Embracing the Change: How Personal AI Use Prepares Us for the 2026 Tipping Point

I can hardly read anything these days that doesn’t mention AI.  I know it’s been around for a few years now, but over the last year it’s really exploded.  

I’ve read about all the cool advancements, continuous improvements, and unique ways people have started to leverage AI.

I’ve read about all the negative impacts of AI.  The loss of jobs, the AI Bias, Data Security concerns, and even environmental concerns.  

Does the good really outweigh the bad?  

I’m not sure.  But I do know that embracing change leads to growth.  As for the negative impacts, I think it’s important to keep discussing and working towards solutions.  

AI isn’t going anywhere, it’s only going to continue to improve and integrate with more of our daily lives.  

How I’ve Leveraged AI

Words are not my strength.  I was horrible with grammar and an even worse speller.  When word first came out with with the red and green squiggly lines I both hated and loved them.  My annoyance of seeing those lines encouraged me to improve and evolve.

Thanks to technology and it’s evolution I have not only greatly improved, I’ve also learned to embrace the advancement.  I even find myself enjoying writing now.  

I haven’t personally paid to leverage any tools yet; however, I have enjoyed playing around with mostly ChatGPT and Gemini.  Some of the first ways I leveraged them was for helping with my Resume.  No, I didn’t have AI create my resume.  I wrote my resume and leveraged AI to help make sure it was polished and score it against different jobs I was applying to.  

I love using AI for brainstorming!  I’m not loosing creativity by doing so, I’m actually improving it!  I’ve had some great pivots from content it displayed, and other times I had a really good laugh.  

I’ve also found different ways to leverage AI for content generation.  I haven’t mastered how to get it to sound like me, but I have defiantly speed up the process.  Maybe paid versions are better?  Either way, I actually enjoy doing most of the writing myself while using AI to help speed up part of the process.

Finally, the thing AI has truly helped me with is improving my coding skills, specifically python.  I’ve used different books in the past to try and up-skill; however, I struggled to find the right ones that helped.  Leveraging AI has allowed me to get real examples for real problems that I’m working through.  

One thing I have been careful with is putting any personal/confidential information or code.  I’ve always used fake stuff or generic variables when getting an example, then refactoring to my situation.

Going into 2026, I’m excited to dive deeper into AI.

Others Predictions

This article “At CES 2026, Everything Is AI.  What Matters Is How You Use It” pretty much sums up what I would expect at this stage.  It mentioned that AI has been featured prominently at CES for the last 3 years and how it’s now about how it’s leveraged and the value it brings.  

When you hear about what how companies are leveraging AI you hear three things.  Some companies are talking about the value that AI has brought to them - these companies are aligning value with AI projects.  Some companies want to implement AI Agents for improved ROI, but lack the alignment and wonder why it’s not working.  Other companies sit somewhere in the middle.  

The conversation has changed from who is implementing AI to how and what are the results.

In this article “Stanford AI Experts Predict What Will Happen in 2026” has a similar theme, starting off by stating it’s about how AI is implemented not if it’s possible.  It has a pretty good perspective of how it will enhance science and medicine, two areas that I think could have a pretty big impact on breakthroughs.  

My Thoughts on 2026

While it is interesting reading about the predictions for 2026, I think we are going to see two primary different things.

First, I think that AI itself will have some pretty cool improvements that will have a huge impact on a larger scale.  While this will impact us, I think these advancements will come primarily from those innovating and researching.  This could be startups focused on AI, Scientists, or larger organizations implementing AI features into their products. 

Second, I think companies are going to make many mistakes trying to implement AI.  Please don’t take this wrong, I actually mean this in a positive way.  This will actually lead to them having greater success as we get towards the end of 2026 and going into 2027.

Before I end, I do want to make one more point.  I think the biggest challenge for implementing AI is going to be Data Culture and Data Literacy.  I’ll dive deeper into this in a future blog post.