The Great Digital Reckoning: Three Uncomfortable Predictions for 2026.

For over two decades, we’ve been promised a digital revolution. What we got was stagnation dressed up as progress. 

E-commerce? Still mostly catalog shopping with better logistics. Social media? The same dopamine loops, just with shorter videos. And now AI — the technology that was supposed to change everything — is starting to feel trapped in the same suspended animation: astronomical valuations, demo-driven hype, and the promise of a silicon-based utopia called AGI just around the corner. 

But this era is ending. In 2026, the tech industry has to start earning its keep. If internal pressure won’t force the change, external competition will: Disruptive China is building a different kind of economy —  one that forces us to rethink what “digital” actually means.

Here are my three predictions for what this reckoning will look like.

1. The “Worst Version of AI” Myth will end.

For years, the prevailing tech-optimist meme was: “This is the worst version of this AI you will ever use.” The assumption was that we were on an irreversible path toward god-like AGI — costs, energy requirements, but also technical restrictions of LLMs be damned. But in 2026, AI might stop getting better.

Not because technology will hit a wall, but because economics will. The staggering cost of overinvestment is meeting a lack of tangible macroeconomic impact. With AGI still “missing in action,” the industry will start to change: 2026 will be the year AI stops being about demos and benchmarks and starts having to earn its money back.

For most users, this will manifest as significantly lower performance (via “distilled”, more “efficient” models or lower usage caps), much higher prices, and the appearance of that familiar specter from consumer internet business models: Advertising.

We’ve seen this movie before. It’s called enshittification. First, platforms deliver value to attract users. Then, they extract value from users to attract advertisers. Finally, they scale the value extraction until the product barely works.

If your chatbot is still ad-free, enjoy it while it lasts.

2. Hypernormalization Goes Into Overdrive.

We are not really living in “normal” times, yet we are working harder than ever to pretend we are. In 2026, Western political and economic systems continue to fray, creating a strange, bifurcated reality.

On one side, we have companies struggling to stay afloat in a volatile economy; on the other, a handful of “hype-core” players are being flushed with capital for a single mission: scale the market cap at any cost.

Many Western, especially digital, companies no longer have real competition, and they are pouring their insane monopoly profits into sustaining narratives rather than solving real problems facing our societies. 

Because we cannot envision an alternative, we have accepted this dissonance as the status quo. This is Hypernormalization — and in 2026, it is the dominant operating system of the West.

3. The Solow Paradox Demands an Answer.

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

Robert Solow said this in 1987. He wanted to describe the gap between massive investment in tech and the lack of actual productivity growth; back then, we had the tools, but we weren’t becoming that much more efficient.

Nearly four decades later, the Solow Paradox is back — but now it’s no longer just an academic curiosity; it’s a sign of a competitive crisis.

The West continues to invest unbelievable resources into digital “layers” that sit on top of old structures and again we are failing to see the productivity growth that should follow. 

Meanwhile, a different model is emerging in the East. In China, we see the rise of “Zero-Touch” companies and “Dark Factories” — organizations where AI isn’t just a tool used by employees, but the very platform the entire organization is built upon.

In 2026, we must realize that digitization is not about “fixing” old processes with new software. For this, we need entirely new strategies and organizational philosophies. If we want to compete on more than just market cap, we need to stop digitizing the past and start building the future.

The next twelve months won’t be comfortable. But discomfort is where real change starts. It’s time to re-think digital — not as a layer we add to the old world, but as a foundation for building something new.

In my next post, I will outline five topics to think about in 2026 to begin doing just that.

Until then: Happy 2026 everyone! 🥳