12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+
From talent arbitrage and "proof of craft" to hardware moats, ambient listening, homegrown software, and the end of waste - what should we expect to see in the coming year? What are the implications?
What should we expect to see in the coming year-ish?
Massive amounts of talent arbitrage. There is much fear and discussion about job loss as a result of AI, but the (often young and fearless) AI-native talent that is most aggressively engaging with new tech has a fascinating advantage in the current workforce. People with knowledge of “the better way” will run circles around their colleagues and bosses. For example, companies want to hire answer engine optimization experts over search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners. Most marketing leaders are still conducting old fashioned focus groups rather than using AI breakthroughs in market research. 2026 provides a precious window for young (or overlooked) talent to gain an advantage as early adopters.
The buzzy concerns around AI in Hollywood will be grounded by the reality of what audiences increasingly crave: craft, meaning, and shared experiences. The industry will start to realize that there is a stark difference between “content creators” (those willing to trade control for speed) using AI to make ads and social media content, and artists (those not willing to trade control for speed) who only favor emerging technology that preserves control and precision to help new and better stories be told. The technology and models that ultimately elevate the craft will get lasting traction in Hollywood, while the prompt-based slop tools will focus more on social and content creator use-cases. Finally, the idea of personalized films with audience cameos will be humbled by the realization that people favor shared experiences. People want to be inspired by craft – and they want a common experience to discuss (or even share, in theaters!) with friends.
Behind-the-scenes “proof of craft” content will enters the mainstream of advertising and entertainment. As more AI-generated content fills our feeds, we will develop a membrane of doubt. “That’s fake” will become a default reaction as we become increasingly unimpressed by attention-grabbing content. Only when we see the ingenuity and craftsmanship behind the making of a piece of content will we become mesmerized by it. We’ve seen this with Apple’s recent TV logo and ad campaigns that were accompanied by “behind the scenes” content that served as a “proof” of the humanity and ingenuity behind the work. Don’t get me wrong, technology can also be used in incredibly precise and creative ways. But the bar for craft has gone up, and process will become part of the end product.
Multiple industries, from insurance to healthcare, will be impacted by the implications of materially better lifespan, healthspan, and joyspan. As health wearables, routine blood testing, increasingly accessible preventative body scans, and AI health coaches proliferate the population, humans will have materially more insight and impact over their own health. As we begin in live longer, multiple industries will change. US life insurers (with de-risked annuity exposure) that are most impacted by mortality, like Global Life among others, are poised to benefit from the insured population living longer. We will also see growth among underlying “plumbing” companies that manage blood testing (like Quest Diagnostics), biomarker detection, and preventative scans for the major consumer apps and Whoop-like devices proliferating our lives. We will also see shifts in travel, entertainment, dating apps, and beyond as the societal implications of longevity become a mainstream conversation.
Hardware becomes a more popular moat (amid a surge of hardware startups). In a world where everyone can make their own software, unique products will emerge that tightly couple hardware and software. The companies that thrive will look like Whoop or Oura, where the AI is tightly coupled with a wearable; Board, where the deployment of digital games happens on their own multi-player physical game board; or Meter, where a vertically integrated networking solution for the enterprise includes both the industrial-grade hardware as well as the AI-powered tools for networking engineers to deploy applications and manage an enterprise network. Fueling this trend, new “picks and shovels” companies will streamline traditional obstacles like chip design and manufacturing, prototype development, and supply chain management. As a result, we will see more viable hardware startups than ever before, and more product variety in our lives.
Ordinary data becomes a less valuable moat. These days it feels like every company is trying to sync everyone’s data, and doing so is becoming easier than ever before. Soon enough, all your products will have all of your data, whether it is via connectors now or computer vision plugins later. As “connectors” of data between apps become ubiquitous, you can expect (1) the growing importance of proprietary graphs (who knows who, who works with who, who has access to see what, etc), (2) more projects trying to make personalization portable for consumers, and (3) real-time data sources (whether X, or the weather, or ocean tide patterns) becoming more valuable and increasingly captured by robots. Graphs, portable memory, and real-time data are the new proprietary data moats.
Ambient listening and summarization will go mainstream. While many teams use services like Granola or Zoom to record and annotate their meetings, the idea of walking around with an “always listening” device is still somewhat fringe and socially deviant. But this will change once local models can process and summarize our daily life (and quickly discard the actual recordings), giving us a treasure trove of self-awareness, instant recall, and intelligent guidance. The implications are numerous, from catching our own biases and living more by fact than conjecture, conversing with new forms of punctuation and trigger words to aide in speedy recall, to tough questions about sharing our memory with others — and who gets to continuing querying it without our permission.
