Our Predictions, Dated & Scored

Innovation Vista Predictions

Dated, Sourced, Scored

The list below includes every prediction Innovation Vista has published which did not qualify as “majority opinion” and/or which predicted a major impact on dynamics which had been stable for over a decade, as of the date of the prediction.

Each entry in the ledger lists the date the prediction was made, the date it resolves, the source that decides it, and its current status. The thesis from which these predictions flow is summarized on its own page. Entries are never deleted; misses count the same as hits in the denominator.

How the ledger works

Every entry below is dated and linked to its first publication. Entries made before this page existed are dated to the post that first made them, with an archived copy of that post as the receipt. Each entry states the claim, the date it resolves, the source that decides it, and a confidence level: High, Moderate, or Contrarian, the last meaning that fewer than half of the experts we could find would have agreed with us at the time. Where a consensus existed when we wrote, we snapshot it and link the snapshot. Entries are never deleted or reworded after posting; a correction is a new entry that cites the old one. Conditional entries are labeled as conditional and are void, not scored, if their condition fails. A miss on a Contrarian call is calibration. A miss on a High-confidence call is a lesson, and we will write it up as one.

Prediction 1 · Cyber underwriters ask about post-quantum readiness by late 2026

The claim: “By late 2026, we expect underwriters to begin asking whether critical infrastructure has been assessed for PQC migration.” Migration to PQC will not be required for a few more years, but we believe Cyber carriers will want to gather this data and will look to incentivize companies to prioritize this upgrade.

Predicted August 2025 in “You Need Quantum-proof Encryption Before You ‘Need It’”. Resolves December 31, 2026; decided by carrier application forms and underwriting guidelines from major cyber insurers, and insurance trade press. Confidence: Contrarian. Status: Open.

Prediction 2 · HR will eventually fold into IT; the CIO will reach C-suite parity

The claim: “traditional Human Resources functions will be entirely subsumed within IT by 2035.” The same post has the CIO at equal stature with the CFO and COO by 2035.

Predicted August 2025 in “The IT Org Chart of the Future”. Resolves December 31, 2035; decided by published org-chart and reporting-line data (Fortune 500 proxy disclosures and the annual CIO surveys from Deloitte, Gartner and Foundry). Confidence: Contrarian. Status: Open.

Prediction 3 · Vendors eventually give away what companies are building

The claim: most companies are building AI in the wrong places, and “their software vendors are going to hand them for free within the next 18 to 24 months.” Custom AI in those zones is “rented advantage, not owned advantage.”

Predicted December 2025 in “Brighter Headlights: Seeing Where SaaS AI is Headed So You Can Build Elsewhere”. Resolves December 31, 2027; decided by vendor release notes and price lists showing the post’s named capability categories bundled at no extra charge. Confidence: Moderate. Status: Open.

Prediction 4 · The old consulting business model fails

The claim: “By the end of 2028, at least two of the Big Four will report advisory-arm revenue declines in consecutive fiscal years, or aggregate advisory headcount more than ten percent below peak, while expert-direct and fractional models gain share.”

Predicted March 2026 in “Why the Old Big 4 Consulting Model is Dying“. Resolves with the firms’ fiscal 2028 global revenue reports; decided by those reports. Confidence: Moderate. Status: Open.

Prediction 5 · The Great Repricing shrinks the Labor market

The claim: “US white-collar and professional-services payrolls will remain below their pre-contraction peak through the end of 2027, and the college wage premium will narrow further.”

Predicted March 2026 in “The Great Repricing“. Resolves December 31, 2027; decided by the final BLS payroll series for 2027 and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s college wage-premium series. Confidence: High. Status: Open

Prediction 6 · The Great Repricing drives national policy

The claim: “By the end of 2028, a major federal income-support expansion explicitly responding to AI displacement will be enacted, or formally adopted as a platform position by the leadership of a major party.”

Predicted March 2026 in “The Great Repricing“. Resolves December 31, 2028; decided by the legislative record and published party platforms. Confidence: High. Status: Open.

Prediction 7 · The Great Repricing, if it comes, drives inflation

The claim: “If prediction #6 proves true, its financing will be inflationary, despite the deflationary pressure AI exerts generally: the federal deficit stays above 2.5% of GDP and CPI reaccelerates above 4% within eighteen months of enactment.”

Predicted March 2026 in “The Great Repricing“, in the lineage of Lyn Alden’s work on debasement, credited there. Conditional on prediction #6; if #6 misses, this entry is void. Resolves eighteen months after any qualifying enactment; decided by Congressional Budget Office deficit figures and the BLS Consumer Price Index. Confidence: Moderate, conditional. Status: Open.

Prediction 8 · Deflation follows, once a safety net exists

The claim: “The deflationary signal appears in the same series during 2028, as redesigned contracts catch up with delivery costs.” 

Predicted March 2026 in “The Great Repricing“. Resolves with the December 2028 PPI release; decided by the relevant BLS Producer Price Index series. Confidence: Moderate. Status: Open

Prediction 9 · Pricing units switch from per-seat and T&M

The claim: “By the end of 2027, at least three major software or IT-services providers will have publicly moved offerings from time-and-materials or per-seat pricing to fixed-bid or outcome pricing anchored at or above pre-AI price levels, while disclosing material AI-driven reductions in their own delivery cost.”

