New Year’s Predictions: Business School Thought Leaders On What Lies Ahead In 2026

THE PAST YEAR HAS SEEN technology company leadership position themselves increasingly assertively in political and social spheres, pursuing compute power and regulatory rollback with total disregard for climate impacts, democratic norms, and privacy protections. This trajectory will likely generate a more visible countervailing reaction in the coming year. We can expect to see segments of users downgrading to dumb phones, abandoning social media platforms degraded by “AI slop,” and more broadly pulling back from digital engagement altogether – similar to how users have exited dating apps overwhelmed by bot accounts. This represents both a shift to alternatives and a simple withdrawal from platforms that no longer serve their intended social functions.

This user exodus, combined with mounting evidence about whether current AI technologies are approaching performance plateaus, will create conditions for a market correction. The divergence between inflated valuations predicated on continued exponential capability improvements and actual technological trajectories will become harder to ignore, particularly as the social and environmental costs of massive computational infrastructure become more politically salient. The existential predictions promoted by tech CEOs and pundits – “AGI” timelines, superintelligence thresholds, an AI arms race with China – will be increasingly exposed as fundraising rhetoric rather than technologically grounded forecasts.

– Virginia Leavell, Assistant Professor in Organisational Theory and Information Systems, Cambridge Judge Business School

Wishful thinking? The peak of AI hype in 2026

I’M GOING TO MAKE THE kind of prediction that could come back to haunt a person: the hype around AI in business school education will pass its peak in 2026. I don’t mean a peak in terms of its capability or innovation in how it can be applied, but a turning point in how people understand its value in the business school classroom. After a couple of years of unfettered exuberance, at time verging on the absurd, faculty and students and Executive Education participants will reach a more mature understanding of its role.

So while the technology may continue to advance apace, the novelty will wear off. AI’s surface-level answers to complex organisational and societal problems will start to grate. And as the shine fades, a desire for the “true” value of business school education at its best will re-emerge: being in a room with peers from many different countries and sectors, with many different experiences and views of the world; debating, building, creating, challenging one another in ways that cannot be replicated by algorithm.

Programmes that push AI too much to the fore will begin to fall out of fashion. Classroom dialogue and debate will return to centre stage. Or maybe I’m just imagining the world I would like to see rather than the world that will emerge in 2026 and beyond.

– Paul Tracey, Professor of Innovation and Organisation and Vice-Dean for Research, Cambridge Judge Business School

2026: The Year Behaviour Meets the Planet

IF 2026 WERE A BEHAVIOURAL experiment, it would be a complex but enlightening one – a global test of our collective ability to align good intentions with smart incentives. And while the data are still coming in, the early results are, well, intriguingly mixed.

Take China. Once the industrial workhorse of the world, it has become an environmental overachiever. Batteries, electric vehicles, hydrogen, renewables – the list goes on. Its new Five-Year Plan reads like science fiction, but the plot twist is: they might actually make it happen.

Elsewhere, policymakers are slowly learning that system change requires more than vision. It needs good governance: sophisticated, stable, and evidence based. Businesses, in turn, need coherence and reliability, along with regulatory frameworks that make long-term, sustainable investments not only possible but profitable. Behavioural economics 101: reduce uncertainty, and people (and companies) are more likely to act for the future.

While the temptation of isolation persists, no country can tackle planetary overshoot alone. Climate change doesn’t do borders, and cooperation – more, not less – is the only rational response. If global unity feels too ambitious for 2026, then regional collaboration, especially in Europe, is a perfect place to start.

Will 2026 be a good year to save the planet? Politically, perhaps not. But as behavioural economists remind us, humans are remarkably adaptable – even against the odds. You do not give up the future because it is hard; you pursue it because it is possible. And perhaps, just perhaps, 2026 will be remembered as the year optimism became a collective behaviour worth catching.

– Lucia Reisch, Director of the El-Erian Institute of Behavioural Economics and Policy, Cambridge Judge Business School

Entrepreneurship 2026: Lessons from Science Fiction

IN THE WORLD OF INNOVATION and entrepreneurship, there is a history of getting the future spectacularly wrong. Elon Musk said that we were two years away from completely autonomous cars, in 2016. Bill Gates, in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead, suggested that the internet would not become a major platform for commerce, and Larry Ellison thought cloud computing back in 2008 was “complete gibberish”, nothing more than a passing fad.

If we turn instead to science fiction, in imagined futures writers and filmmakers have long explored not just new technologies but their social consequences. In Ghost in the Shell (1995), the boundary between human consciousness and artificial intelligence dissolves, raising profound questions about identity and agency. In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), a hyper-commercialised digital society escapes into immersive virtual realities. And in the Star Trek universe, the year 2026 marks the beginning of World War III, sparked by conflict over genetic engineering, a warning about the moral risks of enhancement and inequality.

