Modern Tech, Ancient Wisdom
Trends to watch for 2026
The other day I thrifted a t-shirt that reads in bold red print across the front “LIKE, REALIZING STUFF” which, as a philosopher, I find to be a rather poetic way of describing my work.
I have thus decided to make it my mission for 2026.
Typically, a particular category of stuff to realize this time of year are the trends to watch for over the next twelve months. In past years I’ve focused my attention on AI trends, specifically on how the technology itself was hinting to develop and what kind of new edges we could expect AI to cut.
This year, though, I realized some new stuff.
Yes, trends for AI in 2026 are important to watch and predictions do make for an interesting reflection piece of reading. But, when I sat down to mull over what I will be watching AI for in 2026, I found my mind wasn’t focusing on the technology itself, but was instead drifting to consider what exactly influences these AI trends in the first place.
Which, to no one’s surprise including my own, has led me back once again to the human factor in this whole AI equation.
TL;DR - In 2026, watch for trends in how humans question, connect, and problem-define to understand key influences on AI development.
2025 taught us nothing if not that the intersection of AI and humans is where the real progress happens.
This last year brought us some of the biggest leaps in AI development to date, and yet we ended the year with reports of businesses pulling back on AI investments due to lack of ROI, of users experiencing cognitive atrophy due to over reliance on LLMs, and, worst of all, of lawyers representing cases of AI-assisted suicides in teenagers. The technology may have moved forward, but 2025 left us questioning if we humans were being forgotten in this quest for progress.
But, nature always has a way of balancing things out. As millennia have taught us, no matter how far the pendulum swings in one direction, it will inevitably swing back.
Our technology shapes us, and in turn we shape our technology. This last year AI took front and center stage in influencing that cycle, which means that this year it will be us humans stepping out from behind the wings to rebalance this delicate act.
Enough with the “Top Twenty Ways Gamma Kiwi GPT 4.5 Changes EVERYTHING” lists because, let’s be honest, it doesn’t. What does and will change everything in 2026 is how people engage, shape and evolve with AI.
So, without further ado, here are the human trends I will be watching for 2026.
The craft of questioning
At the start to 2025 I predicted the combination of generative and agentic AI would reshape our relationship with information, taking it from something static and rigid, and transforming it into a dynamic organism (so to speak) that we could directly engage with.
And that’s exactly what happened. Businesses embraced enterprise search and chat at scale, turning thousands of documents stored in Microsoft folders into living databases that users could access in plain language directly through chats. Consumers shifted from ‘hey let me google that’ to ‘hey let me ask ChatGPT’, turning a quick search into a back and forth conversation instead of a slow and steady click through multiple articles. From the board room to the backyard, our relationship with information has fundamentally shifted.
Flash forward to present day, where we have more information at the tips of our fingers than we know what to do with. Now the true differentiator is no longer access to sheer volumes of information, but instead is our ability to shift through that noise to find the underlying knowledge that answers our needs.
In other words, a defining trend of 2026 will be how humans adapt our abilities to ask the right question.
(I know, I can’t help myself. We philosophers sure do love a good question.)
Cliché as it may be to say I am watching for trends in questioning, being able to formulate the right question at the right time and place has quickly become the sneaker human superpower to unlocking AI.
Think of it this way. You want to get a recipe for how to bake chocolate chip cookies. In the past, you would have gone to Google and simply typed “chocolate chip cookie recipe”, and then scrolled through a handful of oddly personal stories about someone’s grandma as you tried to find the right recipe to fit your needs. If you’re anything like me, you probably gave up after the third article and decided on improvising the recipe with questionable results.
Now, instead of Google Search, you turn to Gemini. You aren’t going to type in “chocolate chip cookie recipe”, instead you will ask a more specific question reflective of your needs. Perhaps you’re baking for a vegan friend and are missing baking powder, so you form your question to include these factors. Your fine-tuned question turns back immediate results, saving you time, headaches and taste-buds by delivering you the exact information you need on a nicely greased baking pan.
With access to entire worlds of information and a shortage of finger tips to use it, the true horizon for cutting edge innovation no longer rests with the quantity of information AI can process. Instead, it fully depends on how we humans learn to ask the right questions to unlock that information.
Which is exactly why I’m watching for how our questioning habits will evolve to impact this year’s AI advancements.
