Matt Britton on the Top Consumer AI Trends Shaping 2026

Hi everyone, it's Matt Britton here. As we head into 2026, I want to do something a little bit different. This week we're dropping a special edition of the Speed of Culture podcast focused entirely on my 2026 predictions. What's coming next for consumers, culture, brands, and how AI is reshaping all of it faster than anyone expected. I really hope you get a ton of value out of today's episode. Episode. And more importantly, I just wanted to thank everybody for being such a great audience, such loyal listeners, and helping to build the speed of culture community. We cannot wait to show you what's in store for 2026. In the meantime, let us know what you think of today's episode, and happy holidays to all of you. Thanks so much. Hey everybody, this is Matt Britton. I am the CEO of Suzy, and today we are going to be talking about 2026. Can't Believe It's Hard Already and the top consumer AI trends that I think are going to impact the consumer and major brands heading into 2026. 2025 has been a crazy year. For me personally, it's really changed my life, the notion of AI. I've always been somebody who's been a creative thinker, somebody who had a lot of ideas, but there was always a gap between my ability to have something in my head and have it come to real life. And for most people, that requires a specialized skillset or access to capital or access to talented people, none of which are really easy these days in order to make something a reality. But here in 2025 and heading into 2026, you no longer need those things. Now, any idea that you have in your mind, whether it's an idea for a movie or a song or an app, can really be brought to life incredibly easily and more so every single day. AI is so powerful right now that I actually have to rethink me going to lunch with somebody because I know how much I can get accomplished in a 90-minute period. I've spent 2025 traveling around the world helping companies really truly understand the power of AI. I've been as far as Saudi Arabia, uh, where they're really trying to change their culture and change their future around the world. Of AI. I've been all over the country and spoken to industries like accounting and legal and advertising agencies and consulting agencies, everyone trying to figure out what to do about this incredible new technology. Now, obviously AI is having a massive impact on businesses, but in the year and years ahead, it's going to have as equal, if not a greater impact on the end consumer. And often we see these technologies, whether it be smartphones or the internet itself, first impact businesses and then trickle on and really change the world from a consumer lens. And I think in the world of AI, it's really going to be no different. So today, what I'm going to be doing is going through what I believe are the top 10 most important concepts that you need to be able to get your arms around and plan around for 2026. But before we dive in, I wanna show you a recent video that I played before I went on stage in front of about 4,000 people at Nationwide Insurance at Columbus, Ohio, just to kind of show you how far AI has come in 2025.

This comes alive, nationwide tech hearts beating, ready to thrive. Matt Britton takes the stage, voice steady and clear, talking AI transformation. The future's already here, from data to decisions, automation in the air. Tomorrow's claims and coverage handled with care. He's painting what's next with the confidence drive because Nationwide is on your side.

Now, in order for me to make that video 5 years ago, I would have had to have hired a band to play a custom song. I would have had to have hired a producer and a writer to write the song, and of course a videographer who can to make the Nationwide eagle soar across the street. I would have had to hire an editor who could splice the video together and pull it all together as a concept that I was comfortable enough speaking in front of 4,000 people about and showing them. But instead, I create that entire video in my hotel in Columbus, Ohio, at around 12:45 AM, late in the night, before I was about to go on stage that next morning. That really showcases how far we've come. How, how long is it going to be until consumers can do that? How long is it going to be until consumers can take a dream that they had and manifest it instantly into a 2-hour feature film starring their sister and their brother? These are questions I think about every single day. And when I think about how AI is going to impact the consumer, it really rests upon this incredible technology. That is now acceptable to everybody. Before I dive into the presentation, just a little bit about Suzy. So Suzy, which is the company I'm proudly the CEO of, is a consumer research company. We exist really to amplify the power of human voice and emotion to allow brands really to make confident data-driven decisions with the consumer at the center. I believe in a world where AI continues to grow and the world changes faster than ever before, the voice of the consumer is even gonna become more important because our closely held beliefs around consumer tastes and preferences are gonna change faster than ever to keep pace with the change of technological innovation that we're seeing in society. So we are doubling down on the human voice at Suzy in the years ahead, and especially in 2026. But at the same time, we are certainly doing our fair share of innovation in the world of AI. We first started by having automated summaries of survey results in our platform. Earlier in 2025, we launched Suzy Speaks, which is AI-powered moderators, where now you can have the power of one-on-one in-depth interviews and discussions without having to hire a focus group coordinator or moderator. Can happen instantly in any language through the power of AI. Consumers have human-like conversations with an AI moderator. We can basically execute qualitative research at scale. And in 2026, have some amazing innovations coming out around the concept of Signals, which essentially is a market intelligence tool, which is hyper-personalized to what we know about you, pointing out the trends and topics that matter most. And Stories, which is the first time we're talking about this today, which essentially an automated and personalized form takes consumer research and manifests it into stories in any modality you can dream of. Whether it be a podcast, a book, or an infographic. And we're super excited to tell all of our customers and prospects more about these new AI innovations in the year ahead. But my personal journey has been about figuring out AI and understanding its power. And finally, we're at a point where we feel like it could really reinvent our company, Suzy, which has now been in business for 7 years, going into our 8th year and proudly serving some of the world's largest brands. But we're not here today to talk about Susie. We're here to talk about you and we're here to talk about the consumer. And