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2025 was the turning point.
By the end of last year, 78% of organisations worldwide reported using AI, up from 55% just a year earlier. Generative AI alone is now used regularly by around 65% of organisations, nearly double in ten months.
In other words, AI is no longer a “nice to have”. It has already moved into the centre of how work gets done. 2026 is the year it becomes non-negotiable.
In this article, I’ll walk you through ten shifts I’m watching closely as the author of Think Digital – Rewired for the AI Age, and what they mean for your career, your team, and your organisation.
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The 10 AI Shifts You Can’t Ignore In 2026
In this article, I’ll walk you through ten shifts I’m watching closely as the author of Think Digital – Rewired for the AI Age, and what they mean for your career, your team, and your organisation.
1. Agentic AI Arrives: From Copilot to Digital Employee
For most of 2023–24, AI sat in “copilot” mode: you asked, it answered. In 2025, something new started to happen: agentic AI.
Agentic AI doesn’t just respond to a prompt. It can:
- Understand goals
- Plan multi-step work
- Take actions across multiple systems
- Monitor results and optimise on its own
62% of organisations are at least experimenting with AI agents, even if they haven’t fully scaled them yet.
99% are exploring or developing AI agents for their applications.
The big platforms are moving fast. Google has launched Workspace Studio, allowing staff to design AI agents that work across Gmail, Drive and Chat, no coding required, while AWS has introduced autonomous agents for security, DevOps and general workflows.
And it’s not just the tech giants. Retail research shows around 70% of retailers have already piloted or partially deployed agentic AI to improve efficiency, even if only 8% say they’ve scaled it fully.
What this means for you in 2026
If chatbots were the “digital interns” of the last decade, agents are your first digital employees. The real leverage comes when you:
- Give agents access to your actual tools (CRM, ERP, email, documents)
- Define guardrails: what they can and cannot do
- Treat them like team members: design roles, KPIs and hand-offs
Organisations that stay in “chatbot demo mode” will get left behind by those that let agents actually execute.
2. Multimodal Intelligence: One Brain for Text, Images, Audio and Video
Generative AI started with text. Then images. Then code. In 2025, we saw the convergence: one model that can see, hear and read at once.
AI can now reason across audio, vision and text in real time, combining strong reasoning, very large context windows and better performance on complex tasks.
Why does this matter?
Because the real world is multimodal:
- You show the model a photo of a store shelf and ask, “What’s out of stock?”
- You upload a Zoom recording and say, “Summarise the key decisions and draft follow-up emails.”
- You feed in a complex spreadsheet and a PDF contract and ask, “Where are the risks, and what should we renegotiate?”
75% of global knowledge workers are already using generative AI, with usage nearly doubling in six months. As multimodal gets baked into mainstream tools, that usage doesn’t just increase; it deepens.
What this means for you in 2026
Stop thinking “documents only”. Start thinking “show and tell”:
- Use AI to watch your meetings, read your dashboards and listen to customer calls
- Expect tools that can follow a workflow end-to-end, across formats, without you stitching things together manually
- Build processes assuming that AI can see and hear, not just read text
Multimodal is where AI starts to feel less like software and more like a colleague sitting beside you.
3. Local AI (On-Device): Speed, Privacy and Going Offline
The old pattern was simple: your device sent data to the cloud; the cloud did the thinking. That’s changing quickly.
Gartner predicts 295 million AI PCs and GenAI smartphones will ship in 2024, up from just 29 million a year earlier.
Running AI on-device unlocks four big shifts:
- Speed – Responses feel instantaneous. No round-trip to the cloud for every prompt.
- Privacy – Sensitive data (customer calls, internal documents) can stay on your laptop or phone.
- Cost – Local compute reduces the need to pay for every inference in the cloud.
- Offline capability – AI that works on a plane, at a mine site, or in regional Australia with patchy connectivity.
What this means for you in 2026
When you’re choosing hardware, you’re no longer just buying a laptop; you’re buying an AI workstation:
- Ask vendors about on-device AI performance, not just CPU and RAM
- Consider local AI for regulated workloads where data residency and privacy matter
- Train your teams to use device-native AI features (search, summarise, translate, rewrite) as default, not as “extras”
The office of the near future isn’t just in the cloud. It’s also sitting inside your phone and laptop.
