Imagination is our new economic infrastructure

A few weeks ago, I was on a call with a group of tech executives. 

During a session about AI, I started talking about what happens when AI becomes middleware for the human imagination – when more of us suddenly have the ability to build what we imagine.

But one of the executives pushed back.

He said, “I understand what you mean when you talk about imagination, but what are my salespeople supposed to imagine?”

It was a fair question.

And I sensed some fear underneath it.

Salespeople are watching AI write emails, run demos and draft proposals. AI is coming for the execution layer of their job.

So if a salesperson’s identity is built around the execution of demos and pipeline, that’s a problem. As AI consumes more of the execution work, the identity built around that work starts to break down.

Plus, salespeople do not usually identify as builders. Product is someone else’s job.

But what if that dividing line between those roles started to blur?

A rep chats with a customer and asks how things are going with the product. They listen for what’s working and what the customer wishes existed.

A good salesperson says, “Thank you. I’ll take that back to the product team.”

But then it becomes a game of telephone.

The customer describes what they want. The salesperson writes notes. The notes get summarized and shared with Product. 

Maybe the request joins a backlog. Maybe someone follows up weeks later to understand the request more clearly. Maybe.

But something always gets lost in translation. The building happens far away from the customer’s initial spark of imagination and context.

One of the other CEOs in the session suddenly jumped in.

He told me that his sales team had already started trying it another way.

They’re a mid-sized B2B tech company. 

When a salesperson meets with a customer and hears a spark of something the customer wishes the product could do, the salesperson doesn’t just take notes anymore.

They just start prototyping with them. Right there in the room. 

By vibe coding – with natural language commands to AI, no technical skills required – the salesperson can draft a version of what the customer is describing live on the call.

Together, they start building and iterating on what I call  a “Prototype of Possibility.”

This can't be automated. It requires the salesperson to apply human judgment, imagination, and their ability to forge relationships. 

It might even become the most valuable part of their job description.

“My sales team is driving my product team crazy,” the CEO admitted.

And Product may still say no. But at least they now have something more to evaluate than a backlog request or a bullet point. 

Product now has a Prototype of Possibility with the customer’s fingerprints on it.

For the salesperson, they are no longer just reporting back what the customer wants. They are no longer defining their worth solely by execution.

They are helping the customer imagine what might be possible. 

They’re evolving customer relationships from a transaction to a collaboration.

They’re using AI to translate human imagination into a tangible possibility.

It changes the dynamic of the relationship. Deepening it.

Building together does that.

This creates new problems, of course. Potential conflict between Product and Sales. Discussions about who should be building and why. Leaders will have to decide how these ideas get filtered, tested and prioritized.

But those are better problems than having imagination lost in translation.

Well, the blank canvas has arrived. Everyone in your organization now has access to it.

That changes the relationship between new ideas and their value.

Humans have always had the capacity to constantly generate new ideas. But their ideas were suppressed by two economic forces at once.

One suppressor was resources. The average person didn’t have the resources to make their ideas a reality – to start a company, scale it, bring it to life.

The second suppressor was necessity. Corporations simply didn’t need new ideas because they could already grow and harvest the value of a single innovation for years. 

No new inputs needed. Ideas were killed constantly.

But that model of extracting value only works inside of yesterday’s execution economy, as I wrote about in my last note.

In Tomorrow’s regenerative economy, it won’t. 

As I pointed out in the previous edition, AI is shortening the half-life of advantage.

We saw this play out in real time earlier this year, when the SaaS sector lost roughly $1 trillion of market value in seven trading days. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe and HubSpot were each down more than 30 percent from the prior year.

AI is lifting both suppressors at once.

The cost of translating imagination into a Prototype of Possibility has collapsed. What once required teams, budgets and months can now begin in minutes.

And the necessity has inverted. In the regenerative economy, organizations need continuous imagination because advantage decays faster.

Return on Imagination is the new ROI.

I don’t make that statement as a metaphor. It’s a real economic shift I’m observing. 

The execution economy was built around return on investment: capital deployed, yield extracted, advantage protected. 

The regenerative economy asks a different question: how much of your organization’s imaginative capacity is being translated into new value, and how quickly is that translation happening?

Nobody is really measuring this yet.

That is the opening. The organizations that start measuring their Return on Imagination now will help define what this infrastructure becomes.

In order to keep up, organizations must capture the new ideas being generated by their people – and create the space and infrastructure to extract, translate and manifest them.

Using AI only for execution traps us in yesterday’s economic model.

But when we use it to capture human imagination, we build for Tomorrow.

