Welcome back to Watch Me AI
If you're new here, welcome! Watch Me AI is where I share practical ways to use AI in your work and life. Here are a couple of past issues to get you started: How I turn 1 meeting into 10 assets and How I'm using AI to plan my 2026.
AI is the biggest thing to happen for creativity in a very long time.
I don't mean creativity in some abstract, art-school sense. I mean this:
Anyone with an idea can now execute on that idea in ways they never could before.
In work—building a company that would have required a team and outside capital two years ago. In life—tackling DIY projects you were scared to start, illustrating a children's book for your kid, designing a custom invitation instead of paying for a template.
We can now do so many things that were beyond us as individuals before AI.
2026 is the year the downstream effects of this unlock really start to show. Here's what I think we'll see.
My 7 predictions for AI in 2026:
- Solopreneurship explodes (and why Gen Z is already there)
- Personal software becomes a real paradigm
- Personal agents go mainstream
- We get comfortable collecting our own data
- The digital-to-physical gap gets filled
- Leaders get strict about AI adoption
- New "vibe coder" roles emerge
- The time paradox: why AI might make us work more
1. Solopreneurship explodes
I'm a solopreneur now, largely because I can build an entire business on my own. Two years ago, I would have found that very challenging. When I built my last company, I needed a co-founder, an engineering team, and external capital—partly because I wanted to scale it big, but partly because there were so many things I simply couldn't do myself.
Now with AI, I can do all the things. Code a product. Create and execute an entire marketing strategy. Design beautiful ads. Time is my biggest constraint and increasingly, I'm building AI agents to solve that rather than hiring people.
It's never been easier to build a money-generating company by yourself. These tools both teach us how to do things and do a lot of that work for us. All the barriers have dropped.
Combine this with a white-collar job market that's already getting massively disrupted, and you get a wave of people going out on their own, hanging their own shingle, making their own money.
Here's a spicier take: I think there are interesting long-term political implications here. If we see a real shift toward solopreneurship—toward everyone needing to bring in their own bacon—that could lead to a more capitalistic mindset across the board. This is different from how today's white-collar workers think about work and economics. For many years, we've worked for big organizations that felt safe and secure, that provided benefits and stability. As a solopreneur, you give up that safety net.
But here's the thing: that safety net—that implicit promise—has already eroded. I recently read something from Greg Isenberg about how he's been spending time with Gen Zers, and they're so disenfranchised by the traditional work promise that many of them are starting out as entrepreneurs. They're more capitalistic by nature than us millennials ever were. The shift may already be underway.
2. Personal software becomes a real paradigm
People will increasingly build themselves small, sometimes disposable, mini apps rather than paying for third-party software.
I'm already doing this. When I needed to send out an invitation recently, my instinct wasn't to go to Paperless Post. It was to open Lovable and build a simple invitation with a tracker exactly the way I wanted it, for no additional cost beyond my existing subscription.
Last month I built a digital holiday card for my family instead of going to Minted and paying them for something similar. It was more fun, more custom, and more mine.
This will accelerate dramatically as more people realize how easy it is to build with AI. The mindset shift is: why pay for a generic solution when I can build exactly what I need in 20 minutes?
3. Personal agents go mainstream
We're in the middle of a big interface shift with AI agents.
Previously, building an agent meant stringing together different tasks in a workflow builder. It wasn't hard, but it was harder than just chatting with ChatGPT, and most people wouldn't do it.
Now, you build an agent the same way you talk to ChatGPT. You just say: "I need an agent that combs my email and preferred news sources every morning and sends me a podcast on what I need to know." And it builds it in front of your eyes. (If you haven't tried agent builders like Relay.app recently, go look—this is happening now.)
Given this change in ease, many more people will start building their own custom agents. We'll see much more specific, bespoke use cases emerge, and a much higher proliferation of agents in daily life and work.
4. We get comfortable collecting our own data
I've been writing about this for a while: we're entering an era where the return on personal data is extraordinarily high. The equation has completely changed—data capture is now effortless, AI surfaces patterns we'd never find ourselves, and crucially, it takes action on our behalf.
In 2026, I think we'll see a big shift in how comfortable people are with ambient data collection. Recording your meetings, letting wearables track your patterns, feeding your calendar and email into AI tools—all of this still feels a bit edgy to many people. But the career and life advantages are becoming too significant to ignore.
