The modern English verb ‘to conjure’ is derived from the Latin conjurare, meaning ‘band together by an oath, conspire.’ Its roots con (‘with’) and jur (‘legal right or authority, law’) echo with questions central to our present day struggle with technology: Who do we trust to determine authority? Why do we believe in them?
Conjuring also evokes magic, sorcery, and wonder, essential elements of the tech industry mythos. My earliest pieces on the impact of generative AI leaned on the metaphor of magical “genies” doing our bidding in a relationship bound by loyalty and trust. Do those genies work for us, or are they the product of conjurers beyond our control? Do they demand faith, or instill it?
Today’s technology industry is defined by conjurers of the first order – they captivate us with stories of AI’s power, then justify their actions as inevitable outcomes of their narratives. Techno-optimism becomes religious text; beating China in the race to AGI becomes pretext for dismantling regulation, ignoring climate change, and redirecting capital from public good to private gain.
In 2026, all of us will be challenged to answer one simple question: Do we trust these conjurers?
In the United States, we’ve always been drawn to a good conjurer. Priests are conjurers, as are lawyers, directors, actors, musicians, politicians, writers, and lunatics. All are tellers of tales and weavers of possibility. We believe so deeply in the power of an individual to change the world for the better that we’ve mythologized the notion that anyone can succeed through hard work, perseverance, and honesty. We revere the “self made man.”
But no class of conjurer has captured our imagination quite like the modern entrepreneur. These spell casters weave words into facts, imagination into capital, and capital into action. What begins as a story becomes a company made real by a band of conspirators. Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, OpenAI – these are world-changing companies birthed of incantations, faith, and capital. We celebrate them as proof of our shared belief in the American dream.
—
2026 will mark the year that conjurers are no longer solely human. For the first time, we confront a set of technologies capable of conjuration independent of human constraint or comprehension. We’ve built story machines that can entertain, inform, advise and manipulate us – machines designed to conjure anything we care to consume.
Do we have any idea how to handle such a beast?
As Stewart Brand famously declared decades ago as he contemplated the impact of technology on society, “we are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” 2026 will be the year we find out how good we’ve gotten.
I’m not sure how this story will play out, but I am sure of one thing: its ending will be determined by trust. Trust is sometimes a slippery concept, but I like this definition: “The willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the action of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.”
In 2026, we’ll collectively decide if we trust generative AI, and any number of actors will prosper or fail based on that trust. And since this is supposed to be a predictions post, I’ll give you a few specific examples of what I mean:
- Leveraging its market position as an advocate for individual privacy and safety, Apple will leapfrog into the top echelon of AI companies by cleverly productizing (and commoditizing) generative AI across its walled garden ecosystem. Its core message will be “Trust Us – We’re Apple.”
- OpenAI will struggle throughout the year. It will try to do too many things and be constantly distracted by its governance structure, to be sure, but as a young company driven by a “move fast and break things” mentality, it will lose the confidence of consumers, many of whom will opt for brands they feel they can trust.
- Large consumer brands – think P&G, Nestle, Coca Cola, JP Morgan Chase – will realize that in the context of AI sweeping through society, their most effective competitive advantage is the trust their brands evoke amongst consumers. Expect many of them to launch marketing campaigns positioning themselves as trusted partners, not just as purveyors of superior consumer products.
In short, 2026 will be the year that trust becomes the essential ingredient in business, culture, and society. And we’ll have the conjuration of generative AI to thank for the trend.
—
This is the ninth and final in a series of post I’ll be doing on predictions for 2026. The first eight are here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. My next post will be a short roundup, like I usually do.