Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Jeff Schwartz, Gloat Vice President of Insights and Impact
Is 2026 the fork in the road? Where do we want to lead AI in the coming year?
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” -Yogi Berra
We’re not predicting the future (that’s hard!) but we are reflecting on where things are going in the coming year.
It’s just over three years since the arrival of generative AI, followed by AI agents, and many are asking: how will AI reshape organizations, work, and careers in 2026? We believe that 2026 is the year to flip the question: what are the opportunities presented by AI in the coming year, and how do we want to steer, direct, govern and take advantage, responsibly, of AI, work, and the workforce in 2026?
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Work will fundamentally restructure
In 2026, work will change – but not in the ways most organizations currently expect. AI won’t just flatten organizations – it will fundamentally offer opportunities to restructure work and how it gets done. The future belongs to dynamic combinations of humans and AI agents teaming together and reconfiguring based on outcomes rather than organization charts.
But here’s what’s often missing from the conversation: the technical infrastructure to enable this shift. Organizations moving beyond experimentation need:
- Workforce orchestration systems that can match skills to opportunities in real-time, understand capability adjacencies, and recommend development paths that humans alone can’t surface at scale.
- Integration across historically siloed systems – HRIS, project management platforms, learning systems, and collaboration tools – with APIs that can query capabilities, surface opportunities, and route work based on constantly evolving skill graphs rather than static job descriptions.
Success won’t be measured by jobs managed, but by outcomes delivered – by people, teams, and technology collaborating for results. Dynamic work both changes organizations and leadership, and reshapes careers and skills development.
Organizations will evolve from org charts to work charts
Organizations will flatten and evolve from org charts to work charts as enterprises shift to dynamic networks of work. The focus will move from managing people within organizational silos to redesigning work and teams around more productive, and more importantly, more innovative outcomes. Thinking and acting beyond functional boundaries will be where value gets unlocked.
Technically, this transformation requires:
- Data infrastructure that models work as a graph rather than a hierarchy – understanding not just who reports to whom, but who has collaborated with whom, what skills emerge from those collaborations, and what patterns predict successful outcomes.
- Instrumented workflows that capture the signals making intelligent orchestration possible. The challenge isn’t just adopting AI tools; it’s building the data foundations that enable them to add value.
Leadership will transform and distribute
Leadership will change fundamentally. It will flow in multiple directions across and throughout the organization, up and down and sideways. Leadership will focus on redesigning (not necessarily supervising) work, continually upskilling and reskilling the workforce, and orchestrating evolving combinations of people and technology.
Management will shift to focus on new ways of working: human-machine teams in multiple combinations, distributed and hybrid arrangements, curating critical human skills to unleash human capabilities while leveraging, partnering with, and monitoring AI tools, agents, and systems. Leadership will be tested to explore and set strategies that extract the best from human-machine collaboration while producing value for employees, customers, communities and other stakeholders. In 2026, leadership will be challenged to set direction rather than simply follow technological trends.
This requires new capabilities:
- Management interfaces and dashboards that surface not just project status but skill utilization, capability gaps, and learning velocity.
- Visibility into work flow dynamics – where bottlenecks emerge, how human expertise combines with AI capabilities, and what patterns drive successful outcomes.
Careers will become portfolios
Careers will change. Job and career progression is no longer a ladder. Our mental model is shifting to a portfolio of orchestrated experiences designed to explore opportunities and build skills that drive results. New careers and new teams will require and inspire new approaches to skills development, leveraging talent marketplaces and choice architecture that guides skills to flow toward future work.
The technical enabler here is recommendation systems sophisticated enough to understand not just what skills someone has, but what skills they could develop, what experiences would accelerate their growth, and what opportunities align with both organizational needs and individual aspirations.
2026: The year of intentional direction
Finally, 2026 will be a year of choosing direction, strategy, and redesigning work and organizations for the era of human-AI collaboration. 2026 is a year when direction, goals, and values will be critical; when AI strategies shift from experimentation and adoption to impact and scale. 2026, we hope, will be a year of intentional business, AI, and workforce reimagination – designing not just for outcomes and impact, but for workforce wellbeing, resilience and growth.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Schwartz is the Vice President of Insights and Impact at Gloat and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School where he teaches MBA and executive education programs on strategy and leadership and the future of work. He was a senior advisor on the future of work and a retired senior principal at Deloitte Consulting from 2001 to 2022 where he was a co-founder and leader of the U.S. Future of Work practice and the founding global editor of Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends Report since its launch in 2011 through 2021. Jeff is the author of the recently published best-selling book, WORK DISRUPTED, (Wiley 2021) on the accelerating challenges to the future of work and co-author of WORKFORCE ECOSYSTEMS: Reaching Strategic Goals with People, Partners, and Technology (MIT Press 2023). Jeff’s website: fowdisrupted.com
