This is the fifth and final post in a series about Total Addressable Market (TAM) penetration, written for leaders new to the concept, organizations struggling with revenue optimization, and organizations on the cusp of strategic planning or goal-setting efforts.

This final piece addresses a reasonable objection: does any of this survive contact with reality—especially in an era where AI seems to destabilize everything at once?

Planning isn’t the problem

I have a former colleague who is adamantly opposed to strategic planning—a service she nevertheless sells. She has asserted to me many times that the rigid five-year plans she believes typify the private sector would never suit what she views as the more nimble, ever-changing world of nonprofit. Thus, when she builds strategic plans for her social sector clients, there are no strategies, and no plans, just loose collections of themes for the organization to ponder. The workshops she leads are enjoyable for their inclusivity and their cultivated sense that important strategic questions are being voiced and discussed. The documents these workshops produce sit in drawers and have no further influence on organizational direction or behavior.

This position is neither uncommon nor unserious. Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a similar argument in his 2012 essay Understanding Is a Poor Substitute for Convexity, where he critiques long-range planning for restricting optionality and increasing fragility. His argument is elegant, and like many elegant arguments, it attacks a strawman: a plan that cannot adapt.

If you’re like me, you’ve worked with and for many successful businesses where strategic planning works just fine and is both valuable and elastic. Strategic plans link targets, strategies, and tactics and are dynamically reactive to changing internal and external conditions. Targets shift, strategies fail, and innovative tactics spark new, scalable ideas. But a system holds them all together, so that as the interconnections between targets, strategies, and tactics jostle, the organization can keep running. Change neither shocks the system nor stops it.

Planning is not the enemy. Unmoored planning is.

Stay on target

TAM penetration clarifies what an organization’s target should in fact be. Often against a leader’s intuition, TAM forces them to think externally rather than internally, and relatively rather than absolutely. Relative competitive position—measured against actual and emerging alternatives—is a stable governing constraint on growth for any complex system.

As explored earlier in this series, long-term market position depends on the penetration of specific audience segments (including but not limited to customers and funders) and the phased evolution of operational capacity. These lenses make TAM penetration concrete, diagnostic, and internally legible rather than aspirational. Audience saturation heralds the need for diversified offerings. Declining ROI of existing infrastructure makes management debt and executional tradeoffs quantifiable. 

At a group level, many teams are fearful of committing to either goals or each other, which can show up as an endless deflection between targets, strategies, and tactics. But when targets are explicit, strategies become testable and tactics become meaningful. The organization can inhabit a shared fiction long enough for it to produce real effects. It can work together, and towards something.

Into the AI blender

AI is currently the most aggressive stress test any strategic framework can face because it dramatically affects growth tempo. AI collapses the cost of iteration and increases the volume of plausible options. It shortens the half-life of advantage.

In this sped-up, polycritical environment, principle-based models matter more, not less, because the limiting factor is no longer the ability to produce consistent forward momentum, but the ability to allocate scarce attention and capital coherently and to keep an organization oriented as conditions quickly shift.

A long-standing influence on my thinking is Brian Balfour’s 2015 framework connecting product fit, market fit, channel fit, and business model fit. In slightly different language, Balfour’s TAM-centric model aligns with a sequence I’ve used throughout this series and elsewhere:

TAM → PMF → GTM → PCF

Balfour recently revisited and significantly updated his Four Fits framework in direct response to the unique pressures of AI. And what’s notable is not that Balfour’s model fractures under the pressure of AI, but that it holds. AI increases volatility in markets and channels—but it does not remove the need for external orientation. If anything, it heightens it.

Strategic planning under AI conditions

I’ve long advocated for and iteratively built strategic plans that behave more like code bases than documents: versioned, refactorable, and observable. Major shifts in targets or strategies should cascade quickly through priorities and workflows without getting caught in the cultural gears.

AI meaningfully changes what makes this possible.

At the level of principle, strategic planning remains anchored in external reality. Plans that are not explicitly aligned to TAM will dissipate precious internal energy.

At the level of methodology, AI makes it feasible to reassess the direct and indirect competitive field continuously rather than episodically, to synthesize external signals with internal data, and to surface actionable implications for strategy and prioritization more or less instantly. The emphasis shifts from widening internal lenses to focusing them.

Like all other business processes, strategic planning increasingly becomes an AI-driven, cross-platform workflow—with intentionally bounded human interventions—rather than a periodic, human-only exercise. Tools like Slack, Asana, n8, and Claude are already moving in this direction, collapsing the distance between sensing, deciding, and acting.

At the level of tools, healthy non-attachment is the name of the game. There will continue to be major tool shifts and evolutions within each quarter. Organizations should invest in sustainable cross-system processes, with high expectations that the tools will evolve continuously.

And if your results aren’t automatically feeding back into the system… you haven’t built the right system.

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AI technology, for better and for worse, is now mainstream. It is now part of the assumed arsenal for maximizing human energy internally and organizational impact externally.

Strategic planning in the AI era is less about boldness, caution, or luck than about coordination under conditions of speed and uncertainty. In a world where almost anything can be done quickly, knowing what should be done—and in what order—remains the hardest problem.

TAM penetration as a concept—with AI as both a collaborator and process-builder—can get you halfway to solving it.