with that, we are entering a new world that's ushered in by a new consumer. When I first started my career in the year 2000, the internet itself was first becoming a mainstream consumption habit. When I tell my kids that when I was in high school, there was no internet, they look at me like I look at my grandfather when he told me that he used to walk to school with no shoes on. But the reality is I did not have the internet in high school. I was a Gen Xer, and it wasn't until the generation that came after me, Gen Y or the millennial generation, who became the digital natives. And the millennials ushered in the digital revolution. Millennials have never known a world without the internet. They've never known a world without this powerful technology That was a different world before it existed. About 10 to 15 years later, there was a new consumer that ushered in a new generation and a new technology. Gen Z. Gen Z is going to forever be known as the iPhone generation, the social media generation. All of a sudden, we had a consumer set that had the power of the internet in their pocket, not just as a consumption tool, but as a creation tool. And of course, the iPhone and social media combined changed the world. It started and ended wars. It started and ended marriages. It created created incredible businesses that we see today, like Uber and Airbnb, that allowed these vibrant marketplaces to exist. And of course, the incredible social networks that were birthed outta the social media generation, like Instagram and TikTok. In fact, this generation, Gen Z, was the topic of my last book that I wrote 10 years ago called Youth Nation. And the reason why I wrote Youth Nation is that with Gen Z, for the first time, youth culture was no longer a counterculture. For the first time ever, young people had the ability to have a voice. Before that, they had to go to Woodstock and protest or go on city squares and scream loud because unless they were being carried by one of the big television networks, they had no voice. But now with YouTube, now with these social media tools, all of a sudden young people had a voice and brands start to become built not from the boardrooms, but from the sidewalks. And that was sort of a profound finding that brands were able to learn over time is that consumers mattered and consumer centricity mattered and brands needed to listen. And now a new generation is emerging. Gen Alpha. Gen Alpha, which is the topic of my latest book, which is in May, Generation AI, check it out, is about Gen Alpha. Gen Alpha. Is the AI generation. They will never know a world with AI. They will never know a world where you cannot interact with technology the same way that you do other people. To parents of Gen Alpha consumers, it may seem strange and odd that their kids are having intimate relationships with AI chatbots, sharing their deepest, darkest fears and dreams. But at the same time, this generation will know no other world. They're not gonna know a world where this powerful technology can't know them. And that's going to reshape and rewire our brains and rewire society in a way that many of us are still barely coming to terms with. So why is AI so powerful? Why is AI the technology that's so strong that it's going to define a generation? Well, first and foremost, the rate of improvement is unlike the rate of improvement of any technology we've seen in history. AI is incredibly easy to use. There's minimal coding required to use and build AI, and because of all these things, it truly has unlimited potential as a technology. In fact, the length of tasks AI can do is doubling every 7 months. I cannot tell you how many times I've interacted with people in business who have told me, oh, I tried to use AI for data analysis 6 months ago. It didn't really work well. I tried to use AI to make imagery last month. It didn't really work well. Well, the reality is it doesn't really matter what AI was able to produce for you, you know, in, in 2025, because if AI can do something just okay today, mark my words, it's going to be able to do that thing in incredible fashion tomorrow. And we really need to build our entire strategies around the fact that this thing is only going to improve. And only going to map out and iron out all the imperfections that it has. And the people who like to talk down AI saying, oh, it hallucinates. Oh, it does this and that. That would be like me telling you I'm not going to stream Netflix because I tried to stream the internet in 2002 and it was choppy because the rate of change is indeed 100x of what it was in the digital era. So it does not matter what your experience was in the past or even today. You have to know that today is very much the worst AI is ever going to be. And if it can do something just okay today, it's going to do that same task in a profound, profound manner into the future. ChatGPT is going to be known throughout history, no matter where it ends up in its kind of success trajectory, as sort of the crowbar technology that got consumers to start using AI the same way America Online will be known as the crowbar technology to get consumers to use the internet. If you remember that technology, yes, the internet existed long before AOL, and it was used for government and military purposes, as was AI before ChatGPT came out. But ChatGPT, which is a large language model, was able to harness the power of AI in consumerized form. And gave consumers the ability to really leverage this technology in ways that people really couldn't imagine prior, which is why it was the fastest company by far to ever reach a million users in only 5 days. That's all it took for them. ChatGPT is a large language model, and the way a large language model works is not that dissimilar to the way a search engine works, like Google. You take in a prompt, and a prompt can be in any language. A prompt can even now be an image. A prompt can be a document, and essentially that prompt goes through a neural network, which is essentially a language model where it grabs context and it grabs data to help you get an answer that you care about. Now, what we're seeing right now with these large language models is a real battle for data because data is the core differentiator in large language models. Data is also a differentiator behind the way that Company A uses, uh, you know, AI in the way Company B uses AI. It's more powerful than anything we can imagine in business today due to large language models. And on the output of a large language model, it generates text, it generates imagery, it generates music. In the case of the music video I showed, it is multimodal and multilingual in a way that social media and digital was not. If you think about social media, It first started with text. I had a burger for lunch today. It was great. Then it went to images with platforms like Instagram. Look at the picture of my burger I ate today. And then it went to video. Hey guys, it's Matt. I'm at this great burger joint in SoHo. Look at this burger