The power in consumer AI will shift to tightly coupled hardware and operating system providers. The desire for local AI (like ambient listening and summarization, noted above) will coincide with the shift to AI privately running on your device. As (1) open-source models that you can download, change, and run “locally” on your device become more capable, and (2) consumer hardware (Apple and Android phones, whatever OpenAI is brewing, and our computers) becomes capable of running powerful LLMs locally, well…the world is going to change yet again. The implications for the AI stack are tremendous — from the chips that become valuable, the evolution of operating systems, the devices we use, and the role of open source AI. I suspect these changes will be a major area of focus over the next year.
The lack of change management becomes the ultimate advantage. When the game is changed, whether via a platform shift or otherwise, the wisdom is surprisingly evenly distributed. Leaders know it. They are are more networked than ever before, journalists tout and merchandise the breakthroughs, and consultants capitalize on moments like this. However, changing the gears of execution takes many years. Change management is human rewiring, not technical. Change in a company never happens naturally. On the contrary, the ancestral lizard brain in all of us recoils from change by default. Teams without the burden of change management, whether because they are brand new or transformed with brute force, gain the most advantage during generational platform shifts. As a larger and established company, the only way to transcend this outcome is the willingness and might to hack the organization from the top down. Transplants of strategy, mission, and practice are just that: transplants. The healthier the organization, the more they require a blunt to the immune system in the form of a painfully clear narrative, hacked reward systems, and relentless execution.
The “end of waste” will become a new benefit of AI as technology transforms resource utilization and predictive analytics in ways that will materially reduce wastage across industries, curb climate impact, and improve margins. In restaurants and stores to factories of all kinds, the mismatch of supply and demand has always resulted in wastage in the form of excess food gone bad, excess inventory that must be returned or moved, and excess materials to manage. As new AI-native tools take over the planning of every industry, predictions will become extremely accurate, oversupply will be rare, and we’ll see a profoundly positive impact in both margins as well as positive environmental impact.
Hospitality becomes a differentiating factor of commerce with more humans “front of house.” We’re shifting from a world of digital experiences generalized for everyone to one where every experience is personalized for each of us (as we’ve been discussing here since 2023!). But, as part of the effort to personalize, we will start to see humans (often aided by tech) deployed in more creative ways to make us feel more welcome and special across every shopping experience we have. Perhaps stores and online websites will feel more like hotels and restaurants, where our preferences are known and our loyalty respected and addressed by the people we encounter? Perhaps our agents will handle payment and logistics on our behalf, so the human interaction can focus on the craft and human touches? As technology replaces the human roles behind the scenes, expect to see more humans deployed “front of house.”
We’ll see the rise of “internal development teams,” as companies replace single-purpose bloated SaaS products with their own apps that collapse functions in magical ways. New internal application development teams will be spawned in large companies, and they’ll “vibe code” tailor made software and agent-driven solutions for functions around the company. At first, these efforts will replace SaaS products (especially those that are expensive private-equity-owned clunky solutions). Over time, these home grown tools and workflows will start to collapse functions into one another. For example, why must legal and finance tools be so different? And, in an era where the distinct functions of social marketing, sales, and customer support are blurring together, shouldn’t new solutions collapse these functions into one (making every customer touch point an opportunity)? As companies build their own solutions, they’ll be optimized for a higher level of cross-functional work.
No doubt, 2026 will be chock full of surprises and hopefully developments that give us hope for healthier and more fulfilling work and lives.
As I look back on my own career traversing the worlds of creativity and technology (as an operator, investor, and a writer), it is striking how platforms shifts (like the AI era) smash industries together, conceiving entirely new amalgamations. As the hype cycle dust settles, the most meaningful innovations will become more clear. I am confident that 2026 will be a year of clarity.
My hope for you: Play with new technology to find its applications (remember, novelty precedes utility). Get curious and take creative risks that are defensible (meaning: if something goes wrong, it was tried for a worthwhile reason that serves customers and the mission). Share ideas liberally (the benefits outweigh the costs!). Whether you’re a builder or a creator of any kind, double-down on what makes us human - the stories we have to tell, our care for craft, our empathy and taste, and our ingenuity, and our stubborn desire to find a better way. And, as always, be mindful of the responsibility to keep asking the tough questions. Be creative about what can go right AND what can go wrong.
Thanks for following along this year, and for all the feedback and dot-connecting along the way. Happy new year. -scott
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Thanks. Happy new year!