Vijayanta Gupta

Board memo

Your 2026 growth plan is modelled on a buyer that no longer exists

.8 min read

Read most B2B software growth plans for 2026 alongside the AI roadmap and the contradiction is loud. The roadmap is ambitious, AI-rich, and dated to the quarter. The growth plan still assumes the prior go-to-market motion, the prior pricing model, the prior category position, and the prior unit economics. The product is becoming an AI product, in other words, and the company has decided to grow it as if it were still a SaaS one.

This is the most common diagnostic finding inside a software board in 2026. AI is present in the deck. AI is absent from the plan. The gap is not a communication problem; it is a forecasting and incentives problem.

Until the growth plan changes shape, AI is theatre with a feature list.

Where the gap shows up

Three places, in order of visibility.

The pipeline assumption. Most 2026 plans still assume the same conversion rates from marketing-qualified to sales-qualified to closed-won. The plan does not reflect that the buyer has done AI-assisted research before the seller is engaged, that the demo is no longer where the prospect learns the product, and that the first conversation has to validate and prove rather than educate. The pipeline shape is the first thing to change, and the planning teams that have not yet changed it are forecasting against a buyer that no longer exists.

The pricing line. The plan still anchors on average revenue per user, seats expansion, and net revenue retention as if the contract structure were stable. The contract structure is not stable. Mixed pricing now sits at 92 percent of AI software companies in 2025, with seat, usage, and outcome lines arriving inside the same contract trendingtopics.eu, 2025. Salesforce already prices an AI-augmented seat at roughly 500 dollars against the 175-dollar non-AI seat, a near three-times step from a category leader Tomasz Tunguz, 2025. The growth plan that does not break out AI revenue, AI-augmented revenue, and outcome-based revenue separately is forecasting in a unit the company no longer sells.

The margin assumption. The plan still carries an aggregate gross margin band that, on inspection, is a blend of the legacy SaaS line and a new AI line operating under different rules. ICONIQ Capital’s January 2026 State of AI report finds inference at 23 percent of revenue at scaling AI B2B, with average AI gross margins at about 52 percent for 2026 SaaS Mag, 2026. Public SaaS gross margins for companies shipping meaningful AI have reset into a 60 to 70 percent corridor SaaS Mag, 2026. A plan that quotes a single gross margin band hides the most consequential operating decision the company will make this year.

Why the gap survives so long inside well-run companies

Three forces hold the gap in place.

The first is the language of motion. AI features are easy to put on a roadmap. They produce visible motion in product reviews and board updates. They feel like a strategy because they look like activity. This is roadmap theatre: a list of AI features treated as an AI strategy while pricing, margin, and the location of value capture stay untouched. The growth plan is the test the roadmap fails.

The second is the incentives of the planning team. The 2026 plan was largely built on top of the 2025 plan, and the 2025 plan was largely built on top of the 2024 plan. Each year, the unit economics assumptions get carried forward with light edits because the alternative is to rebuild the model from scratch under more uncertainty. The team is not avoiding the AI question; the team is rolling forward the only model that survives planning season.

The third is the board’s own habit. AI questions get answered in the product update agenda item. The growth plan gets reviewed in a separate agenda item. The board chair asks the AI question of the chief product officer and the growth question of the chief commercial officer, and the two answers never collide in the same room. The structure of the agenda is producing the gap.

What this does to the company

Three consequences.

The growth plan misses. Not by enough to trigger replanning, but by enough to erode confidence over two or three quarters. The CFO explains the miss as one of macro, churn, or pipeline conversion. The truer explanation is that the plan never accounted for an AI-aware buyer, AI-aware pricing, or AI-aware margin.

The roadmap funds the wrong things. Features that are easy to ship and visible to the press get prioritised over the unglamorous infrastructure investments (eval, observability, inference orchestration) that hold gross margin. The product team is doing its job; the growth plan is failing to give the product team the signal that infrastructure is now a growth investment, not a back-office cost.

The capital allocation slips. Twenty cents on the dollar that should be moving from headcount expansion into agent reliability, governance, and pricing capability is still funding the prior motion. Governance is the fastest-growing line item in enterprise AI budgets, rising to 8 to 12 percent in 2026 from 3 to 5 percent two years earlier Presenc AI, 2026. Inside the company, that re-allocation has to come from the growth plan first. The growth plan that does not move does not free the capital.

The counterargument

The board chair will reasonably ask whether this is just rephrasing strategy as planning. It is not. The point is that strategy without a corresponding plan stays as language. The roadmap will continue to ship AI features. The growth plan will continue to forecast SaaS economics. The mismatch will continue to read as macroeconomic noise inside quarterly variance commentary. The cost of fixing the planning gap is small, the work is finite, and the alternative is a third year of misses the company struggles to explain to its own board.

What changes in the next planning cycle

Six changes belong in the next plan revision.

The pipeline assumption shifts to an AI-aware buyer. Conversion rates are re-modelled, the buyer journey shortens before sales engagement, and the demo is repositioned as a proof-of-value step rather than an education step.

The revenue breakdown becomes plural. The plan reports legacy SaaS revenue, AI-augmented revenue, and outcome-based revenue separately, with their own retention, expansion, and margin assumptions.

The gross margin band splits. The plan carries two corridors: a legacy band consistent with the 70 to 80 percent SaaS norm where AI is not material, and a 60 to 70 percent band consistent with the public SaaS reset where AI is material SaaS Mag, 2026. A single aggregate band hides the operating decision.

Capital allocation moves explicitly into the operating spine. Twenty cents of every operating dollar previously funding headcount-led expansion is named and re-allocated to inference orchestration, eval, observability, governance, and agent reliability.

The headcount plan answers the Klarna question on the page. Workforce strategy is named, reliability thresholds for agent deployment are stated, and the rehiring or up-skilling case is built in CNBC, May 2025; Time, 2025.

The valuation context is reflected in the strategic narrative. Median public SaaS sits at 3.3 times revenue in March 2026, down from 6.2 times eighteen months earlier, while true AI-native platforms command 16 to 18 times for companies where AI is the core product Aventis Advisors, March 2026; SaaSRise, 2026. The plan is the document that decides which corridor the company is building toward.

The board agenda

The board does three things at the next meeting.

It moves the growth plan and the AI roadmap into one agenda item, with one combined review. The structural separation is the gap.

It asks the CFO to present a gross margin bridge from the legacy SaaS band to the AI-aware band, with named line items and a quarter of deployment.

It asks the CEO to state, in one sentence each, the assumption about the AI-aware buyer, the pricing structure of the next contract, and the workforce reliability threshold.

The questions are not new. They have just not yet been asked in the same forum at the same time. Until they are, AI is the line in the deck the growth plan does not carry.

Sources

boards, growth, pricing, margin, go-to-market

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