I just had. And that obviously ushered in platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. Unlike the social media revolution, AI is gaining parity across modality almost instantly, meaning its ability to output imagery, and even video now nearly rivals its ability to output text. And that's something that most people still don't really understand. To illustrate the rate of change in these large language models, just one year ago, the smartest large language model had an IQ score of 96. And today, and this slide's even outdated, it has the highest IQ score coming outta the latest Gemini 3 model of 142. So I often stay on stage, imagine if your Uncle Larry who could barely put 3 words together a year ago at Thanksgiving was now a Rhodes Scholar who got a job at NASA and was going to get us to Mars next week. That's essentially the difference in large language models from a year ago to today. If you think about its growing power and potency that it has, and consumers are certainly adopting AI, you can see that it is disproportionate amongst younger consumers. Which I really struggle with because I think AI should be the great technological equalizer for consumers of all ages. 'Cause the reality is you just need to know what you want to accomplish. And if you can text a friend or text a loved one, then you can use AI. And there's no reason why baby boomers should not be using it as much as Gen Z or Gen X consumers. The reality is there's just this kind of misperception that AI is for the whiz kids and there's just blocker with older consumers that I think is a huge opportunity. I think consumers of all ages should be on AI because there is no big hurdle that you have to overcome in order to how to use, use it. And if you think about like the iPhone, you need to know how to type on Glass to be able to choose the iPhone because before that there was only the BlackBerry. So a lot of these big technological innovations in the past did require adoption of new consumer behaviors, but many ways AI doesn't because you interact with it the same way that you do and you have been for a very long time, other human beings. So I do expect older consumers, especially baby boomers and Gen Xers to really start adopting AI. I'm a Gen Xer and I live in AI. I understand that I'm playing on the edges of this stuff, but I do think you're going to see a big trend in 2026. It's not one of my top 10 trends, but that consumers are going to start adopting AI at older stages in life. So how are consumers using AI? Well, the number one way is through writing support. And this is from a really great study that Menlo Ventures did earlier this year. So 51% of consumers are using AI for writing support. You know, for a very long time, you could see it. You could see when an email or a blog post was written by AI. Not so much anymore. Um, 47% use AI for coding projects. That seems a little high to me that half of the people, you know, using AI for coding projects. I mean, that sounds crazy, but at the same time, I do think AI is becoming increasingly powerful as a coding tool. Students are certainly using it for help on assignments. Um, I've spoken publicly before about the fact how in 2024, my son got caught in high school using AI to cheat on a term paper. It was a week before my beloved Eagles were going to be playing in the Super Bowl. I did not take him to the Super Bowl as a punishment, but I really struggled with that decision because on one hand, I'm here building a great career around being an expert in AI and then penalizing my son at the same time for disproportionately adopting it at school. Of course, the issue is he didn't disclose it, but you are certainly seeing AI being used a lot in school, and I think that's only going to continue. And then, you know, you see some of these edge use cases like social coaching or learning new language or managing childcare. And I think a lot of these at-home tasks are going to continually be infiltrated by AI in the year ahead. I think that it's going to become consumerized. I mentioned the iPhone and the BlackBerry because I think there's a lot of parallels here. For a very long time, the iPhone was not allowed in the enterprise. IT managers would not let you have an iPhone with your work email address because it didn't have the security provisions. It didn't have integration with Microsoft Exchange. And because of that, consumers start to get two phones. They had their BlackBerry, you know, their work device, and then they had an iPhone personally. But then over time, you know, this BYOD dynamic started, bring your own devices, where consumers start to use iPhones every day for so many tasks that it became challenging for them to not have it at work. And then we start to see the consumerization of the enterprise where these tools that consumers start to use personally, like the iPhone, became the de facto tools at work. And I think we're gonna start to see the same thing with AI. I think the reality is that most people are not able to adopt and use AI at large organizations despite the fact that these companies are saying they're AI first because there's privacy and data security and IT concerns that prevent them from downloading any app and uploading customer data. So instead, when left to their own devices, I think you're gonna start to see consumers start to use AI for personal chores, personal tasks. I, I could talk about it in a bit, created my own personal health bot where I took 25 years of personal health information, MRIs, blood tests, x-ray information, notes from doctors. I went through external hard drives and went through filing cabinets and scanned stuff, and I created my own personal health bot, and I trained it to act like a leading doctor from Johns Hopkins University with one goal, to keep Matt Britton alive. And after I created it, I asked it my first question, which was, if Matt Britton's gonna die in 5 years, what's the most likely cause? And the answer really freaked me out. It freaked me out because it was so personalized and it gave data sources of markers in my blood from 10 years ago and supporting studies that shows that this was my biggest risk. And of course I was like, oh my God, what can I do about it? Why is this my biggest risk, et cetera? And since then, I really start to understand the power of data and the power of putting your own data with the right prompting and the right application layer to work for your life. I created MomBot, which is a chatbot for my 75-year-old mom who lives alone, who was texting me every week about finding her Netflix password. And I created essentially a bot that was trained on every appliance and every password she has, and now she asks that bot first and she's able to use it. Somebody who really isn't technologically adept nearly at all, as she would agree with. I used, you know, the power, this power and this structure of identifying the right data for my financial planning and estate planning. And I created my own financial management