how you check whether it still holds.
For the meeting, it is not necessary to review everything at once. A list of the assumptions that touch on work, capacity or cost, with a date per assumption of when it was last checked, is sufficient. Anything older than a few months deserves at least the question of whether it still holds, even if the answer ultimately remains yes.
The free assumption check is a short round in which you name your key assumptions and see, per assumption, when it was last confirmed. The full proof, which places this picture alongside sector data and the management team's self-plot, 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.