In volatile, AI-driven markets, customers need a vendor to state a point of view about where the whole market is going, not just what the product does — because typical B2B buyers don't have the insider exposure to AI discourse that industry insiders and vendors do, and ambiguity is expensive: about half of B2B purchase processes end in "no decision" when the options on the table look similar and the perceived risk of choosing wrong feels high. A stated market POV gives the buyer a reason to act now rather than wait.
Not every stated POV is credible. Dunford's test: "why can only we claim this?" A POV that isn't rooted in a genuine, differentiated capability is just marketing noise indistinguishable from a competitor's. IBM's claimed POV (real-time, open, sovereign AI on mainframes) passes the test because it's backed by concrete claims — roughly 70% share of transactional data flowing through IBM systems, standards-body openness, and global physical presence — that a challenger can't simply assert. See Taxonomy of Corporate AI Points of View by Business Model for how this plays out differently across vendors, and Dunford's Five-Part Positioning Framework for the base framework this POV requirement sits on top of.
A practical test for whether a company's point of view on the market's future is genuine or hollow: ask 'why can only we credibly claim this?' If a competitor could paste the same forward-looking claim onto their own homepage without anyone blinking, the point of view isn't grounded in real differentiated capability and won't hold up to customer scrutiny during a volatile market.
Two adjacent, widely-covered examples of leaders staking public identity on a speculative future rather than demonstrated capability: Jack Dorsey renamed Square to Block to signal an all-in blockchain bet; weeks later Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta to signal an all-in metaverse bet. Four years on, the metaverse team 'barely exists.' Used as evidence that even industry-leading executives are 'lousy at predicting the future,' reinforcing why a market point of view should be built from the credibility test above rather than from conviction or investor narrative alone.
Major market disruptions — COVID, the on-prem-to-cloud shift, and now AI (described as possibly the biggest tech change ever seen) — force widespread repositioning because they change what customers believe is possible, not just what a given product does.
Two AI-specific pressures compound this: SaaS incumbents now face customers asking "can't I just vibe code that?", and AI-native companies must work out exactly who or what they are disrupting before they can claim a category.
Positioning's underlying obligation is unavoidable: every product team, by building a roadmap, is already betting on a version of the future — it has "planted a flag whether you want to or not." Positioning's job is to make that bet explicit and explain it to customers, rather than leaving them to infer it (or assume the company has no answer).
Companies that go quiet during a period of uncertainty pay for it: cited examples include Stack Overflow being widely assumed dead, and Salesforce's stock underperforming despite strong revenue, because customers and the market read silence as irrelevance rather than as neutrality.
See Taxonomy of Corporate AI Points of View by Business Model for how specific companies have staked out that bet, and Position the Current Product, Not the Vision / Meeting Risk-Averse Buyers Where They Are: An AI Maturity Model for how to state it without overpromising.
Build the point of view by starting from what the company is genuinely good at — its real differentiated value — and extrapolating how that value persists into the future, rather than reverse-engineering a narrative that merely sounds flattering or futuristic.
Caveat: humans are generally bad at predicting which changes stick versus revert (the discussion draws the analogy to predicting which remote-work habits would survive after COVID). Forming a point of view about the future is part of the job anyway — expect to often be wrong, and treat the point of view as a staked-out position to be revised, not a forecast to be defended.
An executive team is always already building today's product on some implicit assumption about where the market is headed — the work of writing a customer-facing point of view is often just surfacing and articulating an assumption that already exists inside the company, not inventing one from nothing.
The converse is a useful diagnostic: when a team struggles to write a POV on the future, that's usually a symptom of a deeper, unresolved problem rather than a writing problem — the executive team hasn't actually agreed internally on what its differentiated value is. See Vibe Positioning for what happens when a company skips this alignment step and lets positioning become a matter of opinion instead.
The pathway also has to be non-threatening: "You got to show them the pathway to get there that isn't scary" — a customer-facing point of view on the future needs a staged, low-risk path to it, not just a destination. See Meeting Risk-Averse Buyers Where They Are: An AI Maturity Model for the staged-pathway mechanism this produces.