app and now I use it with help with tax preparation. These are a lot of things I think you're gonna start to see consumers start to adopt them. When they do so, they're gonna go through this process where they're gonna identify the problem that needs to be solved. They're gonna identify the data that can help them solve the problem. They're gonna have an idea of an application layer that will be useful to them, and they're gonna start building things. And that same framework is the same framework that is gonna be needed in the enterprise. Again, the only issue with the enterprise is a lot of consumers and workers are really disabled from really diving into AI because they just have too many restrictions around their usage. So this is starting to take off and I think it's only gonna continue in the year ahead. So one thing I think a lot about when I think about AI and talk about AI is education. And, you know, for so many years, what made you a successful student was this notion of memorization and regurgitation, uh, where essentially you would try to cram as much information as you could in your brain and then prove that you knew that the next day on a test. And I was a terrible student, but I knew how to pull all-nighters. I knew how to memorize and regurgitate, and this goes all the way up to standardized testing to figure out what college you go into. It's not a lot about the soft skills, skills that I think are really gonna matter moving forward, but in the age of the knowledge economy, in the age where your ability to understand how to retain knowledge about how to do somebody's taxes as an accountant, or how to write someone's contract as a lawyer, or how to read someone's X-ray as a radiologist. Made you effective in the knowledge economy. And you know, the education system is really just continuing to push this, uh, endless cycle of memorization and regurgitation. But I actually think we're slowly entering the end of the knowledge economy where memorization and regurgitation matter far less. In fact, and this, I thought this was a fascinating study that was conducted by the World Economic Forum, um, about the future of jobs, and they surveyed over 500 leading employers from large enterprises about like, what are the new workplace skills that are gonna matter most moving forward? And what you saw from them was not a lot about the knowledge economy skill sets. It wasn't about memorization of facts and deep skill sets. It was about analytical thinking. It was about creativity. It was about problem solving. It's about resilience and flexibility. If you think about the process I went through to build my health bot, I was analytical at, in terms of thinking about the data I needed. I was creative in thinking about how to prompt it and how to use it. I actually exercised a whole lot of resilience and agility in learning how to build it. And in building anything in AI, you just have to go to a tool like Claude or ChatGPT and say, I want to build this. Give me step-by-step instructions. Don't give me step 2 until I tell you step 1 is done. It's that simple. And if you just go step by step, you will hit some steps, as we do in life, that you have a hard time getting past. But if you keep pushing, Eventually you will do it. And you know, I just have been working on a project internally with a couple really bright people who are research experts, and I'm trying to push our product through and they kept rejecting it because the data wasn't accurate enough. At one point they were ready to give up on me because I kept giving them these versions and they said, I will get this right. I'm not gonna stop. And eventually, just this morning, I was able to finally crack it and break through. And that's what it takes. But these skills are not knowledge economy skills. These skills are not what is taught to tomorrow's leaders, and it does require a completely different way of looking at the world and learning. But I can tell you that same accountant who's made a career out of doing someone's taxes is gonna soon find that AI can do taxes a lot better. And that lawyer who's made a career outta writing contracts is gonna soon find that AI can write contracts a lot better. So what's left for them? Well, what's left for them is to actually lean into these new workplace skills and be somebody who can lean to their own humanity to help their customers understand the implications of their legal situation, or accountants to help clients understand financial planning and understand the decision-making process of where to send their kids to college, or should they buy that house? Those are gonna be new skills are gonna matter. But not the functional skills that we've seen really boom during the knowledge economy. In many ways, what is the new how? Which essentially means being adept at identifying the problem you want to solve is so much more important now than knowing how to solve the problem. So much of those specialized skill sets are going under the hood. Let's take photography, for example. It used to be In order for you to be a good photographer, you needed to know how to develop film in a darkroom. You needed to know how to use all the knobs and dials on a fancy DSLR camera. You need to have the specialized knowledge of ISO and f-stop. But now 99.9% of all photos are taken on smartphones. And a lot of that knobs and dials is beneath the surface where increasingly you can use, um, a tool like Adobe Firefly and just prompt it if you want the lighting different or if you wanna swap someone's shirt from being red to blue. And now the best photographers are simply those that know where to point the camera to. That is really the best analogy for AI. Knowing how to code, knowing how to write contracts, knowing how to be accountant is far less important than what you're doing that work for. And that means leveling up your thinking, becoming a critical thinker, becoming creative. Is so much more important than ever before. So I'm about to go through 10 trends. Given all this, I'm going to talk about 10 trends that I think are going to be really pivotal for you to understand heading into 2026 that are going to impact the end consumer as a result of the power of AI and all the implications that I just spoke about. Number 1, and obviously this is the one trend that I hope does not come true. But I believe that AI-powered job displacement is going to go mainstream. They say the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed, but where it is distributed is the big tech. And what we saw in 2025 is countless large tech companies. I'm not going to name them because many of which are Suzy's clients, um, cut, you know, tens of thousands of employees and they cut these employees because they are seeing before anyone else the impact of automation and AI-powered innovation on their business and enables them to do more with less. It enables them to wipe out layers. It enables them to have less management. And every single time one of these layoffs occurred, there's