Rishad Tobaccowala | A Leading Futurist Takes Stock of 2026

0:00The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO, Mike Linton.

0:41Welcome marketers, advertisers, and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former chief marketing officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com. Here today with my guest, Rashad Tabakawala. Today's topic, a leading futurist takes stock of 2026. Now, Rashad served as president of Starcom, chief strategist and growth officer of Publicist.

1:22He's a best-selling author, in-demand speaker, the host of the What's Next podcast, and the co-founder of the Athena Project. You know, he's staying busy. He also recently published a book titled Rethinking Work. He's been on the show multiple times, and it's great to have him back again. Welcome, Rashad. Mike, thank you for having me back. I believe this is tour number four. I think that's right. It's for you. In a couple of your shows, we broke into two pieces because they were so deep and good. So you've got a high bar to jump over today, but I'm sure you're going to do it. Let's start. Tell us your view of what's happening in the marketplace writ large today.

2:11So I believe there are like five big factors in the marketplace. And I'm looking at it from a lens of business organization and marketing and technology. so obviously I'm not doing it from lenses of health care or finance or things like that global politics yes right global politics it's basically sort of broad boundary friends so I think the first one is a recognition that alien intelligence which is what I refer to AIS is growing increasingly powerful and in many ways unstoppable. And while a lot of people put out press releases and have ways of governing it, it is not governable. And it is not governable for three reasons.

3:11The first is the creators themselves are surprised by the way it's starting to behave. like, you know, the jailbreak into hugging face and things like that. That's sort of one. The second is there is a China-U.S. war, which prevents either government from actually constraining what they believe. Yeah, because if you constrain, you get passed by the other guy. You get passed by, which is sort of the second one. And the third one is some of the increasingly, and right now the Chinese dominate the open models, but the open models are increasingly pressurizing a lower and lower cost per token for everything, but maybe, you know, the most sophisticated version of Claude or things like that.

4:06So in effect, it's becoming very powerful and cheap for more and more people to use. So more and more people using something increasingly powerful and cheap as two countries fight it out. And the underlying technology itself is surprising people in its ability to almost double its capability every few weeks. so how does this play out when you look at business and marketing because what you have is alien intelligence that is you know right well it's not a war of the worlds kind of thing or yeah so so so so so so i'll give you the other four very quickly and then i'll show how all of that play out okay so what is this there's this alien intelligence the other ones we should read shortly so the second is which was in my book but it's becoming more and more prevalent that jobs and work are uncoupling from each other.

4:57We'll talk a little bit about that. You said jobs is a silly face. Work is going through. Right. So jobs and work are uncoupling. The third is that the generational divide is getting worse, which is the baby boomers and Gen Z are behaving like they live on two different planets, okay? And we'll also have some big marketing issues. The fourth, and this is the closest I get to sort of globalization, is we're at the cusp of new technologies of which I think are the new technologies in the hard world, not the soft world, which were batteries, electric vehicles, and solar became dominated by the Chinese.

5:51And the next three, which are robots, AI, and biotech, looks like it's going to be possibly a Chinese victory. Okay? And that is pretty interesting on, like, government systems and things like that. I'll talk to you about that, which is there's a great article for those who subscribe to The New Yorker. It's a guy called Evan Osnos who writes for The New Yorker, and he spent a lot of time in China. He's written a 12-page article, and it's simply called The Future Made in China. And so one of the things I'll also recommend to people is now there are technology tours in China that marketers can take.

6:41that take you into Xiaomi factories and other things. And anybody who goes there comes back completely changed. So there's that. And then the fifth one, which again speaks to your audience, is I think we continue to have a crisis in leadership. And we have a leadership problem. And everybody thinks it's a technology problem. So those are the five things. So there's this AI, the rise of China, work jobs uncoupling, the generational shifts, and a leadership issue. Outside of those five, we're all fine. All right. Tell us about how it is coming together. Okay. Listen, marketing front. So on the marketing front, here are a few things that are beginning to happen.

