2026
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2026: The Year We Stop Blaming the Tools
Here’s a hard truth we’re going to have to face in 2026: sometimes the bottleneck isn’t the technology, it’s us.
I’ve been thinking about how we use tools, how we find the merit in their use. We have access to increasingly powerful tools, but their value depends entirely on our understanding of them.
A hammer is useless if you don’t know which end to hold. The same goes for AI assistants, automation frameworks, and the growing ecosystem of agentic systems.
The rapid adoption of tools like OpenClaw’s agentic assistant tells me something important: people and companies are starting to see the real potential in building autonomous systems. Not just as toys or experiments, but as genuine productivity multipliers. That’s a shift from where we were even a year ago.
I think 2026 will be the year we see more widespread adoption of genuinely useful tools. The Gartner hype cycle is really interesting and how it applies or doesn’t to AI adoption, but I won’t cover it here. I’d like to write more about that in future articles.
The companies that build genuinely useful tools will be the ones that survive. They’ll be the ones that understand the value of tools and how to use them effectively. They’ll be the ones that embrace the future of work, where humans and machines work together to achieve more.
It’s not about replacing humans. It’s about humans getting better at wielding the tools we’ve built. That’s always been how technology works. This time is no different.
/ AI / Tools / automation / 2026