Case in point: Meta recently acquired Limitless, the company behind a pendant that listens and records your conversations. A year ago, this was 100% fringe—most people still shudder at the thought of wearing something that's always listening. But Meta buying it signals where this is headed. Combine that with the exploding popularity of Oura rings and other health wearables, and the trajectory is clear.
The health implications alone are massive. When your wearable can detect early signs of illness, optimize your sleep, and correlate your energy levels with your habits, the value proposition becomes undeniable. Expect this to tip quickly—within a few years, collecting this kind of personal data will be the norm, not the exception.
5. Digital-to-physical services emerge
Here's a gap I keep bumping into: I can now create a flyer, an invitation, a poster for my kid's room, a storybook, etc. fairly easily, and with a ton of fun in the process. But when it comes time to make that creation into a real physical thing I can hang on the wall or give as a gift? The solutions aren't great.
Current printing and fulfillment services weren't built for this new reality. They're not AI-native. They don't anticipate the volume and variety of custom creations that people are now producing.
Given this massive unlock in digital creativity, I think we'll see new services and companies emerge specifically to help us translate AI-created work into real-life artifacts. Someone's going to nail this, and it'll be a big deal.
6. Leaders get strict about AI adoption
"Use AI" won't mean "chat with ChatGPT sometimes" anymore.
I predict leaders will get much more adamant that their teams must:
- Implement entirely new AI-driven processes
- Adopt new AI tools beyond the basics
- Do their work in fundamentally different ways than before
If people aren't doing that, they'll get cut. We've already seen some leaders say this publicly. I think it ramps up significantly in 2026 both in public statements and, more importantly, in the internal expectations within organizations.
The bar is rising fast.
(If you want help meeting that bar, my AI Business Playbook is built exactly for this—practical strategies for using AI in your work. Founder pricing available for two more weeks.)
7. "Vibe coder" roles emerge inside companies
Here's one from Nathaniel Whittemore (host of the AI Daily Brief podcast): he predicts we'll see new roles emerge around AI-enabled coding, including something he calls "internal forward-deployed vibers"—staffers meant to help different groups figure out how to use AI coding tools to improve what they do.
This resonates with me because I'm seeing massive demand for this already, just outside of companies. Organizations, individuals, everyone is hungry for someone who can come in and show them how to implement AI specifically for their function, role, or use case. Often because they don't have the awareness of what's possible, and also because they don't have the time.
It makes sense that we'd start to see this role formalized inside companies. The need is clearly there.
(Also: if you need this, email me. Let's talk.)
8. The time paradox
AI saves us time. I'm now much faster at many tasks, so I can get more done in a day.
You'd think this means we win back time for non-work pursuits. I've come to think otherwise.
Credit to Scott Belsky, who recently wrote about this in a way that crystallized something I'd been feeling. He invokes something called Jevons Paradox: when a precious resource becomes more efficient to use, we don't conserve it, we consume more of it.
With AI, each work minute feels more impactful than it did before. I can do more with every minute. And when it's easier to be productive—when it's easier to make money and create value with my time—it's incredibly incentivizing to put in more minutes and hours, not fewer.
That's the paradox. It's lovely to imagine AI enabling more time for life. In reality, it might incentivize us to work more.
That said, if you believe in the shift toward solopreneurship (which I do), here's where it gets interesting: I'm actually working fewer hours now—probably around 30 a week. Solopreneurship, controlling my own destiny, and AI together enable me to work less and spend more time on household admin, being a present parent, being with my kid.
I feel the trade-off deeply. I often wish I had more hours for work. But that's the key thing: I'm making this choice. I could work more hours and pay someone to help with the household and parenting logistics. It's all within my control.
Looking ahead
Will everyone embrace all of this immediately? No.
People still lean into doom and gloom when they think about AI. That's human nature. Everyone hates change. Everyone worries about job loss (which is a fair concern). I expect we'll continue to see instinctive, gut-negative reactions to AI developments throughout 2026 and beyond.
But give it five to ten years, and I think AI won't even be its own topic anymore. It'll just be embedded in how we live and work. Not a thing we debate, just a thing we use.
In the meantime, 2026 is going to be a fascinating year to watch and build in.
What are your predictions for 2026? Hit reply and let me know.
If this sparked any ideas, forward it to a friend or colleague who's thinking about AI in 2026.
Mollie
P.S. If one of your 2026 goals is to use AI strategically in your work or business, my AI Business Playbook walks you through exactly how. Founder pricing ($297) is available for the next two weeks before it goes live at full price.
Get it here 👉 The AI Business Playbook