7:26This morning, I read an article in Business Insider, and I know the lady I've presented to her group. She's the CEO of Ally Financial. And what she basically says is the traffic to their website of Ally Financial, which used to be GMAC Finance before, right, is up ninefold this year from AI engines relative to what it was last year. But then she says people who come through the AI engines are 3.5 times more likely to convert than other people. And that, I think, means that increasingly, marketing is becoming very rational because the questions that people are asking and what coming there are basically very fact-driven.

8:21And so, in effect, you have to think about not only are you discovered by these AI engines, But do you have credibility and credibility in the form of customer reviews, facts, scientific papers versus storytelling? So in many ways, storytelling will decay and fact telling will rise in this world. And my friend Ray Inomoto on What Next basically said, Rashad, that he's, you know, a legendary AKQA, RGA, and now he runs Guy & Co. So he says, storytelling is fine, but it's all going to be about trusted differentiation. So brands are going to be about trusted differentiation. So can you show that you're different?

9:09And can you and the data that shows you're different be trusted? So that's one big thing that's happening because of this AI age. Also, at its core, you have to be really good at something. Oh, you're not? Yeah. So you can't emotionally differentiate. This, this, you know, you'd climb the ladder and you'd be practically good and then demonstrably good and then emotionally good. If you take off the emotional layer and you're not practically good, that says you lose. Is that right? Exactly. And so an example to great extent is recently Pampers has been losing market share. Yeah. And that's because increasingly Huggies has been winning all the comparison tests, whether it's wire cutter or anything else.

9:53And so all the AI engines for parents say, this is a better thing for these reasons, here are the facts. So all of Pampers heritage doesn't work anymore because Huggies, which is a known brand. So it isn't like, you know, Mike Linton and Rashad's diapers, nobody would care about that. Right. Is, is, is, is a thing. So that is one. Now, how - I have one question. What if I put a bunch of slop out there that isn't necessarily true? The reason is because the engines actually can tell the difference between slop and not. So what the engines are doing is they're going for credible sources. So what basically they'll do is they will give you and me credibility on marketing, but not on medicine.

10:39So if we write on medicine, they'll say, okay, these people are doing fake stuff. So the idea really is to think about that, but also what it means is your product, your services, your customer care is a big thing. A friend of ours, your and mine, Shiv Singh, basically is constantly reminding me, he says, hey, this is no longer about marketing as branding. It's about marketing as changing the organizational system. Yeah. Right? And that is a very broad thing, which basically means coming to that leadership thing that marketers have to truly rise to being almost like a president of a company. Like Corey at Elf, you know, rose from CMO to president.

11:28It's you have to rise to that level or have zones of influence much broader than what was narrowly defined in the old days as marketing. Otherwise, you won't have the leadership chops in this particular world. The other implication is this, which is that the people in the boardroom that the CMO is selling to, and let's say the Gen Z people who work for him or her, have completely different mindsets. So because like you, I used to run things. Like you, I am now unemployed. Yeah. Okay. Or self-employed, I guess. We'll go self-employed. Sounds better. And like you, I'm relatively accessible. Buy me a drink.

12:25I'll have a meeting. Okay. So I, and also because people still remember me for my old thing. So I get to access very senior people and I get to talk to lots of very less seasoned people. Yeah. And very quickly, I really believe that I'm visiting two different planets in what they believe, how they think. So one of the things that was very interesting is I'm about to go and give a talk in September to AARP, which you and I have long belonged to. You're telling me, Richard. You're just telling me. Yeah, so it's AARP. And one of the things that they, so they've asked me to talk about why the workplace should be more friendly for more seasoned people, which is what I've been writing.

13:16Yeah, we're talking about it. Why waste anything? Yeah. Right. So the idea really is that the, if you think about it, the seasoned people that, you know, we are, In addition to the fact that we might have crystallized intelligence, that we may have judgment, that we can learn the craft. The AI is not that difficult to learn. What may be hard is to build over years the judgment, the taste, all these things that people think is important. But as importantly, the people over 60 years old control about 70 percent of wealth in America. Yeah, we have Brett Rivard on from Geezer, and he was saying, this is a ginormous mistake marketers are making.

14:04Oh, it's a huge, huge mistake. And so what is basically happening is you have most marketers are in their late 30s to early 40s. Okay. Most of the money is over 60 years old. The 40 years old people want to basically become the 60 year old people without being 60 years old, have the power and money of these people. The people that they are guiding, which is Gen Z, think everything is bogus. So 22 % of them believe in capitalism. So what I'm basically seeing as a marketer, do you actually know where the money is or are you just following trends? That's number one. Number two, as a marketer, do you understand that this will be about systems and trusted differentiation versus storytelling?

14:57And the third one is I'm going to ask something, which is, if you want a provocative statement, I'm going to make a provocative statement, which is generalized, which means - I always expect this from you. So I'm going to give you a provocative statement, which basically is probably true in at least half the cases, but not 100%. But the fact that this is true in at least half, and if you get insulted by this half, it's not used, maybe someone else. But the half is that I believe that marketers have given up marketing. They've outsourced it. Okay. They've outsourced brand building to the influencers.

15:38Yeah. And what the influencers will do is they will use their money to build their own brand and then run away. Yeah. Okay. So if you think about in cosmetics, right, many of the new brands in cosmetics are built by influencers. Oh, yeah, a huge amount. A lot of brands just built completely by influencers. And then who then, by the way, then sell their brand to L 'Oreal. Yeah. Right? So basically, take your advertising budget, give it to an influencer, let them build a brand for you then pay them a multiple of that revenue to buy what you just built and then call yourself influencer marketer of the year.

16:22Bullshit. Right? So this is the problem our marketers have completely lost the track and let me ask one other thing about this and then you have a bunch of marketers that are performance marketing based fundamentally they're not into the storytelling they're at this logic thing but i think what you're saying is they're outsourcing the brand building and they're also managing only the bottom of the funnel yeah they only and so one of the things i also remind people and this was something that i learned in a podcast interview with the great sir john hegarty yeah so he told me something interesting he says Rishul, can you tell me, and I'm sure some of these exist, but can you tell me of a successful brand that is not a personal brand that was built just by online or bottom of the funnel marketing?

17:22Name me one, right? And I couldn't name him one because they lasted for a few months and then they all disappeared, right? Well, you know where a lot of this comes from is the Silicon Valley thing, which is I just aggregate a bunch of buyers. I build enough of a brand that I can sell this thing to somebody, but then that brand usually gets absorbed into something else. So I hear you on this. Yeah. And so in effect, what it basically is, is that I think that marketing broadly as defined by, yes, Philip Cutler, the late Philip Cutler was marketing is understanding and meeting customer requirements.

18:04That was his definition. Okay. That is more important than ever before because customers are more empowered than ever before. Right. And therefore marketing should be even more, more important than ever before. But I am a little scared sometimes that marketing might go down the route of HR in an AI age. So there was the, I was not invited. I did not go. but there's the big society of HR management thing that they had in Orlando. 20 ,000 people, Oprah Winfrey, right? They apparently closed down Hollywood studios for a night, all that stuff. Okay. And the big issue was, is that right now, AI is replacing a lot of HR.

18:53So HR jobs are down 25%. And some of the big AI companies like Meta, it's down 50 % to 60%. So my basic belief is if you automate, put the stuff out to influencers, someone's going to basically ask me, what the hell are you people doing? Why do we even need marketing? Okay, so what should people be? The other thing, the crisis in leadership, you're also showing a path forward where you're not minting leaders, you're minting executors. Yeah. What should people do out there to fight this? Well, there are a few things that I think people need to do. The first one is I think marketers should. We all need to do this.

19:45I do it. You do it. a dog named Bluetooth as it. But for instance, when I see LinkedIn these days, right, you know, you and I are promoting usually, here's our latest issue of our podcast. Here's some content, right? What we are not posting every 15 minutes is we are humbly speaking at some event and we're humbly doing this. Or, yes, I'm not posting, I drop my kids off at, you know. Whatever. But basically what's basically happened is there's such a degree of insecurity among marketers that we're perpetually marketing for our next gig. Okay. And as a result, we've completely lost the plot. You're painting a picture of marketers as insecure, incompetent, terrible leaders.

20:35No, no, no. We are not. What I'm basically saying is we're starting to show signs like that. Okay. Like we're starting to show signs like basically, oh, it's influencer. It's all about influencer. And by the way, we're going to AI it with efficiency and effectiveness. And my stuff is okay. Everything is being outsourced to either other people or technology. What do you do? Like the stuff is your boss is going to ask you, what the hell do you actually do? Right? And I've always basically said, can you go to your boss and say the following three things? Just do these three things. Forget about all this influencership.

21:10Forget about it. Okay. All right. So here are the three things. The first thing you want to basically say is, I know either my current or potential customer and what they want in really unique ways. So I understand current and future needs of people, which gives us a competitive advantage. Can you talk about that? Which is number one. Number two, I either have ideas or I have seen opportunities for us to create or buy a brand or an idea that will help us reimagine our business. Okay. So the best way of thinking about it is there was somebody who basically went to YouTube, I mean, went to Google and said, you should buy YouTube.

22:03Yeah. Okay. maybe it was Mark Zuckerberg who said, I need to go buy Instagram and WhatsApp. But that was because it was a direct competitor. But what Google and YouTube were, you know, sort of very, very sort of different. That's the second one, which is, can you help me reimagine my business? Can you tell me something about my customer? That's sort of very, very important. And third is, can you use your marketing stuff to attract and retain the very best talent, including converting the talent that is in the company to all being marketing megaphones? So I believe the world's best influencers are all the people who work inside a company.

22:40Why are you going outside all the time? Okay, like eat your own dog food. I mean, just go to their own people. But what's basically happening is marketers and brands have less credibility than an individual. And that's because brands are considered to be inauthentic and individuals are considered to be authentic. Right? And so if I will ask, you're a marketer, and we can't build a brand with authenticity, which is going to be more important in the world of trusted differentiation. You're a marketer. You cannot help me reimagine my category. You're just thinking of how to sell stuff cheaper. Right?

23:21And you're a marketer, and you aren't even allowing me to basically provide me with insights that completely change the way I think about my customer. Well, this goes to losing the plot, which is you may be doing an awful lot of what feels like work, but you're not writing a story for your company. You're writing a story for your company. You're not reimagining your company. You're just doing things. Because I want to make sure this is not two guys yelling, get off my lawn. No, no, no. It's not two guys. Look, I think so. Here's why I'm very optimistic. I'm optimistic because I think markets are going to be more important because customers are empowered.

24:03That's number one. Number two, if you look at the talent that's working in marketing, it's really, really good. Okay. But third is because of whether it's turnover, whether it's technology, whether it's like I got to be on LinkedIn with a press release every 15 minutes. Okay. The reality of it is many of the people are basically doing stuff which is copycat. Right. So I wrote a piece and it got a bunch of people on LinkedIn mad, literally. Okay. I know how bad they got. Well, I'm waiting for all the HR people to pile on and see a moco. So, but on LinkedIn, I basically said, so there's a famous novel called Madame Bovary by Flaubert.

24:48Oh, yeah. And there is a line where Emma Bovary, talking about her husband, Charles, basically says that his ideas are like walking on a well-trampled street. Everybody's walked around that street. So I basically said LinkedIn is like that. Everybody's repeating the same shit. It's the same idea, okay? So LinkedIn people are not happy. And I basically said, this thing is, half of it is written by bots. They said, not true. Now, guess what? The actual fact size, 42 % is written by bots, okay? So my whole stuff is, I can tell - By definition, that's average. And I have to say, this is the first time Madame Bovary has been referenced in over 125.

25:28Yes. So basically, I'm saying, LinkedIn, your stuff is bot-ridden, completely undefeated, self-loving shit. If it wasn't for the fact that you don't have any competition, you'd be out of business. I think at some stage, Microsoft will do to LinkedIn what they did to Xbox, put it out of its misery. Okay? And my own stuff is get real. And they're getting desperate. You should see the stuff now. You got five pages, CurvePress, spend more money to promote 20 pages. The thing has become like a cluttered hellscape. And this is where the marketing community meets often. Okay. If anybody from LinkedIn wants to call me, I'm available.

26:04So, yeah, it's one of those things. Look, they're very good people. This is a great company, but this is where it's a lack of leadership. What are we trying to do? Why are we trying to do it? And part of the leadership is if everyone's going left, maybe going right makes sense as long as it's not jumping over the cliff, right? So I've always basically asked, and I always ask every time I leave a meeting, can you tell me two things? I have two simple questions. So if it's a personal meeting, I say, can you leave a meeting where somebody basically believes that because I met with either Rashad or Mike or Amy or whatever, I have greater clarity on something?

26:44And the greater clarity could mean Rashad is stupid and now I know he's stupid after the conversation, but that's fine. Maybe you have greater clarity. You come out with greater energy or you have a greater belief in yourself, right? So my whole stuff is I don't try to write or post or have anything that doesn't do one of those. Gives the reader or the listener greater clarity, belief, or energy. That's number one. It's a very simple marketing rule. So leave your customer with greater clarity, belief or energy. Forget about anything else. That's another one. I got to flip this over because one, I got to move on to another question.

27:24You said AI is like hydrochloric acid burning through the containers of the past. Yeah. Tell me what you meant. Tell our listeners and me what you meant by that. Okay. So AI is like hydrochloric acid because if you think about AI agents, they basically plan on getting outcomes they ship outcomes they don't care about silos and processes they don't see the difference between upper funnel lower funnel marketing sales communication promotion everything's the same okay their whole stuff is what do you want you want to sell more shit right for this thing i'm going to go figure out how that gets done and i'll put together things in every particular way our organizations are delved around these divisions and silos.

28:11So my thing is, if you think about agents basically built on outcomes, if you think about the fact that in most organizations by the end of this decade, the majority of employees will either be fractionalized employees or agentic, and not full-time, part-time, or contract, right? I mean, full-time freelance or contract. And then if you think about a very simple fact, which I think also people have to sort of recognize that in effect, that because AI is driven by outcomes, the real struggle inside an organization is not technology. It's power politics and partnering. It's people issues. So look, this never shows up.

29:00I don't understand why people aren't talking enough about this. Now this time to talk about, but I saw it from day one. Every AI conversation is about who controls what. Give you an idea. No, I'm with you because one of the things that it might have been at your conference or on the show, somebody said AI lays your organization bare. And if your organization is fractured, it will lay a fractured organization bare. It will lay it bare completely. But in In fact, it is about that. So to give you sort of an idea, right now, one of the big, there are lots of fights going on, okay? But let me just think about this simple logic.

29:42What is the single biggest cost to an organization, a marketing organization? They tend to have the two biggest costs are talent and cost of goods, cost of materials, you know, whatever the product is made of, right? And then everything else. Okay. Increasingly, there's a new cost that is almost going to be more than cost of goods, but maybe less than the cost of talent, which is the cost of tokens. Okay. So in effect, an organization's top two costs would be human talent and alien talent. Because the alien talent is effectively paid by tokens. Yes. So alien is paid with energy and human talent is paid with money.

30:31Okay. So energy, why are tokens going here? Okay. So guess what? If I am the CFO of a company, I basically say my second largest cost now happened to be tokens, which are increasing. My other big cost is IT, which is spinning up these agents with tokens. Why shouldn't I merge my IT and HR department and give it to IT? Yeah, I'm going to have token ROI. And most of what IT and most of what HR now does is automated, you know, it's like, it's all this, you know, from hire to retire things that they do, all of it is machine. So the first thing is talent organizations and IT organizations either have to learn how to work together, fuse together, but definitely not fight because that will become a big sort of issue.