Predicted in May 2026 in “Vendor Partnerships in the Era of AI Arbitrage“. Resolves December 31, 2027; decided by earnings calls, published price lists, and trade press. Confidence: High. Status: Open.

Prediction 10 · Digital workers get a price tag

The claim: “By the end of 2027, at least five of the twenty largest enterprise software vendors will sell per-agent or outcome-priced digital-worker offerings as standard products, and supervisory capacity will surface as the reported bottleneck in major CIO surveys.”

Predicted June 2026 in “Last Year Your Competitors Subscribed to AI Tools · Now They’re Hiring Them“. Resolves December 31, 2027; via published price lists and CIO surveys. Confidence: High on the first clause, Moderate on the second. Status: Open.

Prediction 11 · Mid-level talent becomes scarce and expensive

The claim: “A finished mid-level professional hired laterally in 2028-2030, in a market where every competitor is bidding for the same shrinking pool, will plausibly cost $150,000 or more.”

Predicted June 2026 in “Talent Arbitrage · Leveraging the Professionals AI Just Repriced”. Resolves December 31, 2030; decided by BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for the professional occupations the post names, and published lateral-hire compensation surveys. Confidence: Contrarian. Status: Open.

Prediction 12 · Waiting on vendors does not pay this time

The claim: “Companies in the top quartile of the 2026 Innovation Vista AI Maturity Index will outperform bottom-quartile peers on revenue growth AND margin by the 2028 edition, and the gap will widen rather than close.”

Predicted June 2026 in “The Last Tech Wave Rewarded Waiting for Vendors · This One Won’t“. Resolves with the 2028 Index. Confidence: Moderate. Status: Pending prerequisite.

Prediction 13 · Laggards will be sold for cheap

The claim: “Within ten years of publication, AI-laggard companies in at least three mid-market sectors will trade at distress: median acquisition multiples for bottom-quartile AI-maturity firms below 20% of the sector-median revenue multiple.”

Made June 2026 in Within a Decade You’ll Be Able to Buy Competitors for Pennies. Resolves ten years after that date; decided by PitchBook or Capital IQ transaction data, with the AI-maturity quartile defined by the Index. Confidence: Moderate. Status: Open.

Prediction 14 · Early headcount cutters produce failure stories, then a promotion gap

The claim: “The [AI] faith-based cutters are going to generate spectacular failure stories over the next two years,” and “the bench gap surfaces in three to five years when there is no one ready to promote.”

Predicted July 2026 in “The AI Rorschach Test & the High Cost of Presumption”. Resolves July 31, 2028 for the failure-stories clause and July 31, 2031 for the bench-gap clause; decided by reported reversals of AI-driven layoffs (rehiring announcements, written-down restructuring charges) in the business press and company filings. Confidence: Contrarian. Status: Open.

Prediction 15 · Agent docks will become a standard commercial surface

The claim: “By mid-2029, an agent-facing, transactable interface will be as expected of a mid-market B2B seller as a website was by 2005. By the end of 2027, at least two major ERP or B2B marketplace ecosystems will formally support autonomous counterparty agents completing discovery-to-order without a human starting the session.”

Made August 2026 in “Your Next Customer Won’t Be Human · MCP and the Rise of Agent Docks“. Resolves December 31, 2027 for the ecosystem clause and June 30, 2029 for the expectation clause; decided by vendor documentation and public announcements. Confidence: High. Status: Open.

Prediction 16 · Buyers get agents before most sellers build docks

The claim: “Through at least the end of 2027, deployed buyer-side procurement agents will outnumber seller-side agent interfaces in the mid-market by an order of magnitude.”

Made August 2026 in “Your Next Customer Won’t Be Human · MCP and the Rise of Agent Docks“. Resolves December 31, 2027; decided by published procurement-AI adoption data set against a dock census, which we may have to run ourselves and will publish if we do. Confidence: High. Status: Open.

Prediction 17 · Mid-market tech budgets stop rolling forward

The claim: “by the fall 2027 planning cycle, most mid-market technology budgets will carry governance and data as standing rows and software as a committed-plus-variable pair. The budgets that do not will belong to the companies whose AI spending rose fastest and whose EBITDA did not.”

Predicted September 2026 in “If Your Tech Budget Looks Like Last Year’s, You Missed the Turn”. Resolves December 31, 2027; decided by next year’s Innovation Vista Report, as the post says, cross-checked against published IT budget benchmarks such as Gartner IT Key Metrics. Confidence: Moderate. Status: Open.

Candidate entries, not yet posted

Our AI Dividend Map is refreshed every year, which makes it a natural source of dated claims: which sectors will cross the third gate and move from Slow Melt or Rollup into Rising Bar or Falling Floor by the 2028 edition, and which will not.  Nothing enters the ledger until it has been published as a claim somewhere else first.

The scorecard

So far none of these has been proven true or false; the first entries will resolve at the end of 2026. A ledger with nothing resolved is a promise, and we know it; the near-term entries were chosen so the scoreboard fills in within eighteen months, not ten years.

We’ve laid out our overarching thesis that these predictions test, and of course other articles & pages provide deeper context on specific aspects of the AI revolution through which we are guiding mid-market organizations.

Thought Leadership from our team
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