Not Another New Year Prediction

From the ruins of the "blockchain-ready" panic to the new AI FOMO trap, plus the vital difference between owning a crystal ball and building actual capability.

It’s January, which means prediction season is back…again. Each new year seems to bring a wave of confident forecasts, and this year the AI ones are arriving with particular force. Five trends. Ten shifts. What’s coming next. Everyone wants a clear storyline, because the world has been noisy and unstable for quite some time, and leaders are getting tired of ambiguity.

I understand why prediction pieces work, especially around AI. The last two years have made the ground feel permanently in motion, and you’ve probably felt that strange mix of awe and disorientation that comes when a technology accelerates faster than our organizations can absorb it. Predictions act as a bit of a relief valve. They turn uncertainty into narrative, and narrative feels like control. But what prediction season really does, is train us to mistake being informed for being prepared.

I’ve watched this cycle before. A few years ago, it was blockchain. If you were reading the business press, you’d think it was about to become the default layer for how everything worked - how data moved, how trust was established, how companies operated. When Walmart announced its use of blockchain for suppliers, it sent a wave of panic through organizations scrambling to become “blockchain-ready.” Fast forward to today, and you rarely hear about blockchain infrastructure in everyday business conversations. Not because it vanished, but because it never became the universal future it was forecast to be. It found narrower use cases, and most companies quietly moved on.

Now, let me be clear - this isn’t an anti-trend piece. In fact, one of the best AI in 2026 articles I’ve read so far via MIT Sloan Review is the Five Trends in AI and Data Science for 2026, precisely because it doesn’t feel like the usual hype-driven churn. It’s a strong example of the genre, and because even when prediction writing is good, it can still pull you into the wrong posture if you treat it as a map instead of a mirror.

Pascal once said something to me that I return to regularly at this time of year: nobody knows what the future will bring, and anyone predicting it probably has a reason they want you to believe the version of the future they’re painting.

A prediction is a story that you are being invited to believe, and the invitation comes with implications. It can be as simple as wanting a framework that makes their own decisions feel coherent, or wanting their product roadmap to look like destiny, or maybe just wanting you to move with urgency in a certain direction. The future is one of the easiest places to hide an agenda because you can’t fact-check it yet, and certainty is one of the easiest ways to short-circuit someone else’s thinking.

But trend literacy is not strategic thinking, and being able to name the shifts does not automatically translate into knowing what to do next. The MIT Sloan Review piece lays out five trends that are very likely real, and it’s useful to have those patterns in your peripheral vision, but even if every trend in that list turns out to be correct, those trends will not decide what your year looks like. What will? Your decisions, your ability to interpret what’s happening through your own value creation, and your discipline in resisting the crowd’s tempo.

This is where I think the conversation needs to shift. The most important question in January is not “what will happen in 2026?”. The better question, the strategic question, is “what must we become to meet whatever happens?” because that’s a question you can answer without pretending you have a crystal ball, and it moves you from prediction mode into positioning mode.

That distinction matters even more in an AI-saturated landscape, because hype has a very specific effect: it pressures people and makes them feel a sense of FOMO that they aren’t implementing quickly enough. It creates the feeling that you have to adopt now, announce now, overhaul now, reorganize now, because the future is arriving at speed and you don’t want to be left behind. We were collaborating with a client’s AI working group last year, and an entire piece that they wanted to create was focused around being intentional with your AI strategy and avoiding the FOMO trap.

What we have uncovered is that the most resilient strategy is rarely a single big bet based on a forecast. It’s capability-building, and optionality, and learning velocity, and a stance that can survive surprise. It’s designing your organization and your team to be adaptive rather than always right.

If you want to keep reading trend pieces without being captured by them, I find it helps to treat them as prompts rather than plans. When you’re reading a forecast and it starts to feel like a roadmap, ask yourself what remains true even if the trend doesn’t materialize the way the author expects, and ask yourself what would still be worth building even if everything happens slower than the headlines suggest. Most importantly, ask what the piece assumes about human behavior, because the technical trajectory of AI (or any emerging tech) is only half the story.

And when a prediction starts to sound inevitable, it’s worth pausing long enough to ask what that inevitability is doing to you. Inevitability is the most dangerous word in business because it collapses choice, and choice is where strategy lives. The quiet rebellion of 2026 might be refusing certainty, refusing to outsource your agency to someone else’s storyline, and being willing to build from principles instead of panic.

So read the good pieces, and let them sharpen your awareness of what’s moving. Just don’t confuse the ability to name trends with the ability to lead through them, because the people who succeed this year will not be the people who guessed correctly. They’ll be the ones who stayed clear-eyed, built real capability, and held onto their agency when the loudest voices tried to sell them inevitability.

@Kacee