There is a dangerous disconnect between the people creating AI products and services and those who will be using them. I have seen little or no evidence that the executive teams at leading AI firms care much about CIOs and their 2026 agendas.
CIOs are on the sidelines — actually, they aren’t even in the parking lots of the arenas where the decisions regarding the AI-heavy digital futures of our enterprises, our children, and their children are being made.
What are we going to do about this?
The new paradigm
CIOs aren’t the only ones locked out of the Star Chambers where generation-defining digital decisions are being made. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the world is in the back seat of a rapidly accelerating AI rocket ship with absolutely no input regarding where that rocket ship is heading. We — society — need to pay much more attention to what is going on.
In 2025, 80% of the “Word of the Year” results were digital in nature:
- Dictionary.com: 6-7
- Merriam-Webster: Slop
- Collins: Vibe coding
- Oxford: Rage Bait
- Cambridge: Parasocial
Subconsciously we all know we are living in a digital world. Rather than passively consuming and paying for suspiciously opaque “AI enhancements” to existing product and service sets, it is time we start proactively weighing in on the design and functionality of the technologies that shape our lives. In 2026 the word of the year has to be “agency.”
What agency really means in the AI era
I believe one of the metrics CIOs should use to guide the $5 to $6 trillion we will spend this year on enterprise computing should be what input we had into the design of the products and services we are buying. On the micro level, how much are CIOs investing in creating AI skill sets internal to the organization?
The path to AI agency — rather than agentic AI — begins with CIOs endeavoring mightily to get at least 50% of the workforce actively vibe coding by the third quarter of 2026. One of the directional truths of the AI juggernaut is that we are evolving from using AI to “search” and to “answer” to using AI to perform actual tasks. If you’ve never programmed, you can type into a text box and see what happens. Today, anyone can ship an app. By putting workers hands on AI tools, we can exploit AI’s “capability overhang” — University of Pennsylvania Professor Ethan Mollick’s term for the many new things existing AI can do that were “unknown until users discovered them.”
Big Tech is not designing solutions to our problems. At CES 2026, did anyone see anything that specifically addressed a Top 10 CIO problem? How many instances of AI addressing verifiable customer pain have you bumped into?
For the man-on-the-street, for the worker who is not vibe coding today AI is becoming more of a bug, than a feature.
The state of the IT economy
No one can argue that AI is making those at the tippy top of the tech hierarchy crazy rich. A select group of hyper-wealthy individuals “are profiting wildly off the AI revolution — through exclusive access to private deals, massive investment power, governmental connections, and equity stakes “normal” investors can’t touch,” Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen recently concluded. What is AI doing for the rest of us?
Is AI crowding out investments in other technologies that might actually make our lives better? The money being pumped into data centers at OpenAI alone (Project Stargate) is enough to fund the Manhattan Project 15 times over or the entire Apollo moon project twice!
People across broad categories of economic circumstance fear what AI will do to their jobs. A Goldman Sachs Research report forecast an AI job apocalypse not so extensive that “humans may go the way of horses”, but significant enough that 25% of all work hours could be automated.
One of the most popular New Year’s Resolutions for 2026 was materially decreasing the time one spends with technology.
That’s not a good sign.
Local communities are organizing against AI data centers in an effort to prevent increases in electric utility bills. How long will consumers — whose spending constitutes more than two-thirds of the overall US economy — continue to buy AI-enhanced products designed without their input?
Researchers at Forrester forecast that 2026 is the year AI trades in its tiara for a hard hat. For this to happen the rest of us are going to have to put our hands on AI shovels and start digging.
Only then will we develop the insight to send meaningful demand signals to AI product and service creators.
See also:
Read More from This Article: CIOs must reclaim agency over our AI future
Source: News
