And The Rest Is Leadership 4th Jan '26

Helping Leaders Translate AI Into The Context Of Their Organisations .

Author

Tony Evans
January 04, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

Editor's Note
Welcome to 2026 !
In a break from the standard formatting of the newsletter, this edition has an expanded "In Case You Missed It" section to cover the news from the end of 2025, plus some lookbacks across the year, and look forwards and predictions for 2026.

Featuring

  • Three Things That Matter Most

  • In Case You Missed It

  • Tools, Podcasts, Products or Toys We’re Currently Playing With

Agents, Robots, and Us: Skill Partnerships In The Age of AI

AI at Work in 2025 - Gallup Survey

Open AI finishes the year on a high note

Agents, Robots, and Us: Skill Partnerships In The Age of AI

A new report from the management consulting firm McKinsey sets out how they see our world of work changing. The report outlines how the future of work will be characterised by partnerships between people, AI-powered agents, and robots.

McKinsey has put a figure that by 2030, this automation into AI-powered robots and agents could unlock approximately $2.9 trillion of economic value in the US, if organisations adapt workflows and skill strategies appropriately. But capturing this value depends less on technology breakthroughs and more on organisational redesign, embedding humans and machines in workflows so that each contributes their strengths.

Other key takeaways:

Whilst automation will occur, human skills will not become obsolete. Over 70% of skills used today are relevant across both automatable and non-automatable activities, meaning most human capabilities remain useful. Even tasks that can be automated often still require human judgement, interpretation, quality control, and context-specific insights.

The report introduces a skill change index to analyse how individual skills are affected by automation potential. There are highly automatable skills, such as routine coding or accounting tasks, and these face the greatest disruption. There are then interpersonal or judgement-based skills, such as negotiation or coaching, and these are the least affected.

Takeaways and Implications For Leaders.

Business and institutional leaders should engage directly with AI, not merely delegate it. Investment in human skills, upskilling, and reskilling is critical. Regular readers of this newsletter and/or my book Generation AI will recognise these as common themes !

The technical potential for automation is high, but real-world adoption will be gradual, influenced by factors such as cost, regulation, organisational change processes, and labour market dynamics. If we look at past technology adoption, elements such as cloud computing took decades to diffuse widely.

Overall, the report reframes the automation conversation. It's not just about replacing tasks but about integrating human and machine capabilities in ways that generate new opportunities and productivity. Little wonder that the report highlights that the demand for AI fluency and the ability to use and manage AI systems, has increased sharply, growing about sevenfold in two years.

AI at Work in 2025 - Gallup Survey

A new survey from research company Gallup has shown growth in AI adoption in the workplace. The findings derive from Gallup's nationally representative survey of over 23,000 US adults employed full- or part-time.
The survey shows that whilst occasional AI use is approaching mainstream adoption (45% of employees), frequent use remains limited, and daily users are only 1 in 10.

How often do you use artificial intelligence in your role — daily, a few times a week, a few times a month, a few times a year, once a year, less than once per year, or never?

A core takeaway is that AI adoption is accelerating, but most employees are still experimenting, not embedding AI into daily workflows. The opportunity isn't more tools; it's moving from curiosity to consistency.

Only 37% of respondents said the organisation has implemented AI to improve productivity or quality. Meanwhile, 40% said the organisation had not, and 23% said they did not know. A large share of employees using AI may be doing so without awareness of formal organisational strategy, which suggests ad hoc adoption, shadow AI tools, or inconsistent communication.

In terms of what employees are actually using AI for, amongst the employees who've used AI in the past year:

  • 42% are using it for consolidating information

  • 41% for idea generation

  • 36% for learning new things

This is a great indication that AI is primarily a cognitive augmentation tool assisting with synthesis, ideation, and learning.

Open AI finishes the year on a high note

With the release of a new image generation tool to answer Google's Nano Banana Pro plus the release of an App Store, both moves are significant at the end of what has been a remarkable year in AI.