The cry for (missed) connections
One factor of 2025 that I found particularly interesting was the siren song of the analog. I did not necessarily see this unfolding in the AI space, but rather in my day to day life, as I observed those close to me actively seek out in-person events, tactile hobbies, and what would be considered ‘old-school’ technology.
Whenever I asked why the shift in preference from the digital to the physical, autonomous to the analog, the answers I received were all along similar lines:
People wanted to feel something.
They were craving for touch, both literally and figuratively. Yes, the world of AI was a fascinating one, but at the end of the day they were all seeking a deeper connection than what they were finding in the digital realm.
This shift to analog is not a trend in and of itself though, but rather a symptom of a much deeper movement. When asking why this shift was occurring in the first place, all my exploratory conversations, keen observations, and philosophical ponderings led me back to the same conclusion: the need for connection.
Our digital lives were already ablaze with activity, but with the 2025 onset of general purpose AI into our every day, it was like throwing fuel and fireworks onto a raging forest fire.
Suddenly, everything about our reality was being run through some form of the digital world, and all supercharged by AI. Heck, it felt like we couldn’t even get groceries without downloading an app to track AI-powered statistics of purchases or talk to a bot about what to make for dinner.
This ‘all or nothing’ approach to AI may have optimized for efficiency last year, but in the process we cut out the very life-blood of connection: friction.
In order to connect with someone, and I mean truly connect, we need friction. Friction of ideas, personalities, likes and dislikes, and so on, because it is friction that creates the tension necessary for meaningful engagement, growth and experience.
Digital is not the only way, we still need the off-line, off-grid, full-of-friction analog connection. It’s not that digital is bad or wrong, in fact, at its foundations, it is a fascinating opening of our worlds into an entirely new dimension. Instead, it is all a matter of balancing back out the ease-of-use digital with messiness of the analog.
So for 2026 I will be watching for how humans will seek out a rebalancing of this shift to the digital with opportunities for analog connection.
Wishing I had 99 problems
Sometimes, when you’re handed a hammer, everything can look like a nail.
Or, in the case of 2025, everything looked like an agentic workflow.
As has already been stressed an abundant amount in this newsletter edition, last year AI flooded into seemingly every corner of our professional and personal lives. Left, right, and center, everywhere you turned AI was being pitched as the ultimate solution to end all solutions.
Now, I have a little secret that I’ve been dying to let you in on. While the people on our screens were singing the praises of AI life hacks and more, in reality the people I was meeting through my time on stage and beyond were humming a very different tune.
In public, everyone was asking how to use AI. But, behind closed doors in hushed voices, what they really wanted to know was if they had to.
Which brings me to my third and final human trend of 2026: problems.
No, not problems in terms of the ones AI is riddled with. That would be a bit morbid of a trend to watch, don’t you think?
What I mean by this trend is our human ability to understand and define the problems worth solving with AI.
Through rapid technological development, we have managed to arrive at a rather odd conundrum: we have more AI solutions than we know what to do with. This has left us collectively in a lurch, as we attempt to backfill the access of AI solutions with nonexistent problems.
The result? A whole lot of hammers with very few nails.
In other words, we kind of missed the whole point to this AI thing. The purpose of AI development is to solve real concrete human problems, not to create prank viral videos on TikTok. Without clear problems, we miss the purpose of this technology and end up in an endless cycle of creating purposeless AI in the hopes of a problem magically arising to meet that solution.
We may have the ultimate solution in AI, but we can’t use it to solve anything if we don’t understand the problems in the first place. And even once we have defined a problem, we need the confidence to recognize that sometimes AI really is not the solution and we do not have to use it.
Just because we can, doesn’t always mean it is worth doing.
Before we can create life-changing technology, we must first define how our lives need to be changed. So for 2026 I’ll be watching (and a little bit more) how we go about defining the human problems worth solving with AI.
In the end, it all comes to down to the fact that our technology is a reflection of our humanity.
So when in doubt of where AI is headed this year, take a step back and ask yourself where are we humans wanting to take it.
OG.
Hey, great read as always. This shift to the human factor influencing AI trends is trully brilliant. It makes me wonder, what's one specific "human way of questioning" you think will define the next big AI leap? You've really captured something profound here.
This is a great piece, Olivia. Looking forward to improving my ability to ask the right questions!