5 Business Trends Every Owner Needs to Know Right Now (2026)

If you're not going all in and, and, and building these systems to create content for your business, then you're actually going opposite of the trend that is happening right now in 2026. And data centers are coming in all around the state and beyond. And so people are concerned, housing costs are going up. There's a flood of an extra like 15,000 people, probably more, come in to this smaller town. You have to be putting yourself out there to make yourself visible for your clients and your ideal clients because there's already people who are wanting to buy from you. You just haven't make— made yourself known. Brand Builders Podcast. Today's episode is sponsored by Empire Management Group. Whether you are a business owner looking to improve employee benefits, strengthen your insurance coverage, grow your sales, develop your leadership team, or build long-term wealth, Empire Management Group provides practical solutions all under one roof. That's right, their team helps businesses attract and retain top talent, improve operations, and create sustainable growth. Plus, through premier partnerships like Aflac, they offer career opportunities for individuals looking to make an impact in their community. Learn more at empire-management-group.com. Let's get to the episode. Welcome back to the Brand Builders Podcast. I'm your host, Daron Pacheco. In today's episode, it's gonna look a little bit different. I wanted to actually pull in some stories and some news articles of things going on in the content world, things going on in the business world, and just to keep you up to date because I have to be up to date to keep up with everything that's going on. And so let's go ahead and get right into it. I hope that if you're watching this, you're a business owner and that you find some value outta today's episode. We don't have a guest today, it's just me, so Let's get into it. It's me and the stories. The first thing I wanted to cover is the creator economy just hit $250 billion. The projected estimates is actually $528 billion by the year 2030, and that's only a few years away. And so we're talking about doubling these numbers. And what is the creator economy? This is the content creator like you and I. If you post a video, you're a creator. The money going towards that sector of the market so that these companies can advertise their products on these people's platforms is going up significantly. And the reason that is, is because it is so effective. If somebody can garnish a whole audience full of your ideal client, you as a business owner are probably gonna wanna pay some money to get your product in front of their audience, which is huge. It's a huge opportunity for businesses and for creators. And so this has never happened before ever. I mean, within the last few years, this has really, really, really exploded and people have been saying it's gonna happen for the last 20 years, but we're finally seeing it actually become very influential in the economy. And so we're at $250 billion right now. So 200 million people call themselves a content creator. And when you, when you zoom out and see there's 5 billion people on social media every single month, that's really not that much. And so the, the window is wide open for you to hop on and start creating content if you haven't already. So 200 million people out of 5 billion, it's a very, very small percentage. Um, 50 million. Are professional or semi-professional, meaning that you get paid in some sort of way to create that content, whether it's through commission, through affiliate, through flat fees, whatever that looks like. 50 million of them, 50 million of them are getting paid. Creator revenue is up 16.2% this year alone. It's a great, great stat there. So basically to sum it up, if you're not going all in and building these systems to create content for your business, then you're actually going opposite of the trend that is happening right now in 2026. And AI and everything is disrupting this market a little bit, but I don't think that's going to slow it down. I think it's actually going to increase the value of real creators because everybody's going to be so sick and tired of seeing this AI slop. We'll talk about AI more here in a little bit. Next thing I wanted to talk about, short-form video is basically the whole internet right now. And we can thank TikTok in 2020 for starting this movement. So on YouTube Shorts, there are 200 billion daily views, 200 billion eyeballs on the content. on YouTube Shorts. So like this is people that are binge watching content all day long. They're just on YouTube Shorts. I want to believe that they surpassed TikTok recently on the amount of viewership. And so YouTube isn't going anywhere, guys. YouTube is not going anywhere. They're the grandfather of content. If you're not on YouTube, get on YouTube right now. The leverage is huge, especially for business owners like you. Yeah. So 50% of the engagement is under 60 seconds right now. So they're watching short videos, like videos over 60 minutes get only 17% retention rate and engagement versus these Shorts, which get 50% of engagement. And so short form obviously is a very hot topic right now and everybody's trying to do short form. Anybody that we help or we consult, we only do short-form content for certain industries. There are industries where we want to go long-form and building personal brands, like starting a podcast. Like, this is me building my personal brand. And so I want to spend as much