4. AI Governance Grows Up: Boards Can’t Look Away
As AI has moved from experiments to core operations, governance has had to catch up.
A 2025 survey of public company boards found:
- 36% have adopted an AI governance framework
- Only 9% have approved a dedicated annual AI budget
- Just 6% have established AI metrics in management reporting
Directors are now being explicitly asked to oversee AI risks, strategy and value creation, not just “IT projects”, highlighting the rapid professionalisation of AI governance roles inside organisations.
Regulators are also moving:
- Many jurisdictions now expect transparency and auditability of high-risk AI systems
- AI fairness, bias, and explainability are appearing in tenders and contracts
- Customers are increasingly asking, “How exactly are you using our data, and where does AI sit in that?”
What this means for you in 2026
If you’re on a board or senior leadership team, AI governance is no longer optional:
- Treat AI like any other material risk and opportunity, with clear policies, reporting and accountability
- Establish a cross-functional AI governance group.
- Make sure the board has at least one director with real AI fluency, not just buzzword familiarity
AI strategy, ethics and risk are now board-level issues, not a side-project for IT.
5. Synthetic Data Becomes Central: Fuel Without the Fallout
Good AI needs good data. But real-world data is often messy, sensitive, biased or simply unavailable.
Enter synthetic data: artificially generated datasets that mimic the statistical properties of real data without revealing real people’s information.
The synthetic data generation market is estimated at US$1.3 billion in 2024 and projected to reach US$9.7 billion by 2030, a 37.4% compound annual growth rate.
Why the rush?
- Privacy – You can safely share synthetic data across business units or with partners.
- Bias reduction – You can deliberately rebalance datasets so models perform fairly across demographics.
- Experimentation – You can simulate rare events (equipment failure, fraud scenarios, emergency situations) that don’t appear often in real data.
What this means for you in 2026
Forward-looking organisations will:
- Treat data generation as a strategic capability, not just data collection
- Use synthetic data to prototype and stress-test AI systems before production
- Work with partners who can evidence how they generate and validate synthetic data
If data is the new oil, synthetic data is the clean fuel we can actually scale without blowing up our social licence.
6. End-to-End AI Video Creation: From Text Prompt to Finished Clip
Video has always been powerful, and painfully slow to produce at scale.
AI is changing that fast. In 2025:
- Latest text-to-video models can create cinematic, lifelike videos that closely follow prompts, with improved physical accuracy and multiple visual styles.
- Text-to-video and image-to-video are now the norm.
What used to take a creative agency and a week now takes:
- A script drafted by AI
- A voiceover generated in minutes
- Footage created or heavily edited by AI
- Subtitles, translations and formats are exported automatically
What this means for you in 2026
If your organisation communicates, internally or externally, AI video matters:
- Marketing teams can produce many more variations of ads and explainer videos for the same budget
- Learning & development can create micro-learning videos in hours, not weeks
- Leaders can turn dense strategy documents into short, multilingual video explainers
The strategic question becomes: What messages are important enough that you still want humans storyboarding every frame? Everything else will be AI-assisted by default.
7. Personalised Pocket Models: AI That Speaks Your Language
We’re moving beyond one-size-fits-all chatbots.
Custom models, trained or tuned on your tone, frameworks, decisions and company DNA, are becoming normal:
- Enterprises can create domain-specific copilots.
- OpenAI and others support Custom GPTs, letting users create specialised assistants to match their workflows.
The direction of travel is clear: instead of asking, “How do I adapt to the model?”, you’ll have models that adapt to you.
What this means for you in 2026
Expect every serious leader and team to have:
- A personal AI workspace, stocked with their own prompts, templates and context
- One or more team-level agents tuned to shared frameworks, tone and rules of thumb
- Clear data boundaries: what the model is allowed to learn from and remember
Think of this as the digital equivalent of having a chief of staff in your pocket; one that knows your style and doesn’t get tired.
