AI Gifts for 2026
This holiday season, I’m sharing a different kind of gift guide: AI gifts you can give your team, your firm, and your organization.
Most gift guides focus on what to buy. This one focuses on what to build—the practices, patterns, and architectural choices that make AI easier to use and scale. As we move into an AI-driven 2026, these internal upgrades matter far more than any individual model announcement.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll share gifts that strengthen your organization’s ability to operate, learn, and deliver at the tempo AI now enables. Think of them as compounding capability upgrades.
Let’s start with the first two:
\uD83C\uDF81Gift #1: Design Beyond Today’s Limits
In the early computing era, chip performance was improving so quickly that the best software teams didn't design to the hardware they had—they designed to the hardware they knew was coming.
Moore's Law created a simple rule of thumb: by the time your product shipped, the capability curve would catch up. AI is moving much faster. If you design to today's constraints (latency, cost, context windows, model accuracy) your solution will feel outdated the moment it ships. The frontier is advancing too fast.
*The gift is this: design for the experience you want to deliver, not the bottlenecks that exist today. The capabilities will catch up. *
The opportunity cost of under-building is now far higher than the cost of building ahead. Give your teams permission to design for the curve, not the moment.
\uD83C\uDF81Gift #2: Depth Over Breadth
Many organizations celebrate AI adoption by counting how many people have access. It feels like progress because it’s easy to measure. But wide access without deep engagement doesn’t materially shift how work gets done.
Shallow usage creates the illusion of adoption without the outcomes.
Here’s the real pattern emerging across enterprises: the organizations seeing meaningful impact aren’t the ones with the most seats—they’re the ones where people use AI across multiple workflows, day after day, with increasing sophistication.
Why? Because depth changes the economics of work.
When someone uses AI only occasionally, they get incremental convenience. When they use it across the full arc of their work—analysis, writing, coding, planning, reviewing—they get multiplicative gains. Work compresses. Turnaround cycles shorten. Teams move from “occasionally sped up” to “consistently accelerated.”
The gap between these two worlds is widening. In almost every enterprise dataset, the people who lean in deeply—across more tasks, with more advanced capabilities—pull away from the median user. Their workflows become both faster and better. They also unlock categories of work they previously couldn’t do, which alters role boundaries and team dynamics.
That’s the so what: Depth doesn’t just make individuals more productive—it reshapes how the organization performs. It changes what a team is capable of. It influences who does which work. It affects delivery speed, client experience, and ultimately competitive position.
The gift, then, is a commitment to intensity over distribution.
Start by choosing the workflows where depth matters most—where repetition, judgment, and variability intersect—and build the conditions for mastery: shared patterns, reusable workflows, expert examples, consistent reinforcement.
Breadth expands access. Depth expands capability. And capability, not coverage, is what compounds.
More Gifts to Come
In the next installments, I’ll share additional gifts—each one focused on a structural pattern that helps organizations scale AI with clarity, speed, and confidence. They build on one another. Together, they form an operating mindset for 2026: how to design, deploy, and improve AI systems in ways that compound value over time.
More next week.