time as possible with you, the viewer. That's uncut, that's unpolished. And so this is going to build the most trust between me and you. And hopefully I can bring some sort of value to you your life and your business. And so even if we never work together, I want your business to grow. I want your organization to prosper and to use these things that we're talking about, content creation, social media, to grow your business because I want to see everybody win. There's no reason everybody shouldn't be winning right now in 2026. Here in Abilene, Texas, this has become a very —controversial topic because we have these AI data centers coming in and basically it's caused a whole shift in the dynamic of the city, of the state. Now data centers are coming in all around the state and beyond. And so people are concerned, housing costs are going up. There's a flood of an extra like 15,000 people, probably more, come in to this smaller town. And so it's freaking everybody out. So everybody has a bad taste in their mouth about AI, about online things, digital people, or we call them the AI people around here. And it's like, it's funny 'cause it's like they're not an actual artificial intelligence person, but everybody calls them the AI people. So I'm like, are these guys robots just walking around or what? But it's causing a stir. And so, people around Abilene just kind of want to— we're kind of wanting to refuse it. I'm on the opposite side of that. I'm wanting to implement more of it because as a small business owner, you should be thrilled about this stuff, especially with it being in our backyard. Like, that is crazy to say here in Abilene, Texas. But the fact that they are pouring that much money into it just shows that— it's gonna be very, very influential over the next decades, maybe centuries. We'll see what happens. But it's because it's so useful. Like, it's not perfect, and I think it's overrated in a lot of areas, this AI thing. But there are areas where, at least I've seen personally, it's significantly saved us, like, thousands of dollars in editing fees. It caught a bunch of subscriptions that I didn't even know about. It acted as my CFO. There's a lot of things that it can help you with in running systems. You can now build agents who think on their own. Basically, you train them and they think on their own. And so there's good and there's bad things that come alongside this because once it's so integrated and if something goes wrong in your business, that becomes— Yeah. A very large legal issue, a liability for the business. And so you gotta be careful with it. Obviously right now at least you have to be super careful with it. And in 5 years I may be having a complete, I don't know, I will be having a completely different conversation about this stuff. AI is everywhere. Most small businesses still are not. Using it here in Abilene. If you're an Abilene or Big Country or West Texas business owner and you're not using AI or you're not using social media, like 8 times outta 10, those are the businesses that I end up having to help get off the ground because they're not getting any leads from anywhere. They're not really doing any marketing because it's been word of mouth for so long. Mm-hmm. Which is fantastic. Word of mouth, you cannot beat word of mouth referrals. But if you want to grow anything, you have to be putting yourself out there to make yourself visible for your clients and your ideal clients because there's already people who are wanting to buy from you. You just haven't made yourself known. Trust is the foundation of every single great business. And the Better Business Bureau exists to protect that. So the Better Business Bureau helps consumers find businesses they can trust, offers scam prevention resources, and supports local business owners through accreditation, networking, education, and visibility opportunities. Brittany Brown, she's the CEO. She's been serving the big country and she says— Strong communities are built by strong businesses. Whether you're trying to grow your business or make a smarter purchasing decision, the Better Business Bureau is in your corner. Visit BBB.org to learn more. And so if you can do this, this is going to be a game changer for your business. 94%, um, project growth in 2026 for AI projects. Only 1 in 5 firms or businesses use AI currently. And so with that much business growth, We got to learn how to use this stuff. And this is me included. Like, I am studying every single day to try and keep up because right now with how fast things are moving, it feels like you, you can't keep up. And so what I've done is actually use AI to help me keep up. So this is a little life hack and you could do this with anything. Say you use ChatGPT or Claude. These are the basic, like, general AI assistant type of platforms. You can schedule prompts to go out every single day. So if you say something like, "Hey, at 8:00 AM every single day, I need you to research everything in this specific industry. Give me all the facts and most up-to-date knowledge that you have so that I can be well prepared moving forward every single day and stay up to date in my business without having to research it all myself. And so every day at 8:00 AM, you'll receive a fully prepared document with all of this information that's going to brief you, that's going to summarize everything. It does the research for you and you can stay up to date. So that's a little life hack. You can do that with anything, writing emails, updating your calendar. anything. The day, the days of having