For the first time, the bottleneck is not technical capacity. It is imaginative capacity. 

Imagination is no longer just a creative function or a personality trait.

Imagination is our new economic infrastructure.

Here’s how I think about a practical way to harness imagination as value.

We should now see every function in our organization with two layers:

The Floor and the Canvas.

The Floor is the part of the job that must remain reliable.

In Finance, the numbers have to add up. Reports have to go out. Controls have to hold.

In Product, tickets have to move. Releases have to ship. Bugs have to get resolved.

The Floor is the repeatable part of the work.

And if it’s programmable, it should increasingly be handled by machines, with humans still setting direction and oversight.

But when AI starts handling the Floor, something else opens up:

The Canvas.

The Canvas is the space above and beyond execution.

It is the room that appears when people are no longer spending most of their energy on repetitive, mechanized work.

The Canvas is where Tomorrow’s advantage comes from.

Sure, some ideas will fail.

But the ones that work will kick off a regenerative loop inside organizations.

At the same time, opening up the Canvas doesn’t magically work inside yesterday’s business structure.

The Canvas also demands more of us.

It demands imagination. Judgment. Taste.

That’s the real distinction I want leaders to understand.

If you use AI only to clear the Floor, you may build a leaner organization.

But you’ll also just end up with a faster execution machine.

If you clear the Floor and also build infrastructure for the Canvas, you build a regenerative organization.

That’s how you keep creating new value, again and again.

The harsh reality?

Most organizations are not set up to accomplish this.

Activating the Canvas will require a radical departure from the execution-first logic that got us here. That logic still has a home. It's called the Floor.

Without using the same words, Jack Dorsey put this shift into unusually plain language in March, after Block cut more than 4,000 jobs, or roughly 40% of its workforce.

In his essay, he wrote that Block is trying to become “a company built as an intelligence” rather than a hierarchy. 

He argued that AI can now perform coordination work that used to require layers of management.

Dorsey described the same thing I am now:

I think his move is directionally right.

But it’s simply not enough to free people from execution.

You also need a way to activate what opens up next.

How do ideas get surfaced in your organization? Encouraged? Tested? Made real?

That is the Canvas.

And most organizations are not built for it. They are built to protect execution.

From where I sit, leaders now have three choices about how to move forward. 

Only two of them are viable.

This requires breaking something entirely – a true structural rupture with consequences, plus an intentional next step behind it to produce results and proof that the rest of the organization can’t ignore.

Optimize the execution while also building anew…but accept that a fuller transition will likely be forced later. Use the time to be less unprepared when that happens.

This is what most organizations have opted for today. Pilot programs, old-school change management initiatives, values statements. This is not really an option. It is the execution organization’s preferred defense mechanism dressed up as transformation.

At Block, Dorsey made the right choice. 

He broke the structure. He might have done it too quickly and forcefully, without the right next step lined up to harness the space left behind.

But he made the right choice. 

Genuine discontinuity is our fastest way to regenerate value.

But activating imagination at scale will also create more ideas than any organization can pursue.

That is the right problem to have, but it is still a real problem.

When more people can create Prototypes of Possibility, leaders will need new ways to decide which ideas get selected, which ideas die, and how people stay engaged when their imagination is activated but their idea is not chosen.

What that organization actually looks like – built for thinking rather than execution, structured for the Canvas rather than the Floor – is where we’re going in the next edition.

Here are the questions I’m challenging every leader with right now:

If you calculated your organization’s Return on Imagination today, how much of your people’s imaginative capacity is being translated into new value? What would that number be? Is it a number your leadership team has ever tried to calculate?

Where in your organization is the Canvas already open, and does your leadership team know it?

Your organization says it values imagination, creativity, and curiosity. What evidence exists in the org chart, the incentive structure, and the budget that it’s true?

You now have three choices for how to move forward. 

Only two are viable. 

Which one are you choosing – and have you named that choice out loud to your leadership team?

– Nish

A gratitude P.S.

Every year on my birthday, I send a list of things I’m grateful for — one for each year. This year it’s 54.

I took this selfie on a recent trip to Washington, DC, at the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream.

The installation was called Dream Machines.

Maybe it was a little on the nose for me. But I’ve been thinking about this exhibit since.

“Dare to be courageous.”

What if courage is part of what allows us to turn our imagination into infrastructure, value and Prototypes of Possibility?

What if the dream is already there – and now we have the machinery to make it real – but we’ve just not let ourselves go there yet?

I dare you to imagine.

This moment demands it.

From you, from me, from us.