Hiring in 2026 won't look much like hiring even two years ago. If you don't pay attention, you will get left behind. I was a retained search consultant for 25-plus years. I've written executive and board résumés for the last 10 years. I've never seen so much change in candidate sourcing happen so quickly. CEO priorities and expectations have shifted. AI is reshaping how candidates get surfaced. Résumé sameness has skyrocketed. Candidate shortlist cycles have accelerated.
When ChatGPT was first released to the world at the end of 2022, Kristin Ginn, the product marketing lead for AI adoption and usage at Microsoft and founder of the consultancy TrnsfrmAItn, started playing around with it. She explored how she could use AI both at work and in her personal life, and realized just how powerful the technology would be.
In his telling, AI has yet to graduate from pilot programs into anything that materially reshapes how marketing departments are staffed, structured or paid. Until that changes, agency chiefs can stop bracing for a shift to outcome-based compensation. CMOs, he said, are still buying time and headcount. "Without naming names, I can remember a real situation where the marketer said 'of course we'll move to an output model' and then you get into a conversation with their procurement people and they're just worried about getting caught out," he continued. Which, in plain terms, means they're worried about paying agencies more than they have to.
Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, value from AI investments has been slow to emerge and worries that we're in an AI bubble are growing. Yet according to responses to this year's annual AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey, companies are undaunted. Virtually every data and AI leader participating in this year's survey believes that AI is a high priority for their organization, has plans to spend more on it, and confirms that their company is getting measurable business value from their AI investments.
AI often sparks strong reactions, with people predicting either a near-term utopia - or the end of the world as we know it. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy told Business Insider that individuals on the hype end of the spectrum tend to jump quickly to promises of unlimited prosperity. The CEO said that the other extreme includes those who believe AI will lead to a doomsday scenario.
In response to a question from Nextgov/FCW about how the initiative is helping to bring more AI tools into government, GSA Chief AI Officer and Data Scientist Zach Whitman said that, for those "wanting to see some level of adoption for experimentation purposes on low-risk use cases, this has provided a procurement pathway for a lot of these agencies who may have had early, light contact with some of these technologies."
despite one person in six now using generative AI (genAI) tools, there exists what it described as a "widening divide." The adoption rate in nations that are situated in the region known as the Global North, a term used for developed nations regardless of their geographic location, is at 24.7% of the working age population, far higher than the 14.1% figure in the Global South, those countries either under development or least developed.
"What is AI? How are we going to provide training to both the developers and the trainers - train the trainers, if you will - and employees? What areas can we leverage AI? What risks [are there] with AI?"
Microsoft CEO and head AI peddler Satya Nadella wants you to know that it's time for the next phase of AI acceptance, where we focus on how humans are empowered by tools and agents and how we deploy resources to support this growth. Amid doubts that revenue from Microsoft Copilot subscriptions and cloud AI services will compensate for data center capital expenditures any time soon, Satya has some incentive to convince customers and investors that AI is a financially intelligent long-term bet.
Nearly all corporate workers face mental health challenges at work. And in 2025, unprecedented, lightning-fast developments in AI, unending widespread layoffs and broader political turmoil roiled workers' emotional well-being. Many workers have been left burned out, anxious, and filled with dread. But it's not all bad-in some corners of the workforce, each seismic disruption this year brought with it discourse around the problem, as well as some leaders and workers staying committed to safeguarding mental health in the face of constant change.
Yet across sectors, many organizations are reaching the same conclusion. Adoption is proving harder than invention, especially for general-purpose technologies, as it once was for electricity. As a result, AI adoption remains on the sidelines. Systems exist, but changing how work actually gets done is far more difficult. The constraint is no longer technological capability. It is whether institutions and organizations are prepared to absorb AI.
Agoda's AI Developer Report 2025 shows that AI has become a mainstream tool for developers in Southeast Asia and India, delivering real productivity gains while raising new questions about reliability, skills, and organisational readiness. The report finds that AI adoption is nearly universal: 95% of developers in Southeast Asia and India use AI tools weekly, and more than half keep an AI assistant open while they work. Developers report clear speed improvements-over 90% say AI makes them faster-but describe the impact as steady, incremental gains rather than dramatic automation of their jobs.
"Yeah, that's changed," the Massachusetts Democrat said with a laugh this month, explaining that she now finds ChatGPT to be "really valuable" for basic research questions, even if she still catches the occasional hallucination. Warren said that she began using ChatGPT more after seeing her daughter use it. She says she doesn't "rely" on the technology, but uses it to "start to approach a problem."
For the past three years, AI 's breakout moment has happened almost entirely through text. We type a prompt, get a response, and move to the next task. While this intuitive interaction style turned chatbots into a household tool overnight, it barely scratches the surface of what the most advanced technology of our time can actually do. This disconnect has created a significant gap in how consumers utilize AI.
If 2025 had a theme tune for the IT channel, it would be the sound of partners enthusiastically unboxing "AI opportunities" while quietly checking the invoice to see who actually got paid. Because, yes, AI dominated everything. Vendor keynotes. Distributor roadshows. Strategy decks. Every conversation that began with "we're seeing a lot of interest in..." inevitably ended with "...AI". But for many partners, 2025 wasn't the year AI transformed the balance sheet, but the workload.
Those who follow me on LinkedIn may have gotten the impression that I'm against AI. Nothing is further from the truth. What I'm really against is the notion that you can't do design without AI so you either learn AI or you're doomed. Using AI is of course useful for designers. But so is knowing how to use Figma and I put both of those in the same bucket of tactical skills.
Three years into the AI revolution, enterprises are grappling with an interesting paradox. Despite racing to adopt AI, most organizations remain trapped in pilot purgatory. The disconnect isn't technological; it's organizational and cultural. AI is a force multiplier. In organizations with clear domain ownership, AI augments the organization within well-defined boundaries, enabling semi-autonomous decisions safely. If your team is organized and works well together, AI acts as a turbo-boost, propelling projects to completion. The same is true in reverse for the more traditional bureaucratic "dysfunctional" organizations; AI will amplify the dysfunction.
Spikes embeds AI into his executive workflow. He likens it to how large firms use management consultants to map scenarios and risks, as well as act as a sounding board. He uses AI to help with complex decisions across people dynamics, situational gray areas, and selecting external partners or service teams: It could, for example, offer advice on handling disagreements between colleagues or partners, or offer alternate perspectives that challenge someone's initial point of view.