a virtual assistant overseas are over. AI has completely taken that role from the virtual assistants that we used to hire for $6 an hour overseas. Now it's significantly cheaper. It's $20 a month, $19 a month. So if you haven't started paying for it, you might consider paying for it because a $20 employee that can do this much is— Yeah. Kind of crazy. Kind of crazy. Okay, let's keep moving on. Authenticity is beating polish. AI-looking content is losing. So this AI content, like I was talking about earlier, this AI slop, it's been coined AI slop, which is very funny to me. But if you think about it, there's so many people who are posting hundreds of AI clips every single day just to get views. And so they're view farming and they're not really building anything other than trying to get monetized and trying to bring in revenue from these companies like YouTube and Facebook and Meta. So where I think this is gonna take a turn for the creators is there's gonna be less and less people who legitimately know how to create content, at least good content. And so if you can be one of these people, your leverage is going to be exactly that. It's going to be the authenticity because there's a lot of people— Mm-hmm. AI is great, it's fantastic, but there's a lot of people who are still terrified to use it. They don't want to support it. And so they would much rather find an expert human and pay them, which for a lot of things that is still very true, very, very true. And so you're gonna actually have this leverage over the AI content is you're gonna actually be human, as ironic as that sounds, but you're gonna be able to build genuine relationships with the people that you're engaging with online. And so— All right. Authenticity is going to be the new oil. Meaning if you can remain authentic and be yourself online and not use AI, there's gonna be a factor and a large number of people that prefer that. I just think about calling some of these businesses who have AI assistants or secretaries or whatever. They're cool in theory, but they're often annoying to use because they don't always understand fully the context of your situation or can determine exactly what you need. They're getting better, but it's just still so annoying and it feels really like there's no soul behind the conversation. It's purely transactional. And so they're just there to basically analyze what you're saying and try to decide what to do from that point forward, which is, insane that we're talking about this right now, but at the same time, human to human will never go away. I think we're never gonna get rid of that connection and there's nothing gonna be more pure than that. So let's keep moving on. Podcast hosts are the most trusted influencer in the game. I love this. I love this. Because I'm a big podcast fan. I listen to so many podcasts. I do this podcast. I produce multiple podcasts. Me and my team produce it for so many people around here in the big country. And I had a cool moment. Me and my wife were watching Netflix yesterday and we pulled up the different categories because you can look at the different categories of like movies, TV shows, or type of movies, adventure, comedy. Yeah. And the first thing that popped up on the list were podcasts on Netflix. And these are podcasts that people are filming in their houses. Like, they're not even super high-scale production or anything. They just breed authenticity. And so that was a cool moment yesterday whenever I saw Netflix having podcasts on their platform. And there's been 100— 100. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the podcasting industry for people who can garnish an audience. And so this is just where everything is going. And you even think about the transition from audio podcasting to video podcasting. Like it has now turned into a full-fledged like TV show. Like you're sitting down having a conversation with a friend for a whole entire hour, 2 hours, 3 hours. Some of them have podcasts that are 10 hours long, 8 hours long, like Jocko, which is insane. But there are people who will watch every single minute of it. And you think, why is that? We would never sit down and watch an 8-hour-long movie unless you're like an uber fan of that thing. But there's more and more of this happening. And the rise of smart TVs, this is also helping the industry. Yeah. And so people go home, they turn on their TV, they see the YouTube app pop up, it's free, they don't have to pay for the subscription if they don't want to, and they can watch podcast after podcast after podcast and conversations and just learn and, and feel like you're in the room having a real connection with somebody. This is why podcasting is going up. This is now a $34 billion industry, which is just glorified radio shows. Like, people who are on radio, if they throw up a camera and start an online version of what they're doing already, the views are gonna skyrocket because people wanna watch this stuff. So 56% of weekly podcast listeners say podcast hosts are the influencer type that matters most, more than Instagram or YouTube stars. Yeah. Influencer marketing returns $5.78 for every dollar invested. So that's crazy. The return is huge. And like I said, like it's authenticity that wins. And these short-form content creators who make 5-second videos, 10-second videos, you can get a lot of views, but that doesn't necessarily always convert into a lot of followers. I had a video recently, hit a million views on Instagram. I think I got maybe 10 followers from that. And so it's funny, it's creating