Every’s 2026 Predictions

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How AI Changed Our Work in 2025 (And What’s Coming in 2026)

Every year, we ask the Every team to reflect on the year behind us and look ahead to what’s coming. As we head into 2026, we asked: What tool changed your work most in 2025? What’s coming next? What should we all be reading? This year, we got the same answer from almost everyone—and a few surprises.

The year of Claude Code

Ask the Every team what changed their work most in 2025, and you’ll hear the same answer: Claude Code.

COO Brandon Gell puts it plainly: “The first time coding agents really work and mostly the code they write works, which was not the case last year.” General manager of Cora Kieran Klaassen calls it “the first truly agentic app.” Head of consulting Natalia Quintero describes it as “having a research analyst who can spin up other analysts using subagents.” She used it to help a hedge fund build a market map of AI tools: “The first version took two hours. I spun up 10 subagents and had it search, get profiles on CEOs, and help us define how these companies differentiated themselves.”

Editor in chief Kate Lee‘s answer also comes from the Claude universe: Her go-to tool was an AI editor built in Claude Projects by staff writer Katie Parrott. Trained on Every’s best pieces, style guide, and editorial principles, it returns targeted revision suggestions on demand. “I don’t accept every suggestion, and I wouldn’t expect to,” Kate says. “But I take each one seriously because it’s telling me how to write like us at our best.”

For creative lead Lucas Crespo, MidJourney remains his go-to for brainstorming and creative inspiration, paired with Nano Banana. “It really feels like with a combo of those two, you can really do anything,” he says. His non-AI discovery of the year is design and prototyping tool Framer: “It’s just amazing how much you can do with very little technical knowledge and deploy React-ready pages like that.”

Ashwin Sharma, an MD and a regular contributor to Context Window, cites Google’s NotebookLM. He uses the tool as a “a brainstorming partner, uploading research documents and letting it help me see what I’m missing. It’s remarkable for revealing gaps, and what I love about it is that it doesn’t replace my thinking. Instead it somehow accelerates the messy early phase where you’re trying to figure out what you even think.” His also recommends Gemini Deep Research: “I run it roughly four times a day for deep dives on medical studies and journal literature.”

These picks reveal what Every values in AI tools: power, customization, and creative possibility; AI that adapts to your work, not the other way around.

Three predictions for 2026

1. Agents become infrastructure. CEO Dan Shipper sees a fundamental shift in how software gets built: “Anything a user can do in an app, an agent can also do. Then anything the app can do, the agent can do. Eventually, anything a developer can do—changing logic, fixing bugs, customizing behavior—will be something the agent handles on the user’s behalf.” Kieran puts it simply: 2026 is when agents go mainstream. Natalia thinks the most advanced companies will have agentic workflows embedded in daily operations by year’s end—particularly in finance, where “AI will allow tech-forward firms to synthesize an even broader amount of information. This will change the industry, similar to the way quantitative finance changed the industry.”

2. New roles are emerging. Dan predicts a third kind of engineer: agentic engineers who fully delegate implementation to AI and move up a level to managing and orchestrating agents. Kate expects most companies to have at least one dedicated role focused on building and maintaining internal AI systems by 2026—“someone whose job is to continuously optimize how the organization uses AI.” Ashwin says he thinks that workflows will change for analysts such as himself, too. “Right now I’m hopping between tools, but I want to ideally run everything from my terminal and let Claude integrate my research and somehow put it all together in a document.”

3. Designers become superheroes. Dan’s prediction: “There’s a whole class of highly creative, highly visual people who have been held back from making full experiences because they can’t code. Now they’re going to be able to code.” But Brandon says a prerequisite for designers embracing AI will be tools that don’t make it feel like coding, and hence are less intimidating. The next wave of builders may not look like the last one.

The wildcard: Head of platform Willie Williams has a prediction you won’t see coming: A mass-market robotic pet succeeds by the end of 2026. He bought a robotic cat and brought it to meetings. “About 85 percent of people viscerally hate it and want to throw it out, 10 percent are neutral, and 5 percent absolutely love it.” He’s watching a fluffy robot called Moflin, which he says has “nailed the experience of threading the uncanny valley.” Someone’s going to figure this out.

What we’re reading

For a raw and nostalgic look at software development, Kieran recommends Jordan Mechner’s The Making of Prince of Persia—the original game development journals. Willie suggests How We Got Here by Andy Kessler, a 20-year-old book about power and computation innovations that frames today’s AI and data center headlines in historical context. Kate calls out Leslie Jamison’s essay “The Pain of Perfectionism” in the New Yorker, which brilliantly reframes perfectionism from a humblebrag into what psychologists call a “personally terrorizing” state driven by fear rather than aspiration. And if you want to see how engineering teams are restructuring codebases for agentic work, Natalia points to this presentation on advanced context engineering—“a whole new paradigm.”—Katie Parrott

Knowledge base

“Every 2025: Our Year by the Numbers” by Every staff: What was the most frequently cited LLM across all Every articles in 2025? How many hours did listeners tune into the AI & I podcast? We gathered the highlights of what we published and launched in 2025 in true Every fashion.

🎧 “Reid Hoffman on How AI Might Answer Our Biggest Questions” by Dan Shipper/AI & I: On Christmas eve, we republished one of our favorite episodes from our podcast AI & I. Dan goes in-depth with Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, author, venture capitalist, and Every investor. They dive into understanding the way AI functions through the lens of philosophy and using it as a tool to make better business decisions. Though the conversation is from 18 months ago, the insights resonate even when we’re almost in 2026. 🎧 🖥 Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

🎧 “Four Predictions For How AI Will Change Software in 2026” by Rhea Purohit/AI & I: If the predictions above weren’t enough, join Dan and Brandon for a holiday podcast as they share their predictions for 2026. They discussed how software will be built, who will build it, and what it will take for truly autonomous AI agents to become a reality. 🎧 🖥 Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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