Guiding Principles for Navigating AI Instead of Predicting

For the past couple of years, I've had fun making a set of AI predictions for the year ahead. This year feels different. Trying to predict the end state of the AI revolution right now feels like asking someone in the era of horse-drawn carriages to predict the societal impact of self-driving cars. The world is moving too fast for a "Bingo Card". So for 2026, I’m ditching the predictions and focusing on Guiding Principles. Instead of guessing what will happen, I’m committing to how I’ll navigate it: 1️⃣ Build to Learn: You can’t just theorize; you have to build. 2️⃣ Agency > Intelligence: In a world where intelligence is abundant, the drive to "figure it out" is the ultimate differentiator. 3️⃣ Cultivate Product Intuition: When execution speed is effectively infinite, the bottleneck is decision-making. You need the intuition to make the right call instantly. 4️⃣ Write to Think: Using writing not to preach, but to find out what I actually believe. 5️⃣ Stay Curious: Comfort is a trap. In today's substack post I expand on all of this - and also talk about something else that I think 2026 is going to be full of....balancing tensions: https://blog.jaclynkonzelmann.com/p/look…