brand awareness. Everybody saw my Howdy Media hat and everybody saw my profile, but the conversion to followers and business was like hardly anything. As opposed to this with the podcast, like I've already made made significantly more money with the small podcast that I have, funneling people to the business, being the podcast being the business with sponsorships. I've made significantly more impact and monetary dollars through the podcast because if you can sit here and talk for an hour about a certain topic or thing, then people are going to start to trust what you have to say. And so hopefully, the more you watch this stuff and the more interesting people that I bring on, the more value that you get from it. So huge industry. If you've never thought about starting a podcast, but it's hitting you right now as you watch this and it's like maybe now is the time to do it and you don't know where to start, send me a DM on Instagram and let's start a conversation because that's exactly what we do. Even if you don't live around here in Abilene and wanna use a studio, you can either fly in to do that, or I can coach you and go to you and build a set for you. Whatever you want to do, let me know. Let's move on. We're almost done here. Big tech is betting everything on AI infrastructure. So SpaceX is now entering the chat. SpaceX just completed a $70.5 billion IPO, partly to fund space-based AI data centers. I've been hearing rumors about this. But they're going to do it, which is crazy to me. We're going to have AI data centers in space, which goes into my mind because I have a background in real estate as well. It's like, do you have to pay to lease space? Who owns space? We haven't really gone there. And so I guess it's technically free. The first person to discover an island in the middle of the ocean that was uninhabited Do they just get it for free? Probably. They just put a setup camp. And so we're gonna do this same thing in space, which is absolutely crazy. And there's so much that goes into that. Google raised $80 billion to do something similar. Microsoft is pushing AI agents into everyday computing. The AI race isn't about chatbots, it's about infrastructure. Yeah. So Microsoft, they're also kind of in the AI game. I wouldn't consider them to be leading it by any means, but they are definitely keeping up and staying on par with the others. I've heard a lot of people who use it, I don't personally use any of their AI products. I hear a lot of the users, they're kind of like iffy about it. They're not real sure that they like it yet. Google is crushing it. Claude with Anthropic is crushing it. And ChatGPT has been consistent this whole time. And recently they've come out with some updates that are crazy too. But that's pretty much all I had for you guys today. I just wanted to bring some updates and some things that are happening right now in the world because I want you to stay up to date in order to best utilize the things that you need to utilize for your business. There's so many things. And if you feel overwhelmed, if you feel like this is just too much and you don't know how to get started or what to do, or you want somebody to partner with you in your business with this type of thing, please, please, please reach out to me. Yeah. Let's set up a meeting, let's set up a call because this is the type of thing that you cannot, you can't skip over. You can't just ignore it because it's going to be so influential in everyday life, which it already is starting. And like, if you've never used Claude, go try and talk to Claude and ask it to do a task for you. And If you can't figure out what to ask, tell it what you're wanting and say, "Hey, if I want to get this done, what do I need to prompt you to make it happen?" And then copy and paste. Like, use AI to learn how to use AI. There's so many courses, it cracks me up. There's so many courses right now who, they're charging quite a bit of money. And I'm not saying courses are bad or anything like that, but— Yeah. They're charging quite a bit of money to teach people how to use AI. There's a free resource as of right now, as I'm recording this video, Anthropic has out, which is the company that created Claude. They have a free course that anybody can take. You just sign up with your email, it's free. You go through all the videos and I went through some of 'em and it's pretty, great explaining the use cases, how to structure a prompt, how to connect your different platforms and tools, 'cause you can connect it to Google Calendar, you can connect it to your Gmail, your Google Drive, your anything that you want, you can figure out how to do it. And so anyways, with that being said, I'm gonna stop just talking about random things at this point. But if you want any help, if you want somebody to partner with you in your business, like, please reach out to me. I would love to help you. I am all about building brands and businesses using AI content video. That's what we do every single day. That's why I started a business. That's why I started a podcast about it. And so use me as a resource and go check out some of the other videos, the other podcasts that we have out right now. There's so much value and so much gold in these conversations that they could easily transform your life for the better. So make sure to go check those out. Hit the subscribe button if you're watching on YouTube. If you're on Facebook, make sure to give us a follow so you don't miss the upcoming episodes coming out. And we'll see you guys in the next one. Peace. Peace.