I was perusing the Deloitte Tech Trends of 2026. Some notes of things I found interesting:
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Conversations with leaders are moving from “what can we do with AI?” to “how do we move from experimentation to impact”.
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Things with AI feel urgent, but this is driven by the speed of the change more than anything - the broad use of AI by over 50 million people happened in just 2 months, 300x times faster than the adoption of the telephone and 84x faster than adoption of the internet. This is driving faster time to value, faster scaling and faster technology adoption.
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The robots are coming - AI is helping accelerate the robotics field (check out Boston Dynamics at CES). Advances that drove LLM advances are now being applied to the robotics world in the form of vision plus language equals action. Ayanna Howard, a roboticist at Ohio State University, said that she believes there should always be a human in the loop somewhere. This will get over the concept and challenge around “over trust” of automated and AI systems. Interestingly, labor shortages are potentially driving faster advances in the robotic space.
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Organisation’s need to move faster and also fundamentally change. I love the Henry Ford quote: “Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.”
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Enterprises are still mainly in the phase of automating what they know versus doing different things completely. Gartner suggest 40% of agentic projects will fail because organizations are trying to automate broken processes vs completely rethink operations. The challenge with these are that these tasks were often designed by and for humans, and so we now need to start to reimagine how what’s going to be done instead of doing what we always have done.
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The report uses the phrase Silicon and Carbon based workforce - where Silicon = AI Agents and Carbon = Humans. Not sure I love that but interesting to see if it sticks.
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Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, frames the organizational challenges as leadership, crowd and lab. I like this simple framing - leadership to drive org changes, crowd - larger number of people using the technology and lab - a place where experiementation on ideas can happen.
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Interestingly, 70% of tech leaders plan to grow their teams in direct response to gen ai which is counter to the narrative of AI taking jobs.