In image generation, Google’s Nano Banana Pro has quite rightly met with great accolades after it launched and was streets ahead of ChatGPT's offering. The new image generation from ChatGPT makes big leaps from the previous iteration, but is still not quite at the standard of Nano Banana Pro. Head-to-head comparisons on their capabilities can be seen here and here

The launch of the App Store is a significant development as it mirrors the evolutions of ecosystems like Apple's App Store. It positions ChatGPT as more than an AI system: it becomes a transaction and action layer across digital services. It means that users can browse and connect apps within conversations so that all actions like ordering, booking, playlist creation, searching, and productivity workflows can happen without leaving the chat.

This is not a traditional mobile app marketplace. Users won't install separate apps as they would from Apple's App Store or Google Play. Instead, the apps run inside ChatGPT's conversational hub

The strategic rationale for this is clear: stickier user engagement as users stay within the ChatGPT environment rather than switching to standalone apps. And there are increased monetization opportunities - whether commissions, revenue shares, or premium integrations inside the AI ecosystem, OpenAI can benefit from these. This will accelerate OpenAI's path towards becoming not just a model provider, but a digital infrastructure layer.

Early integrations include big names like Spotify, Canva, Expedia, Zillow, Apple Music, DoorDash, and more. This challenging of the traditional gatekeepers of apps fits alongside the new AI browsers that we saw over recent months. Both of these things provide a big challenge to the incumbent leaders of search and app store marketplaces.

🔥 In Case You Missed It…

Whilst many people were taking a break at the end of last year, the world of AI didn’t seem to slow down. What we know is that the AI from a year ago is very different from the AI that we have now, and will probably be very different to the AI we have in a year's time. If you miss a month's worth of news on AI, you're way behind. So here are some notable stories from the past few weeks along with a few things of note looking back over a remarkable year in AI.

SoftBank invests $40B in OpenAI.
More detail here.

Yann LeCun - Meta’s Chief AI Scientist quits Meta and announces his own start-up
More detail here

Nvidia buys Grok (the claims are it is not an acquisition but it certainly looks like one !) More detail here

Meta buys Manus
More details here.

2025 Lookback

2026 Look forward

Forecasts and predictions in any industry are tough. When things are moving as quickly as AI is moving, it’s even tougher. Many of the things we currently use in AI were little known or non existent just 12 months ago.
2026 will likely see more demand for demonstrating the ROI of AI initiatives and consolidation of AI companies will continue. And we'll continue to see the naysayers and click-baiters relying on poor research to bolster their stories. Outside of that, especially with the speed AI is moving, the prediction game is notoriously hard. With that disclaimer, it's still worth looking at the predictions from a few places for 2026.

Forbes predictions here.
Stanford’s AI predictions
Predictions from executives from Blackstone, Cisco, Ernst, and Young, IBM, Snowflake, visa and others can be found here.

Bonus - For Your Own 2026 Productivity
The site ‘There's An AI For That (TAAIFT) has over 43,000 different AI tools listed. What are their top 7 picks for AI tools in 2026? Link here

🏆 Tools, Podcasts, Products Or Toys We’re Playing With This Week

Wispr Flow

With the continued rise of wearables like smart glasses, or whatever OpenAI brings out as their new device, increased voice recognition capabilities is a great benefit of AI.

Wispr Flow is an incredibly good dictation tool. Works on your phone, works on your PC. No matter how quickly you may be able to type, it's still not as quick as dictating by voice. Plus it gives you the ability to dictate notes onto your phone wherever you are. For instance, if you're walking or in the car, it’s far easier than trying to do that by keyboard (especially ideal for anyone who is trying to combine the practice of voice dictation and getting their daily steps in).

It does need a bit of a change in habit, and I'll personally be seeing if the repetition over coming days and weeks gets this to stick.

Did You Know? 

With 2026 beginning on a Thursday, there are economic benefits.

Years that start on a Thursday produce more working days in many Western economies, which can slightly lift annual productivity and GDP compared to years starting on weekends.

Till next time,

And The Rest Is Leadership