always this kind of, you know, headline that the CEO says, oh, it's not about AI. But then once they start to explain what they're getting out of it, it clearly is due to AI. I think we need to be more honest as a society that many jobs that exist right now do not need to exist. It doesn't mean that I am happy about this being the case. It doesn't mean that I want this to be the case, but I do believe it is the case. And I think anybody who wants to be on the right side and future-proof themselves needs to learn how to build an AI, needs to learn how to kind of lean into these different skill sets because the reality is You know, this is kind of here and it's not going away. Just like any other technology that's existed in the past, it's going to bring positives and negatives to society. But this genie is not being put back in the bottle, my friends. Like companies are only going to be adopting this more and they're only going to be looking for more cost savings. And this, by the way, these cuts this year happened with a record high stock market. So tell me what's going to happen. When eventually, and we always do, hit recessionary environments and there's less demand from consumers, well then companies are going to be pressured even more to adopt AI innovation, and that's going to drive more and more pressure on the job market. And I think, so this is very much an AI consumer trend that's starting in the business world that obviously is going to trickle down in the consumer because I think in 2026, We are going to be entering a recessionary environment, and there's so many data points out there, like record high defaults on car loans. If you do a Google alert search for personal loans, it is at an all-time high level over the last 15 to 20 years. What happens when people can't afford to pay their bills? They go into credit card debt. What happens when they can't afford to pay their credit card debt? They get a personal loan. We're also seeing record high credit card defaults. It's very much a tale of two economies as it's been for a long time, but I think this wealth disparity is continuing and is only going to continue due to AI. And as a result, you're going to start to see a lot of companies that are Main Street American companies, not the big tech companies, but the ones that hire hundreds of thousands of employees, not going to name them either because they're also some of Suzy's clients. I don't want to offend anyone. But I do think you're going to start to see a lot of large companies conduct layoffs, and that's going to make consumers far more cautious. They're going to be a lot more price conscious and they're going to spend less, especially on discretionary purchases. So AI is going to create a trickle-down effect over time. I do believe that AI is going to open up far more efficiency with companies. It's going to increase our GDP. It's going to create new jobs. And, you know, they say 80% of the new jobs created by 2030 don't exist yet. I completely agree with that. But it's not going to happen like a light switch. I think we're going to have to take one step back, one hard, brutal step back before we take many steps forward. And that step back is going to be in 2026. And I think we all need to prepare for it in any way we can, whether it's future-proofing ourselves to not be a casualty of AI, you know, and losing our jobs, or it's understanding that our consumer that we serve, that our brands serve is probably going to have a much tighter purse string next year. At the same time, we are seeing this massive wealth transfer where over the next 10 years, actually this, this stats in the next 20, over the next 20 years, $84 trillion with a T is going to be passed over from baby boomers to younger generations like Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Now, my father tragically passed away pretty suddenly 3 years ago, and when he did, I was left in charge of his estate, and I was shocked by how much wealth he accumulated based upon how he lived. 'Cause he was somebody who would circle around city blocks for an hour to avoid paying $7 for a parking spot. But my dad, as I would learn as I dug deeper, I was trying to kind of come to terms with everything that happened. You know, he was a child of the Great Depression and World War II, and his relationship with money was one of scarcity. Now juxtapose that against the money, the relationship with money that younger people have, Gen Z. What happened when they had all this stimulus during the pandemic? Was their relationship of capital one with scarcity? Absolutely not. You had GameStops, GameStunks, you had NFTs. Right now you have Cauchy and online betting and prediction markets and sports betting. This generation has a YOLO mentality with capital. So what is going to happen when $84 trillion gets passed on? From a demographic and a generation that has a relationship with capital of scarcity, and then $84 trillion gets dropped into a generation that has a complete opposite, I can't spend money fast enough relationship with capital, where you're going to see a huge spending boom. Now, I don't think it's going to happen next year, but we are set up to have Gen Alpha becoming the most lucrative market that we see in history as a result of the saving habits and the lack of consumption that baby boomers had. And obviously they were the beneficiaries of a booming economic environment and stock market over the last 30 to 40 years. And once the younger generations inherit that, you are going to see a sea change in the way that capital is spent. And you're already starting to see that. Consumer trend number 2 is, I actually think it's the most important, and that's that the internet is getting a new front door. For the last 20 years, the only way that most consumers found stuff was by going to search engines like Google and lesser-used search engines like Bing to find things. And while they're still using Google, the Google experience itself is quickly evolving to one that is AI-powered, where now instead of getting a long list of blue links, it is a conversational interface And whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or Groq, um, or Rufus, which is Amazon's AI tool, or Microsoft Copilot, these tools are infiltrating our workflows. They're infiltrating the apps in our, on our phone home screen. And as a result, the way that we find products is never going to be the same. 50% of consumers, according to McKinsey, already use AI-powered search today. There's about 20 to 50% of total traffic at risk, and unlike SEO, search engine optimization, which in sometimes cases could take 10 years for you to go from not being ranked at all to being the number 2 ranked, um, company for dental insurance, right? In AI, you can actually be from an unknown company, the one that ChatGPT is recommending, in the span of a couple days. So that's going to create a lot of losers and a lot of new winners, and it's going to shift a lot of markets in, in a way that we haven't seen before. You know, the other thing about AI is you are normally much further down the funnel when you're asking for recommendations. So this is a search, give me recommendations for a pickleball racket for beginner female. And in a traditional search engine, you might just type in pickleball racket, but in AI, above this prompt was a conversation that I had about you know, uh, for my daughter, good activities for her to get into. And it wasn't till I was much further down the funnel, deeper into the consideration set, that I asked for recommendations. And what that means is that your ability to create very specific content— like, for example, if I had content, if I was selling pickleball rackets and I had a lot of content and videos that I published about best pickleball racket for a young a beginner female, well then I might have a shot at having my product recommended here alongside Dick's Sporting Goods. So the specificity of content matters and the part of the funnel that consumers are gonna be searching for is gonna change because you're entering a conversational interface where you don't really feel like you need a one-shot prompt to write everything that you care about in the first search, 'cause you know that you're about to enter into a conversation. So AI content optimization is going to be huge for businesses because that's how consumers are going to find you. And over time, we're going to look at, you know, traditional search engines the way, same way that we do rotary phones today. Now, I'm not at all saying Google is going away. Google has, I believe, the best large language model right now in Gemini, and they've made a masterful pivot into AI. But I think at the same time, the way that we think about building our business around traditional search is going to change. The next consumer trend is the era of chat-based shopping emerges as a result of us using AI for research, as a result of us using chat to learn about things. I think the traditional web interfaces, the e-commerce interfaces that Walmart and Amazon and Home Depot and every large company has in terms of how we buy is gonna change into chat-based shopping. I think that, as I mentioned earlier, Humans are gonna wanna interact with AI the same way they do other people. And the way they interact with other people is through conversing and through communicating in the way that they know in their own language. And we're already starting to see this happen. We're already starting to see people have conversations. We're already starting to see the large language models, you know, like ChatGPT integrate with companies like Etsy where now this year, and this is a recent development, you actually can have checkout directly within the ChatGPT interface. Through, uh, you know, an Etsy partnership. This is going to explode in 2026 where every company that is a merchant, uh, Shopify has obviously millions of merchants. They're all going to have the ability to integrate with these large language models and the consumer is never going to have to leave. Uh, and that's obviously going to change, you know, we used to have for the last 20 years a very, you know, simplistic consumer journey and funnel where you heard about something in mass media. Um, or you saw it in social media and then you would use Google to do deeper search and you usually end up at Amazon to buy something. And while I think all those companies are still going to perform very well moving forward, that consumer journey is going to change in a world where you can do the research, have the conversation, and buy on one platform, which is why you see these large tech companies pour so much money into AI and try to have the best models because this thing is so powerful that over time It's going to know, and it already does, your kid's age. It's going to know your, your shoe size and you're not going to have to enter that information anymore. And the more it learns about you, the better it's going to be able to serve you. And the one thing that none of us can get back is time. I don't think a time machine is going to be invented in 2026. And over time, it has been those products, whether it's Google or Uber, that save consumers time. That they disproportionately adopt. And this notion of the funnel being collapsed, the internet having a new front door, and you being able to shop in these large language models is gonna change commerce, is gonna change forever the way that people buy, and it's gonna create many new winners and many new losers moving forward. Number 5, AI-powered creative takes center stage. I spent 20 years in the ad industry. I built and sold a large ad agency called MRY to the Publicis Group. I respect traditional advertising agency creatives and the process it takes to make a great TV spot. But when I hear from traditional creatives that AI can never make great creative and that consumers will never appreciate a TV spot that's made by AI, I just point them to the electronic Daisy Carnival. The Electric Daisy Carnival, rather, which happens in Las Vegas every year, where 500,000 young people go to the desert in Las Vegas to watch DJs play music made completely from computers. And the DJs are just pressing buttons. They're playing no instruments. So any music, you know, lover would've said 20 years ago, that will never happen. Music is about drums and pianos and guitars, and it's about And I love live music, right? But younger people and many older people don't really care how the music's made. It's how the music makes them feel, which is why they dance to electric music that's made by computers. And to think that consumers aren't going to be inspired and emotionally moved by AI-powered creative for the same reason is just something that's lost on me. And I think as this technology gets better. It's going to enter the workflows of more and more companies. This is a comparison of Midjourney's text-to-image output. Version 1 was about a year and a half ago. And while you can't see it, that person had 6 fingers on one hand, 7 on the other. Look at version 5.1. And Midjourney is now working on version 7. Look at the fidelity of version 5.1. How good is this output going to be in the years ahead? And it's not just text-to-image, it's text-to-video as well. This is ChatGPT's image creation capabilities. You talk about changing, you know, job roles. If I wanted this shirtless buff man on the left-hand side, if I want that image 5 years ago, I would've had to have found him. I would've had a casting director, a makeup artist, a wardrobe person, someone that did lighting, a photographer, somebody who could do the set. And now we can have it all with a prompt. So it's much more about the problem I want to solve, the image I want to make, versus how to create the picture. If I want that cat to be drinking a Diet Coke instead of a beer because it's driving, I just have to prompt it. I don't have to have a photographer reshoot that cat, right? This is where we've gotten to with AI image generation.

Trees sway. Steeplechase living where the backyard steals the day. Waterfall flowing. Swim-up bar glowing. No rear neighbors in sight. The sunset keeps on showing. 4 beds waiting. Style elevating. New roof shining since 21. Kitchen reimagined. High ceilings expanding. Every day feels like vacation fun.

So that was a video that I played in front of 5,000 real estate agents at the National Association of Realtors conference. And I made that It was in Houston, and the night before, I went on Zillow and picked a random for sale home listing on Zillow, and I turned that listing into a music video. And the music video obviously had a song that was sung by me. Now, obviously, it's not my voice. I'm not a good singer. I don't even like country music, but it seemed to fit. This shows the power of creativity. This is something that's so powerful that 1,300 people afterwards email me and ask me how they could create it. This type of creativity is what is going to go mainstream in 2026, where if you have the idea, you're gonna be able to create it. Hyper-personalization becomes a baseline expectation. For many years we've been talking about the notion of hyper-personalization, yet most companies still have a one-to-many email strategy. We'll send the same email out to many different people, but the reality is in the age of AI, you should not be sending the same email out to more than one person. You should have an audience of one that's multiplied millions of times. At Suzy, we have a product called Signal, and with our Signals product, we are launching— it's actually already in market— a hyper-personalized email newsletter called Signals, where your picture will be on the email. It's custom built for you and based upon your role, your company, what you've posted about on LinkedIn, everything we know about you, we will go out and find market signals to a proprietary scoring system that you should care about. This is hyper-personalization at work. We're mining data about you and using the data for inputs to seek the world about things that matter to you. I've spent the last year so deep in AI, and one of the areas I've been incredibly deep in is in the area of hyper-personalization. And we're gonna be at a point one day where every single TV spot's gonna be personalized towards you. But starting in 2026, if you're a sophisticated company, As soon as I enter my email address on the website, that entire website experience should be different based upon what you know about me. The technology is here now. AI is powering it, and I think we're gonna see that become super mainstream and over time, a core consumer expectation. The next trend is consumers are gonna learn AI in the home, and I spoke about this earlier, but you know, the fact that many companies do not allow consumers to use AI in an unencumbered form. Yet these same employees are being pushed and asked to be AI experts are two things that conflict with each other. And, uh, you know, I've helped a lot of large companies and their employees try to drive AI transformation. And the one thing I usually end up telling them is do a contest where you give each employee $250 to use AI, any AI tool they want, and to build something for themselves. And one of my, uh, companies I work with, they, they had an employee who built a, tutoring agent for math for his 8-year-old, right? So you, there's so many things you can do and it's, it's great that you've built the thing, but it's about going through the process because I see all these AI experts on LinkedIn, but none of them know how to build anything. They haven't built shit, right? They haven't spent time to go through the steps and the hours to figure out what's possible. Until you do that, until you're at a point where I am today where there's nothing you can tell me you wanna build an AI that I wouldn't be able to figure out how to build. You really can't say what it can or can't do. And while I don't expect most people to spend as much time as I have, and I wouldn't recommend it, understanding how to build these pretty pedestrian things and going through the process will future-proof you. And I think you're gonna start to see the same way the iPhone got adopted at home first and then pushed into the workforce. You're gonna start to see the same thing with AI. My next trend of 2026 is that creators are gonna turn their sights towards AI tech deals. So we've seen obviously through the last decade or even two decades, you saw Dr. Dre with Beats and you saw George Clooney with, you know, Casamigos or more recently Kim Kardashian and the wild success she's had with her SKIMS brand, right? That creators building and celebrities building their own products has been a smash hit because in a world where developing and producing things have become commoditized because of these highly efficient China-based supply chains. The only differentiator in the end ends up being the celebrity that's in front of it. And I think the same thing's going to happen with tech because building in tech is increasingly becoming commoditized. And I think over time, the one thing that's going to differentiate tech company A from B is going to be the celebrity behind it because they have distribution, they have a name. Brand. So Ryan Serhant, one of the biggest real estate influencers, he created his own sales training tool. Is it better than every other sales training platform out there? No, but he has an audience. His audience trusts him. He identifies use cases. He leans into his influence, authority, and authenticity to drive adoption. You're gonna start to see that happen over and over as celebrities understand that they can now become tech entrepreneurs by slapping their name against the product that other people can build, but the only differentiator being them. So that's going to be one I think is pretty fascinating. My next trend is AI is going to become a core pillar of longevity and preventative health. This notion of the quantified self is something I've been talking about for a long time where consumers are becoming increasingly obsessed with data on their health. And now we have the Eight Sleep mattress, which measures your sleep, and the Apple, Apple Watch, obviously, which measures you know, your, your heart rate, and you have the Oura Ring, which tracks your body temperature and all sorts of things. And now there's new tools like Cal AI, where by simply taking a picture of what you're gonna eat, it'll bring in the caloric content of that meal. And all these things together can be synthesized. They weren't able to in a pre-AI world, but now these things can be pulled together and it can help paint a picture of your health in a way that we haven't seen in the past. And that combined