Alternative Entrepreneurialism: 2026 predictions

This time last year I made some predictions.

I wasn't optimistic about the short term, when it came to folk embracing their values and passions and generating income from projects in alignment with these.

2025 has seen many in corporate roles paralysed. There's a growing unease, a more than nascent sense that the world is changing and some sort of strategy to adapt to it might be necessary, but without a whole load of movement in most cases.

In peak 'I cannot function without my corporate role' behaviour, we saw more than one person set up a GoFundMe to have others on LinkedIn pay their mortgage whilst they waited for 'the roles to come back'.

I also had several frustrating calls from folks claiming to want to pursue purposeful financial self-support but trapped by inherited beliefs and harmful habits, which made courageous and creative action impossible.

There's a sort of double think for many of these people: they can see that their own career prospects are more limited in many senses. They know that there are fewer roles, less flexibility, fewer benefits, cultures built around KPIs that make work frustrating, operations built around efficiency and automation which are particularly antithetical to those with sensitive or people-focused natures.

At the same time, they feel that 'while things are going well for me' they'd be foolish to initiate change. They plant seeds, and water their gardens, even as they watch the tornado take shape on the horizon.

They invest more time and energy in the career they claim to be disillusioned with than they do in growing self-awareness, developing new skills, building relationships outside of the bubble or anything that predates change.

I also predicted, 12 months ago, that mid 2026 would see a seismic shift in attitudes towards alternative entrepreneurialism.

That's a mere six months away now. Do I still feel the same?

Yes. And with growing evidence to support my beliefs.

The Cat is Out of the Bag

Denial was flavour of the month for every month of 2025 up until November/December, when a series of (I assume secretly co-ordinated) statements by global AI leaders (of which more later) made it impossible any longer to deny the societal and labour market impacts that developing technologies will have.

What this means for alternative entrepreneurialism is far from clear. The future of work is contested. What's now a matter of consensus is that:

• things are changing permanently
• each of us need some sort of response to that
• mindlessly waiting for our employer to issue another round of layoffs before sending CVs off into the void to be read by machines and asking strangers to 'share this with their network' or pay your mortgage is a very high-risk strategy indeed

Yes, AI is coming for the jobs

It's hard to believe that just 12 months ago the majority opinion on LinkedIn was that AI was a cheap, low-quality and unsustainable solution to business management.

Gleefully, posters identified 'giveaways' that AI had been used for tasks. Without irony, creatives and managers alike asserted that they were simply too skilled, too intelligent and too keen to continue to grow to be replaced.

In one of the largest exercises ever in collaborative self-delusion, huge swathes of professionals started publicly counting the em-dashes in each other's posts as some sort of evidence that the career Armageddon was a load of hype.

It was as if they were determined to miss the entire point of artificial intelligence: it improves. Rapidly. Much more rapidly than any individual can. And the richest and most powerful people and companies in the world are prioritising its development and use above all other agendas.

Try out running a tsunami.

There is, compared to this time last year, much more public acknowledgement that the changes coming from AI are profound, unprecedented in their speed and global nature, and that they will force us to ask ourselves: what does a human life need and mean? Further: if we wish to make a case for human life being necessary at all, on what basis should we do that? If we are as a species economically redundant: what purpose do we have?

From Niche Anxiety to Podcast Hot Topic

Stephen Bartlett is an intriguing figure. His Diary of a CEO podcast (one of very few to have over a billion streams, and to track regularly in global top 5s) maps his own development as a human being as well as tracking the shift in public consciousness that distinguishes late-term capitalism over the six or so years he's been podcasting.

From concern over success, money and material possessions (How To Make A Million was the approximate title of many of his early shows), to the prioritisation of a search for meaning, purpose and a way of thriving in an era of unprecendented technological change, he's someone who is shifting before our eyes in response to the existential threat posed by mental health collapse, the rise of AI and megatech.

Bartlett was open, in the latter half of 2025, in sharing that discussions he has had privately with global tech leaders, indicated a scale and pace of social change ahead which the public had little inkling of.

So Yoshua Bengio shared on the 18 December episode that:

“Jobs are already being replaced at an alarming rate … We have only two years before everything changes.”

In another episode, again in the last month of 2025, AI authority Professor Stuart Russell warned of a turning point where AI systems become so capable they fundamentally alter the calculus of corporate hiring. The discussion, titled “2030 Might Be The Point Of No Return!”, framed AI development an existential shift with labour market consequences.

In early 2025, Mark Zuckerberg, predicted that AI would soon be capable of performing the work of mid-level software engineers, particularly coding tasks that historically defined the career ladders of many technology graduates and established developers.

At the U.S.–Saudi Investment Forum on November 19, 2025, Elon Musk articulated a sweeping vision of AI’s impact that goes far beyond automation. He suggested that AI could one day make traditional work optional.

In early 2025 Google's CEO Sundar Pichai was denying AI would have any impact on Google's own hiring plans. By late 2025 in a BBC interview Pichai made one of the most striking remarks of the year: even the role of a CEO could theoretically be performed by AI “one day”: