Rapid Response: Rana’s AI forecast for 2026, with Bob Safian

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1:37Hi, everyone. It's Rana. Hope you've been having a restful holiday break. The new year is just around the corner, and I've been thinking a lot about what 2026 has in store for AI. So I joined Bob Safian, host of the podcast Rapid Response, to talk about my AI predictions. On this episode, I'm in the hot seat, and I'm really excited to share it with you. Let's get into it. The thing I'm most excited about for 2026 is how AI can actually help us build deeper human connections and more meaningful human experiences. And the way this happens is through AI that can really help you organize your relationships and your network and surface connections that you need.

2:24Do you know the devil wears Prada? It was Anne Hathaway and she was with Miranda Meryl Streep at this gala. and this like guy and his partner were moving towards Miranda. And she was like, oh my God, it was this guy. And Anne like whispers in Miranda's ear. She's like, he's the ambassador and his new wife. And I was like, that's exactly what I need. I need an AI version of Anne Hathaway.

2:55That's Rana El-Kalubi, AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and host of the podcast Pioneers of AI. In today's episode, I talk with Rana about her predictions for AI in the year ahead, how the technology will evolve, its impact on our work and our everyday lives. We also dig into some big headlines surrounding AI, from whether there's an AI bubble to the battle between OpenAI and Google. Rana cuts through the clutter, illuminating key challenges, as well as harnessing joy and excitement for what's to come. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

3:38I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Dr. Rana El-Khalyubi, AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor at Blue Tulip Ventures, and host of the terrific podcast, Pioneers of AI. Rana, great to talk with you. Yeah, great to see you again, Bob. You are yourself a pioneer of AI as a researcher, as a founder, an expert in emotion AI, the relationship we have with technology. I'm curious because 2025 has felt like this tipping point in the mainstreaming of AI. For someone like you who's sort of been doing this for so long, is it odd that AI is suddenly the center of every conversation or is it kind of finally? I think there's a bit of finally for sure.

4:21but it's kind of like there's definitely some of us who are OGs in this space and have been around for a while and then there's all these newcomers sometimes without a lot of basis so there's definitely you know like mixed emotions but you know the thing that strikes me the most I just got back from Fortune Brainstorm AI conference I co-chair the conference I've been doing this for the last five years and I had this on-stage interview with three amazing both kind scientists and entrepreneurs who have straddled both the world of academia and industry in AI. And it struck me that just over the last decades, the power shift has moved from all the breakthroughs happening in academia to happening in industry.

5:05That was a really kind of thought-provoking conversation. Like, have we stopped innovating in AI in the academic circles? Well, there's so much money going into the industry side of it, right? The resources are there. Right. And a lot of the building of especially the AI infrastructure is very compute intensive and it's quite expensive. I think what struck me from this conversation was that, yes, a lot of the LLMs we use today are industry generated and they're kind of shipped and published through industry. But to create real breakthroughs or the next breakthroughs in AI, we really need a strong academic industry partnerships and we need to reimagine what those relationships look like.

5:54So I thought that was really telling. I don't think the real scientific breakthroughs will come from industry alone. That's where your background was, was academic research. And I guess there's a different way of approaching it when your priority isn't how you're going to monetize it. Absolutely. You need to be able to think about these long-term big moonshots without it having to map to a kind of a business model or a commercialization plan in the short term. So, Ronna, I'm really eager to ask you about your ideas about what we should expect for AI in 2026, if you're game to talk about that. I'd also love to start maybe by asking you some updates about things that happened in 2025.

6:38Let's do it. All right. So let's start with the biggest headline, really, which is whether there's an AI bubble. You've asked guests and pioneers of AI about this. Is today's AI obsession, has it become kind of a craze? Are valuations out of whack? Like, where are we sitting? Yeah, I think there's definitely some craziness going on. There's like crazy valuations. There's a bunch of companies that are raising, you know, seed rounds without like a product, without customers at these crazy valuations. But I also think at the same time, it's still very early days. And the way, as you know, I invest in early stage AI startups, so I've had to think a lot about this.

7:22The way I see it is that AI is basically creating this massive structural shift in how value is created. And we're moving from this idea of a software as a service to service a software. And to just simplify it, instead of selling you a tool that will help you do your job, I don't know, 10 percent or 20 percent faster, AI can just get the job done. So instead of, I don't know, selling a law firm, a tool that helps its lawyers become more efficient, you just sell an AI lawyer. And we're seeing this shift in business model, which actually means that we're expanding the TAM for AI. So we're not just disrupting the software industry, we're actually disrupting the services industry and the labor market.

8:09It's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, which is very exciting. And I think a lot of people don't realize that. And that's why I don't think it's a true, true bubble. I mean, I hear from the guests on my show this sort of back and forth between like, oh, my gosh, I got to get a piece of this. And at the same time, this sort of anxiety that like, if I spend on this, I'm not really sure what my ROI is going to be yet. And they're sort of caught between like, I don't want to fall behind, but I also don't want to waste money. Yeah, I think there will be, unfortunately, money wasted. Again, whether you are a company that's leaning into AI or an investor that's investing in AI, I think there will be some collateral damage here.

8:57But I also think that's what happens when you're exploring a new innovation anyway, right? You're going to take a risk. And sometimes these risks will pan out. Sometimes they won't. I try to channel my MIT Media Lab kind of days. And the framework there is even if you fail, in quote, because we never called anything a failure, you learn. And I think it's important to lean in and learn. Another headline I want to ask you about, the horse race between AI chatbots. We've seen like Google's Gemini come on strong against OpenAI's chat GPT and Sam Altman at OpenAI calling it a code red. I actually think these chatbots are very quickly becoming commoditized.

9:39You know, I think they're being trained on very similar data sets. The algorithms are kind of the same. There might be kind of differences at the fringes. So, for example, you know, the new Gemini slash Nano Banana Pro is really good at image generation in a way that ChatGPT isn't quite yet, although I just read today that they just released a new version. So I've got to try that. But there was this really interesting study that my son shared with me, and it's called the artificial hive mind, where these group of researchers studied how similar or different the different models are. And by and large, they're kind of the same.

10:16I mean, I've seen this headline this week about someone using AI for dynamic pricing, right? Instacart, I guess, that is testing it. Like the price of everything may shift in the future, like airline tickets. Is this, do you look at this as like good, bad, inevitable, sort of this is just one of the AI implications that we're going to have? I have mixed emotions about that one because, first of all, I don't actually think you needed like the new version of AI to do dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing has been around like algorithmically for a long time. something feels really like cringy about dynamic pricing for just our groceries right something doesn't sound quite right about that but if you think about it there's dynamic every time you take a Lyft or an Uber that's dynamic pricing every time you book a flight it's dynamic pricing so there's a lot of precedent and I don't know how we decide what is okay to price dynamically and what is not.

11:21I think that does introduce a lot of potential discrimination and biases, unfortunately. Who can be taken advantage of by the dynamic pricing, right? The AI will get better at knowing who it can poach more. Exactly. There have also been headlines about personal relationships with AI chatbots, mental health therapy, romance, concerns about suicides and other bad choices. I'm curious how much you saw all this coming. I mean, your personal mission has been to humanize technology, but right now it seems like the tech is almost too human sometimes or addictive, I guess, especially for those in need, even if it's not really human.

12:03You know, I heard, I think it was Yuval Harari who said this. He said the last decade was a race for human attention and the next decade will be a race for human intimacy. And you can I kind of already see that with a lot of these AI companions slash friends. They are trying to not just grab your attention, but build this intimate relationship with you. And I worry about that. I worry about that as a mom of a teenager. I believe that a lot of companies who are building these kind of companions and friends, to our point about building guardrails, are not prioritizing guardrails at all. They're just maximizing for time on the platform or time with your AI friend.

12:44that's very dangerous. I'm all for AI that can augment our human connections, but not take away from our human relationships. And I think that happens by these platforms putting guardrails in all sorts of ways. Why should you be able to converse with your chatbot for five hours in a row? It should two hours in, it should say, Bob, enough, like go talk to a real human being. But the companies aren't incentivized to do that. Let's look ahead to 2026. You sent me some fascinating thoughts about AI's sort of next phase impact on business. And I'd love to take you through them. The first one was the rise of what you called relationship intelligent AI.

13:30So, you know, everybody's worried that AI is going to make us less human and take away kind of our human to human connections. We just talked about that. There is definitely a risk of that. But I think the thing I'm most excited about for 2026 is how AI can actually help us build deeper human connections and more meaningful human experiences. And the way this happens is through AI that can really help you organize your relationships and your network and surface connections that you need and maybe make warm introductions to you. I love connecting with people, but my relationship data is a mess.

14:08It's all in my brain. Some of it is in LinkedIn, some of it on WhatsApp. I take a lot of notes when I meet new people. And I use an AI note taker. It's just a mess. It's very disparate data sources. And I always think of this scene. And do you know The Devil Wears Prada? Have you seen that movie? Oh, that's exactly what I was thinking of. The characters are kind of whispering in your ear. Exactly. It was Anne Hathaway. And she was with Miranda Meryl Streep at this gala. and this like guy and his partner were moving towards Miranda. And she was like, oh my God, who's this guy? And Anne like whispers in Miranda's ears.

14:43She's like, he's the ambassador and his new wife. And I was like, that's exactly what I need. I need an AI version of Anne Hathaway. And it's now doable with LLMs because it's all this unstructured, messy data that an AI can take all of that, contextualize it and hopefully kind of be that AI chief of staff for you. Is that like a product? Is that something that you would have to do to turn your chatbot, your whatever, your Claude or your ChatGPT into that? Or is it a new products that you think are going to come out that will make that easy for you? There are already a number of new companies that are starting in this space.

15:26So one company is called Via AI. It's a Boston-based company. They do this for sales professionals and BD professionals, So I have to do this for their work. There's a company called Goodword that I'm very excited about. They're doing this for just like the average person like you and I. Like we have very strong networks, but how can we organize it? So I'm excited about that one. There's a company called Bordy that does this for investors and founders. So it's becoming a thing. And I'm excited to see how these companies take off in 2026. They're all fairly new. So it'll be interesting to see how they evolve.

16:01Yeah. And whether they can stay ahead of some of the bigger chatbots that may just try to integrate some of this capability into the products they already have. Right. That's always the case in this kind of evolution of technology is what's a feature and what's a company. Right. What's an independent service. Absolutely. And that's a lot of the like when I'm looking at these companies and I'm diligencing them, that's a key question that I ask. Like, is this something that the next version of ChatGPT or Gemini is just going to implement? And if the answer is yes, then that's obviously not a defensible company.

16:40But a lot of the times there's this additional like moat of data and algorithms that you need to sit on top of these LLMs. And I believe in this relationship intelligence space. I don't think this is something that just a kind of an off-the-shelf LLM can do. It really needs to know you, right? It needs to know your data. It needs to know your relationships. And you have to trust it enough to share it with that, all that data with it, right? Absolutely. That's your proprietary data, whether it's about your business or about you individually. Exactly. And I don't want this to all go up to OpenAI's cloud, right?

17:18I want to trust that I have control over these like really private relations. Like if you and I have a conversation about our kids, I don't necessarily want that to now sit in a general, you know, open AI cloud and be used to train the next chat GPT. So that safety and security, appreciating the privacy and the importance of this data is really key. Like many things in life, the more we put into AI models, the more we'll get out of them. Still, I'm not quite sure I trust enough to upload my Rolodex and network details into a GPT just yet. As Rana says, that could change in 2026. So what else is she predicting AI for the year ahead?

18:00We'll get into AI's next infiltration of the workplace, as well as what she calls physical AI, after the break. Stay with us.

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19:05AI. Let's dive back in. Another business change you expect in 2026 is the insertion of AI into the org chart. This is about who manages AI, like performance reviews and team culture impacts. Yeah, so this goes back to this thesis that there's this shift in how AI is creating value, and it's not a tool anymore. Well, it is a tool. It'll always be a tool, but it's not a tool that helps you get work done faster. It could actually take an end-to-end task and get it done for you. And I'll give a few examples. So I'm an investor in a company called SynfPop. And instead of building a tool that helps healthcare administrators accelerate or like really become efficient in how they do patient intake, It just takes the task of patient intake.

20:00It does the thing end to end. And so if you then imagine what that means for a hospital or a clinic, it will have a combination of human workers collaborating and working closely with AI co-workers. And so then the question becomes, well, who manages these hybrid teams? Sometimes it's a human manager. Sometimes it's an AI manager. I'm also an investor in a company called Tough Day, and they sell you AI managers. And then how do you do performance reviews for these hybrid teams? How do you build a culture? Like at Affectiva, my company, culture was our superpower. How do you build a culture when some of your team members are AI and some of your team members are humans?

20:44So I think that is going to spur a lot of conversation around how do you build organizations that are combinations of digital agents and human employees? Yeah, well, and it's interesting, this sort of team culture, as you talk about Affectiva. I think a lot of businesses have felt that their culture is one of their competitive advantages, distinctive features. And yet, if you're taking, if more and more of your jobs are being done by AIs and those AIs are, those agents are sort of off the shelf, like, how do you make your culture differentiated or integrate that agent, that AI into your culture?

21:25Exactly. And my prediction is we've already seen that actually with this company, Tough Day, that sells AI managers. Their first client was the state of Hawaii. It was the Hawaii Employer Association. And this company is based in New York and a lot of their, you know, it was trained. The Hawaiians basically said, this sounds like very New York. We need more aloha spirit. So they actually had to go back and collect data from like, you know, the Hawaiian like customer employee conversations and use that to train their AI. So I think we're going to see more and more of these AIs and AI agents become customizable to a certain culture or to represent certain values of a company.

22:11As you talk about sort of this, you know, merging of AI agents and humans in work, I mean, it brings up that looming question about the impact of AI on jobs and employment. And, you know, there's some numbers that are coming out now that make it seem like, oh, it's bad for jobs. There are other numbers coming out that's like, oh, we're actually hiring more people because of it. Like, do you have a prediction about sort of what is going to happen with that in 2026? Is AI going to take over roles that have been done by humans that quickly? We had a really fascinating roundtable discussion at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference.

22:51And the headline was like, is AI killing entry-level jobs? And actually, a lot of the Fortune companies and also AI companies that were around the table were basically saying, no, we're hiring more kind of entry-level jobs. They're just not the same jobs that we were traditionally seeing. And also the career ladders have changed too. So my prediction is we're going to see an entirely different organization where I think if you are able to come in an entry-level position, for example, but work very closely with AI and be AI native and be AI fluent and be able to wear multiple hats, I think that's going to go a long way.

23:35as opposed to this like very silo job trajectory where you come in, this is your little task and then you like do more of it and then you go up the career ladder. I think that's gonna change. I think young people are looking for different ways of working and I think AI is changing all of that anyway. Will there be jobs that will go away? I think so. I can't remember who said this line, but it's now very popular, right? Like it's not AI that's gonna take your job. it's going to be somebody who knows how to use AI. And I believe that to be true. Another prediction for 2026 you've shared was that memory will be the new AI moat.

24:15You're not talking about memory like RAM, right? Like computer memory. You're talking about generative AI having a memory like a human. So understanding context differently? Yes, exactly. So because these LLMs are basically becoming commoditized and sounding the same and kind of, you know, yeah, presenting information in very similar ways. I think what's going to be different is, is how much does it know about you? How much does, how much context does it know about you? Does it know your preferences, your emotional state, your history? And right now, all these LLMs, their concept of memory is very naive.

24:56It's just like basically a memory dump of every single conversation you've had with, say a chat GPT, which is fine. It's actually already sticky. I had a problem with logging into my chat GPT a while ago, and I was trying to get somebody at OpenAI to help with that. And they basically said, oh, like the only solution is you've got to start from scratch. Just like forget about this account, sign up with a different email. And I totally freaked out. I was like, are you guys kidding me? It's like three years of conversation. I am not doing that in any way, they fixed it, thank goodness. But that was an aha moment for me because I cared so deeply about the history of these conversations that I was not ready to just, the switching cost is really high.

25:41And we're going to start to see more and more of that, not just at the LLM level, but at the solution and product level. So products that are able to really thoughtfully convert your conversations and your history within AI into an understanding of who you are and your preferences and personalized, you know, recommendations and whatnot, that's going to be very sticky. And it's going to turn, you know, AI into a trusted co-pilot. And the moat, I guess, as you're talking about it, you're giving this example about yourself, like you're not going to switch from ChatGPT to somewhere else if you've got three years worth of memory in there.

26:24Unless that's something you could pour it over. But I don't even know how you necessarily could do that. So what that means is you're kind of making a decision now as to whether am I going to be a perplexity person? Am I going to be a Gemini person? And then once that has your memory, that's where you are. Right. I think, I mean, again, I use several tools, But chat GPT definitely has most of like it has a lot of my personal stuff. It has a lot of my professional stuff. And I don't know what. Yeah, there's no way to port it to other systems at the moment. And that is a key consideration in my decision around which of these models to use.

27:11I do think, however, I've, you know, as you know, I studied memory for many years and there is a close interaction between memory and your emotional experience. And I'm excited to see companies implement some of these more sophisticated models of memory into AI. So right now, it's just a flat history of all your sessions. But memory is weighted on importance. You know, it's okay to prune memories. We definitely do that as humans, and that's a good thing. Yeah, some things we don't want to remember, right? Right. We just want to like delete. And it's kind of, you know, a lot of these frameworks don't exist in AI today.