12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+

What should we expect to see in the coming year? Writing at the close of 2025, Scott Belsky lays out twelve outlooks on where technology, craft, and company building are heading.

1. 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 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.

2. The buzzy concerns around AI in Hollywood will be grounded by what audiences increasingly crave: craft, meaning, and shared experiences. The industry will start to realize that there is a stark difference between content creators, who are willing to trade control for speed, using AI to make ads and social media content, and artists, who are not willing to trade control for speed and 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 with friends, or even share in theaters.

3. Behind-the-scenes "proof of craft" content 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 proof of the humanity and ingenuity behind the work. Technology can also be used in incredibly precise and creative ways. But the bar for craft has gone up.

The bar for craft has gone up, and process will become part of the end product.

4. Multiple industries, from insurance to healthcare, will be impacted by materially better lifespan, healthspan, and joyspan. As health wearables, routine blood testing, increasingly accessible preventative body scans, and AI health coaches proliferate, humans will have materially more insight and impact over their own health. As we begin to live longer, multiple industries will change. Life insurers most impacted by mortality are poised to benefit from the insured population living longer. We will also see growth among the underlying plumbing companies that manage blood testing, biomarker detection, and preventative scans for the major consumer apps and 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.

5. 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 digital games are deployed on a multi-player physical game board; or Meter, where a vertically integrated networking solution for the enterprise includes both the industrial-grade hardware and the AI-powered tools 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.

6. 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 via connectors now or computer vision plugins later. As connectors of data between apps become ubiquitous, expect the growing importance of proprietary graphs (who knows who, who works with who, who has access to see what), more projects trying to make personalization portable for consumers, and real-time data sources becoming more valuable and increasingly captured by robots. Graphs, portable memory, and real-time data are the new proprietary data moats.

7. Ambient listening and summarization will go mainstream. While many teams use services 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, to conversing with new forms of punctuation and trigger words to aid speedy recall, to tough questions about sharing our memory with others, and who gets to continue querying it without our permission.

8. The power in consumer AI will shift to tightly coupled hardware and operating system providers. The desire for local AI will coincide with the shift to AI privately running on your device. Open-source models that you can download, change, and run locally on your device are becoming more capable, and consumer hardware is becoming capable of running powerful LLMs locally. The world is going to change yet again. The implications for the AI stack are tremendous, from the chips that become valuable, to the evolution of operating systems, the devices we use, and the role of open source AI.

9. 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 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. The healthier the organization, the more it requires a painfully clear narrative, hacked reward systems, and relentless execution.

10. The end of waste becomes a new benefit of AI. Technology will transform resource utilization and predictive analytics in ways that materially reduce wastage across industries, curb climate impact, and improve margins. From restaurants and stores to factories of all kinds, the mismatch of supply and demand has always resulted in wastage: excess food gone bad, excess inventory that must be returned or moved, 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 on both margins and the environment.

11. 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 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 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.

12. The rise of internal development teams. Companies will 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 expensive private-equity-owned clunky solutions. Over time, these home grown tools and workflows will start to collapse functions into one another. 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.

A year of clarity

No doubt, 2026 will be chock full of surprises and hopefully developments that give us hope for healthier and more fulfilling work and lives.

Looking back on a career traversing the worlds of creativity and technology, as an operator, investor, and writer, it is striking how platform 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. Belsky is confident that 2026 will be a year of clarity.

His hope for the reader: play with new technology to find its applications, since novelty precedes utility. Get curious and take creative risks that are defensible, meaning that 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, our ingenuity, and our stubborn desire to find a better way. And be mindful of the responsibility to keep asking the tough questions. Be creative about what can go right and what can go wrong.