It is interesting that while our real-world innovators often overestimate technological progress, our fiction has been far more effective at anticipating the frictions, inequalities and ethical dilemmas that accompany it.

So yes, 2026 is a world that is beginning to resemble near-future science fiction worlds imagined over the decade’s past.  Several converging dynamics (AI, geopolitical instability, climate volatility and social fragmentation) are redefining and reshaping what it means to innovate, and the role of entrepreneurship.

After a decade of start-ups being celebrated for moving fast and breaking things, we will see the pendulum swing the other way towards repair, resilience and reconfiguration. Rather than a focus on disruption, there is a growing opportunity around entrepreneurial endeavours that fill in the gaps left by technology – climate restoration, circular supply chains, humanising automation, social cohesion and digital trust. As I was writing this, I ran a “pitching” evening for entrepreneurs – and the ventures had two things in common: they were all high tech (AI, robotic, bioscience, materials) and they all were using these technologies to make a positive change in the world (sustainable manufacturing, social cohesion, healthcare, aging populations). Taking inspiration from science fiction (more so than the tech leaders of our time), and those nascent ventures, in 2026 entrepreneurship will shift from inventing new technologies to re-imagining how humans, machines, and ecosystems coexist. These ventures, enabled through possibilistic thinking, are developing visions of the future through building a narrative of the current challenges and technologies alongside an empathetic understanding of the impact on the communities they are developed within.  In 2026 we will see the beginnings of a post-disruption paradigm – the future founder not as disruptor, but a designer of balance, cultivating equilibrium in an increasingly unstable world.

– Monique Boddington, Management Practice Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Studies in Entrepreneurship Programme, Cambridge Judge Business School

Crisis of overwork looms after AI-related layoffs

IN A CONTEXT IN WHICH every major tech firms and beyond are announcing significant layoffs, pinned on AI-driven productivity gain, I believe we are about to enter a new crisis of overwork.

Most of the firms that are engaging in mass dismissals are still unsure about how they will achieve productivity gains with AI – they are laying off their people before thinking how AI can practically and concretely replace them at scale. It means that those employees left behind will not only suffer from a survivor syndrome (being demotivated and having lost trust in their organisation due to seeing colleagues getting fired) but they will have to cover the labour gap left by the layoffs. Firms will then be at risk of demotivating and burning out their best people, having soon to go back to the job market to rebuild their human resources.

– Thomas Roulet, Professor of Organisational Sociology and Leadership, Cambridge Judge Business School

In marketing, a more local focus in a globalised world

GLOBALISATION IS OF COURSE REAL and irreversible, as we are all dependent on supply chains that span continents and time zones, but globalisation is not the same as a single global consumer culture. I expect that in 2026 we will more clearly see that consumer culture is instead divided into several “innovation circles” such as countries belonging to the BRICS+ bloc (emerging economies, which will surpass the G7 in global trade share), mostly wealthy OECD countries, and Non-Aligned nations. Along with this, we’ll see brands co-creating with local ecosystems rather than adopting one-size-fits-all marketing campaigns, and this more local approach will allow companies to adapt quickly to changes in those local or regional markets.

This strategy is not risk-free, as brand coherence can be strained if not handled carefully. So there’s a real opportunity for “creatives” (in both the advertising and innovation senses) to craft firm identities in a hybrid manner that feels globally aspirational yet locally authentic. And global trade tensions could bring tariff retaliation from various parts of the world that pose further difficulties for such brand positioning.

I also expect that trust will emerge as the most valuable marketing currency in 2026 as consumers tire of algorithms and AI. This trust can be generated through verifiable sustainability claims, traceable supply chains and dashboards that clearly illustrate corporate claims. Firms that fail to do so risk reputational backfire and loss of competitiveness.

– Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing and Vice-Dean of Faculty at Cambridge Judge Business School

Countering inflationary pressure through tech innovation

OWING IN PART TO CONTINUING negative supply shocks, both short and medium term and some likely permanent, economies around the world could face enhanced inflationary pressure coupled with sluggish growth in 2026.

My hope is that we can counter this through positive technology shocks from innovations in areas including agritech, fintech and climate tech, which can improve productivity and spark new potential growth. Given this backdrop, it is important in business schools and beyond to develop data analysis and AI tools along with strategic thinking, communication skills and adaptability. This will help leaders current and future to identify the relevant questions to be tackled and to communicate them well and effectively with a focus on smart and responsible results.

– Juliana Kozak Rogo, Management Practice Associate Professor and Director of the MBA Programme at Cambridge Judge Business School

Next Page: Predictions from INSEAD, Georgetown McDonough, Emory Goizueta, ESCP & ESSCA.

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