How will AI transform business in 2026?

How should leaders prepare for AI’s accelerating impact on work and everyday life? AI scientist, entrepreneur, and Pioneers of AI podcast host Rana el Kaliouby shares her predictions for the year ahead—from physical AI entering the real world to what it means to onboard AI into your org chart. El Kaliouby cuts through today’s biggest AI headlines, bringing to light the insights that will matter most in the months to come.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

Let’s look ahead to 2026. You sent me some fascinating thoughts about AI’s next-phase impact on business, and I’d love to take you through them. The first one was the rise of what you called relationship intelligent AI.

So everybody’s worried that AI is going to make us less human and take away our human-to-human connections. There is definitely a risk of that. But I think the thing I’m most excited about for 2026 is how AI can actually help us build deeper human connections and more meaningful human experiences. And the way this happens is through AI that can really help you organize your relationships and your network and surface connections that you need and maybe make warm introductions to you. I love connecting with people, but my relationship data is a mess. It’s all in my brain. Some of it is in LinkedIn, some are on WhatsApp. I take a lot of notes when I meet new people and I use an AI note taker. It’s just a mess. It’s very disparate data sources.

And I always think of this scene in, do you know The Devil Wears Prada? Have you seen?

Oh, that’s exactly what I was thinking of. The character is kind of whispering in your ear.

Exactly. It was Anne Hathaway [as Andy], and she was with Meryl Streep [as Miranda] at this gala. And this guy and his partner were moving toward Miranda and she [didn’t rememeber their names]. And Andy whispers in Miranda’s ear: “He’s the ambassador and his new wife.” And I was like, “That’s exactly what I need. I need an AI version of Anne Hathaway.” And it’s now doable with LLMs because it’s all this unstructured, messy data that an AI can take all of that, contextualize it, and hopefully be that AI chief of staff for you.

Is that like a product? Is that something that you would have to do to turn your chatbot, whatever, your Claude or your ChatGPT into that? Or is it a new product that you think is going to come out that will make that easy for you?

There are already a number of new companies that are starting in this space. So one company’s called VIA.AI, it’s a Boston-based company. They do this for sales professionals and BD professionals who have to do this for their work. There’s a company called Goodword that I’m very excited about. They’re doing this for just the average person. Like you and I, we have very strong networks, but how can we organize it? So I’m excited about that one. There’s a company called Boardy that does this for investors and founders. So it’s becoming a thing, and I’m excited to see how these companies take off in 2026. They’re all fairly new, so it’ll be interesting to see how they evolve.

Yeah, and whether they can stay ahead of some of the bigger chatbots that may just try to integrate some of this capability into the products they already have. That’s always the case in this kind of evolution of technology: What’s a feature and what’s a company, right? What’s an independent service?

Absolutely. When I’m looking at these companies and I’m diligencing them, that’s a key question that I ask. Is this something that the next version of ChatGPT or Gemini is just going to implement? And if the answer is yes, then that’s obviously not a defensible company. But a lot of times there’s this additional moat of data and algorithms that you need to sit on top of these LLMs. And I believe in this relationship intelligence space, I don’t think this is something that just a kind of an off-the-shelf LLM can do. It really needs to know you. It needs to know your data, it needs to know your relationships.

And you have to trust it enough to share all that data with it, right?

Absolutely.

That’s your proprietary data, whether it’s about your business or about you individually.

Exactly. And I don’t want this to all go up to OpenAI’s cloud. I want to trust that I have control over these really private relations. If you and I have a conversation about our kids, I don’t necessarily want that to now sit in a general OpenAI cloud and be used to train the next ChatGPT. So that safety and security, appreciating the privacy and the importance of this data, is really key.

Another business change you expect in 2026 is the insertion of AI into the org chart. This is about who manages AI, like performance reviews and team culture impacts?

Yeah, so this goes back to the thesis that there’s this shift in how AI is creating value, and it’s not a tool anymore. Well, it is a tool. It’ll always be a tool, but it’s not a tool that helps you get work done faster. It could actually take an end-to-end task and get it done for you. And I’ll give a few examples.

So I’m an investor in a company called Synthpop, and instead of building a tool that helps healthcare administrators accelerate or really become efficient in how they do patient intake, it just takes the task of patient intake. It does the thing end to end. And so if you then imagine what that means for a hospital or a clinic, it will have a combination of human workers collaborating and working closely with AI coworkers.

And so then the question becomes, well, who manages these hybrid teams? Sometimes it’s a human manager, sometimes it’s an AI manager. I’m also an investor in a company called Tough Day, and they sell you AI managers. And then how do you do performance reviews for these hybrid teams? How do you build a culture? Like at Affectiva, my company, culture was our superpower. How do you build a culture when some of your team members are AI and some of your team members are humans?

So I think that is going to spur a lot of conversation around how do you build organizations that are combinations of digital agents and human employees?

As you talk about this merging of AI agents and humans in work, it brings up that looming question about the impact of AI on jobs and employment. And some numbers are coming out now that make it seem like, “Oh, it’s bad for jobs.” There are other numbers coming out that are like, “Oh, we’re actually hiring more people because of it.” Do you have a prediction about what is going to happen with that in 2026? Is AI going to take over roles that have been done by humans that quickly?

We had a really fascinating roundtable discussion at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference and the headline was like, “Is AI killing entry-level jobs?” And actually, a lot of the Fortune companies and also AI companies that were around the table were basically saying, “No, we’re hiring more entry-level jobs. They’re just not the same jobs that we were traditionally seeing.” And also the career ladders have changed.

So my prediction is we’re going to see an entirely different organization where I think if you are able to come in an entry-level position, for example, but work very closely with AI and be AI-native and be AI fluent and be able to wear multiple hats, I think that’s going to go a long way. As opposed to this very siloed job trajectory where you come in, this is your little task, and then you do more of it, and then you go up the career ladder. I think that’s going to change. I think young people are looking for different ways of working, and I think AI is changing all of that anyway.

Will there be jobs that will go away? I think so. I can’t remember who said this line, but it’s now very popular: “It’s not AI that’s going to take your job. It’s going to be somebody who knows how to use AI.” And I believe that to be true.

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source https://www.fastcompany.com/91464688/how-will-ai-transform-business-in-2026