8. AI + Robotics Become Everyday: Beyond Sci-Fi
If you picture robots, you might still see sci-fi humanoids. In reality, AI-powered robots are already quietly reshaping logistics, warehousing and care.
AI in the warehousing market is valued at US$10.27 billion in 2024, rising to US$61.36 billion by 2032.
These machines are lifting, sorting, packing, inspecting and moving goods around the clock.
And it’s not just warehouses:
- Aged care robots are emerging to assist with lifting, monitoring and companionship
- Inspection drones and bots are checking dangerous or remote infrastructure
- Hospital and hotel robots are handling deliveries and routine tasks
What this means for you in 2026
If your world involves physical work, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, or utilities, it’s time to:
- Map where AI-enabled robotics can safely augment people, not just replace them
- Invest in new roles (robot technicians, flow controllers, AI maintenance specialists)
- Include robotics in your workforce and safety planning, not treat it as an experimental side-project
The organisations that win will be those that pair human judgment + robotic consistency, not those that try to pick one over the other.
9. AI Interfaces Replace Websites
Websites used to be digital brochures. Then they became self-service portals. Now they’re starting to turn into conversations.
Several trends are converging:
- Conversational AI tools are expected to handle most business-to-consumer communications in the near future.
- In customer service, the call-centre AI market is set to grow from US$1.7 billion in 2022 to US$6 billion by 2032, as chatbots and conversational AI take over a larger share of interactions.
Customers increasingly expect to ask a question in natural language and get a personalised answer, whether they’re on your website, in your app, or messaging you from their phone.
What this means for you in 2026
Expect a shift from: “Can people find information on our site?” to “Can people ask anything and get the right answer instantly?”
Practically, that looks like:
- AI front doors on websites that talk, not just show menus
- Integrated systems that pull from knowledge bases, CRMs, and live inventory in real time
- Smooth hand-offs from AI to human, with full context preserved
Your “website” becomes less of a destination and more of a digital concierge that meets customers wherever they are.
10. AI Fluency Becomes Non-Negotiable
The most important shift isn’t technical; it’s human.
Multiple studies now highlight both the upside of AI and the emerging skills gap:
- Generative AI and other technologies could automate 60–70% of the time employees spend on work activities.
- 75% of global knowledge workers are already using AI, but many organisations still lack a clear strategy to move from individual experiments to enterprise impact.
- 90% of employees say AI helps them save time, and 85% say it helps them focus on more important work.
- 90% of students are already using AI tools, prompting calls for formal AI fluency support.
- AI agents and tools deliver 3–10× gains in specific workflows, particularly when teams redesign processes around them
What this means for you in 2026
AI fluency is becoming as fundamental as digital literacy was 20 years ago:
- Individuals need to know how to ask good questions, evaluate AI output, and build AI into their daily rhythm
- Teams need shared norms: what to automate, what to keep human, and how to collaborate with AI
- Leaders must invest in structured AI education, coaching and experimentation—not just buy tools and hope for the best
The gap in 2026 won’t be “who has AI” but who knows how to use it well.
2026: The Year of AI Absorption
If 2023 was the year the world discovered generative AI, and 2024–25 were the years it hit mainstream adoption, 2026 is the year AI is absorbed into the foundations of how we work.
- AI shifts from tool → system → foundation
- Agents shift from experiment → assistant → digital employee
- Skills shift from “AI is scary” → “AI is just how we work here”
Your responsibility, as a leader, professional or entrepreneur, is to decide:
- Where can AI create real value in our context?
- What guardrails do we need to put around it?
- How do we lift the AI fluency of our people, not just our tech stack?
If you’d like a practical roadmap to do that over the next 90 days, that’s exactly why I wrote Think Digital – Rewired for the AI Age. It’s designed to help you and your team move from feeling overwhelmed by AI to using it confidently and responsibly across your workflows.
You can learn more and grab a copy at
Order here: “Think Digital – Rewired for the AI Age”
References:
https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report?
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai-2024?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/ai-at-work-is-here-now-comes-the-hard-part?
https://www.strategicmarketresearch.com/market-report/synthetic-data-generation-market?
https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/ai-in-warehousing-market-113682?