against your health history, combined against the knowledge of every health study in history, is going to put the consumer in a much more powerful place in terms of controlling their future. Now, it's not going to stop them from getting hit by a bus tomorrow, but the notion of control and health has long been something that's growing. And you see this boom of preventative health services like Prenuvo, which give you full-body MRI scans. And I did one. I did a full body MRI scan and I put it into my HealthBot, right? Because the more data you have, smarter you're going to be about your health. And we've seen coming outta COVID this huge boom in health, and obviously the rise of GLP-1s is part of that. And I think the notion of quantified self is going to take center stage. And I spoke recently at a retirement planning conference, and I think that this actually will impact the retirement planning community because if they have the data on the consumer, they could help figure out how long you're going to live, and then you know how much you need to save for retirement. So I think it's going to have a trickle-down impact on other industries as well. I think the quantified self boom is really just still in the early stages. And lastly, AI is going to hit American classrooms. Um, recently there is a school that was announced, uh, called the Alpha School, which is billed as the future of education, which basically redefines education. And, you know, to my point earlier on The end of knowledge economy and memorization, regurgitation kind of going away. I think AI needs to become central. I recently spoke in front of 700 professors and of large universities, and most of them are using textbooks that were written long before ChatGPT ever came out. So we do have a problem of AI literacy with our professors and teachers. And, you know, I think it is gonna be incumbent upon parents, like with my 4-year-old daughter, I try to show her that anything's possible. I will ask her to come up with a crazy story and I'll turn into a video and show it to her before she goes to bed, showing her how her creativity can come to life, knowing that it's boundless in terms of what you can create. And I like going through that process of allowing her figuring stuff out. Yes, I still read her books, but I'd rather read her a book that's based upon a family adventure we just took. I think you really need to tie these things together. Especially at home as a parent, because the parents are gonna play a big role. You can't just rely on schools, but I think you're gonna start to see a bigger and bigger push. And I do think it's gonna be a lot of the students, especially in high school, start to bring this into the school versus the school push it onto the students. So we have 5 minutes left. Um, I could go on around this topic forever. Um, I think my colleague Jessica Corbett is on the line who's gonna pop on with some questions. And, uh, happy to answer them. Hey Jess, how are you?

Hi, I'm good. Um, okay, let's start with the first question that came through from Jim. Um, do you think Gen Alpha will be at a severe disadvantage because of AI? I think you kind of just answered this one, but if you have anything else that you wanna elaborate on.

I think Gen Alpha is gonna be at a severe advantage because of AI, because I think they're gonna be AI native. They're gonna be, their entire worldview is gonna be around the world where AI exists. They're never gonna know a world where it didn't exist, and I think it's gonna be intuitive for them to adopt certain things that aren't intuitive for other consumers. And while they are gonna be definitely facing a different economic landscape, I think they're gonna be much more adept at doing a lot more on their own and probably be a lot more productive in the workforce as well.

Nice. All right, next one up is from Brantley. You talk a lot about getting into AI and building with no coding experience. How did you actually begin and what steps did you take early on? What would you recommend that I do to get started? What should I focus on first?

So, you know, Jess, as you know, like we, we hit a lot of kind of false starts with AI innovation at Suzy, and I was destined to figure it out on my own. And we worked a lot on some of this stuff. And the way I dove in at first was I took a step back and, you know, I'm, I just turned 50. I have small children. I put my focus on the biggest problem I wanted to solve in my life, which is staying alive as long as possible. So I made the decision that before I was gonna use AI for, my business. I was gonna use it for myself. And that was the problem I, I focused on. And then I started to think about what is the data that can help me achieve that? And it was all my health data. And then I went to ChatGPT and I said, I want to use AI to help me stay alive as long as possible. Here's the data I have. Here's a problem I wanna solve. Give me step-by-step instructions on how to build something that will be useful to me. And I just followed the steps. That's what I did. I think so many people get enamored with, What tools should I use? And this and that. But they, they never really take time to think about the problem that they wanna solve. And because of that, they're just an inch deep and a mile wide. You wanna go a mile deep, and the way you become a mile deep is by focusing on a problem. Then once I built my health bot, you start to see correlations. Oh, it's about data. Oh, it's about personalization. Oh, I can build it for this, this, and that. And that's kind of how you go through that process. And that's what I would recommend to anybody.

Nice. All right. And then one more to round us out from Sam. How likely is it that AI results will tap out or dry up such that the info that we get or the capabilities we have become like redundant, not as exciting, kind of that notion of like AI making like a—

it's echo chamber. Yeah. So I think that is possible, which is why first-party data is so important, which is why you should work with a company like Suzy who can get you new, fresh, human-centric content that you can feed into your models. So you're not, you don't just look and feel like everyone else, which actually would be great positioning for us, Jess, uh, as, as another reason to use Suzy is to be able to uncover the power of consumers, not just to learn at that moment, but to take the data and help feed your models to make it smarter moving forward.

All right. That's it for us. Awesome.

Well, wishing everyone, um, a happy and healthy holiday season in 2025. Wishing everyone a prosperous and successful 2026. You're going to hear from us more around these topics in the year ahead. And thanks so much for joining.

Hey!