Vision Before Prompts — Why Leadership in the AI Era Starts With Imagination

Christoph Burkhardt
3 days ago
2 min read

By Christoph Burkhardt

AI Strategy Advisor | Founder, AI Impact Institute

In a world where generative AI can replicate style and simulate creativity, competitive advantage no longer belongs to those who produce—it belongs to those who originate. This article argues that leadership in the age of AI begins not with prompt engineering, but with imagination, insight, and the ability to define new value frontiers before a single tool is deployed.

The Myth of the Better Prompt

Ask any executive about their AI strategy, and you’ll often hear:

“We’re experimenting with better prompts.”

“We’re testing faster content generation.”

“We’ve trained the model on our knowledge base.”

But here’s the problem: a smarter prompt won’t invent a smarter vision.

The true challenge isn’t input design—it’s imagination. AI can simulate patterns. But it cannot see what customers haven’t yet articulated. It cannot define new genres. It cannot intuit what value could exist just beyond today’s map.

That’s not a prompt problem. That’s a leadership problem.

Crossing the Creative Threshold

The creative threshold—a concept that describes the shift from access to originality. As AI lowers the barrier to content creation, leadership must move up the ladder of abstraction.

What used to differentiate companies—speed, style, consistency—is now table stakes. The new differentiators are:

Vision
Taste
Insight into unmet need

You can’t prompt your way to originality. You have to think differently before the model even touches your inputs.

What AI Can’t See (Yet)

AI is excellent at interpolation. It thrives on pattern recognition and probability distribution. But leadership is about extrapolation. It’s about:

Sensing what isn’t yet obvious
Defining what isn’t yet built
Seeing meaning in the noise of data

Great leaders don’t just ask, “What can we produce now with AI?”They ask: “What hasn’t anyone produced because the constraints used to be too high?”

Stop Piloting. Start Imagining.

Too many organizations equate AI adoption with technical pilots. But vision doesn’t emerge from iteration—it emerges from imagination.

Replace tech pilots with thought experiments:

What would we build if production cost were zero?
What customer need are we too narrowly defining?
What if our category didn’t exist—what problem would we solve?

AI can then simulate those futures. But only after leadership imagines them.

Leadership in the Age of Creative Abundance

Generative AI democratizes execution. But it amplifies the premium on discernment. In a marketplace flooded with polished sameness, being original isn’t optional—it’s survival.

And originality begins not with prompt libraries, but with clarity of purpose.