For me, the holiday season is always a time of reflection on the past year, where I get to pause for a moment to celebrate accomplishments and spend time with the ones I love and that make this life worth living. This is also a time where I get to plan for the year ahead and chart the success criteria that will govern the actions that I take to do my part to make this world a better place as best I can.
Looking back on 2025, it is clear to me that AI is taking over the technology lexicon and there are increasingly few conversations that are had in our community that don’t revolve around the promise and power that this technology has in store for us. On the one hand, there is legitimate fear that a lot of jobs today will be replaced by AI agents. On the other hand, it is clear to me that human connection is and will continue to be the glue that holds the economy together—and it is essential for us to all focus our energy on doing things that machines can’t do.
One of the most striking moments of a recent tech conference I attended was the opening remarks of one of the event sponsors highlighting the fact that the room was full of about 800 technology professionals and not a single AI agent. The reason for that was that technology still needs people to put it all in context and make it make sense for those that rely on us to create the collaborative environments that allow us to service our customers.
Looking forward to 2026, it is imperative that we continue to emphasize the fact that humans still matter. In fact, humans matter more now than at any other time in our history because routine, repeatable, and mechanical work can all be done by machines now.
If your solution is solely dependent on a little black box, you’ve already lost and are on the path toward irrelevance.
We’ve been heading toward this moment since the dawn of the mechanized economy; the world of humans doing any of those tasks is rapidly fading away. As a result, we’re going to have a little more time on our hands to engage with one another to decide what we are going to tell the machines to do on our behalf.
Given that we as technology professionals design, deploy, trade, and support the machines that make up these physical and virtual environments, we have a responsibility to get this moment right and leverage our humanity to create space for deeper human connections. As such, what are the things that we need to do to reduce the friction that impedes that human connection?
For Those Supporting Colleagues
Provide the right technology and standardize access. It’s no longer OK to throw a hodgepodge of hardware at our colleagues and expect them to wrestle with machines that were not designed and configured to make it easy to connect with each other. We must eliminate this point of friction and build to standards that set up our organizations to engage with each other with little thought on the underlying technology.
Automate everything and let machines do what they do better than humans. Now is the time to move away from relying on people to walk around and check every room to ensure its function. Instead, embrace the power of automated monitoring and self-healing solutions.
In a world of agentic AI, our organizations are demanding that we all play on the same network so the computers can talk to each other to do work on our behalf. This will require deeper conversations with our partners in cybersecurity and networking—but at this stage, the cost of not doing so far outweighs the time and effort required to make this a reality.
Be vigilant and relentless about ensuring meeting equity and inclusive collaboration. This is where the machines need us to fill the gap in that human-to-computer interaction and equalize the physical and virtual workplace experience. Inevitably, someone that is important to the creative process or decision to be made is going to be remote to the in-person attendees, whether they are in their home office or satellite location.
While we continue to get better at this, there is still opportunity for technology professionals to educate our colleagues on maximizing the utility of collaboration solutions. The market is ripe with solutions that make this very easy. We need to continue to learn how to leverage them so we can spend more time creating and deciding.
For Solution and Service Providers
Think outside of your box. If your solution is solely dependent on a little black box, you’ve already lost and are on the path toward irrelevance. Software-defined ecosystems are here to stay, and we need you to embrace the opportunities to connect with multiple cloud-based technologies and services to enable that frictionless experience for your customers. Solutions that capture meaningful data and are able to feed into other technologies in the customer ecosystem will win the day and further enable the technology transparency we all desire.
Ask the question and solve the problem. Every conversation with a customer should start with this question: “What problem are we trying to solve?” Starting anywhere else will inevitably lead you down the path of negative experiences and poor outcomes.
By the time you engage with an end user these days, they have already researched products and services, and can recite the differences between you and your competitors based on the information that is publicly available. Therefore, the added value comes from asking the question, listening to the customer, and crafting solutions that solve their problems.
Play well with others. The days of proprietary ecosystems are over. Your customers need you to accept the fact that they have a mixed environment and they need you to help tie it all together.
Success in 2026 is going to involve a lot of talking to competitors to create and deploy solutions for your customers. We’re all having different versions of the same conversation—the faster we sit down with each other to compare notes and build better products, the better it will be for the entire industry.
Whether or not your colleagues and customers are coming to the office out of mandate or necessity is no longer important. Your work product by and large is happening on a machine somewhere, because a group of humans created a product that automated a task and another group of humans said this is the product you should use and this is how you should use it.
Facilitating this organization of humans to create things and make decisions is the real work in front of us in this space. Success in 2026 will look like the physical workplace being transformed into a space where people enthusiastically gather to shake hands, share hugs, and compare lived experiences in order to create things and make decisions.
