In my latest Substack, I ended with an observation that’s been sticking with me: it often feels like I’m living in two different worlds at the same time. I didn’t fully unpack it there, so this post is an expansion of that idea.
Not as a prediction or a warning, but as an honest reflection on what it feels like to lead an insights company in 2026.
In one world, I spend a lot of time reading, thinking, and experimenting with how AI is changing my industry and the future my company is heading into. I’m watching the distance between an idea and a working output collapse. I’m seeing analysis, synthesis, and even software creation get dramatically easier.
In the other world, most days still feel familiar.
Clients ask for the same deliverables. Meetings look mostly the same. Decks still get built. Legacy tools still work well enough. If you weren’t paying close attention, it would be easy to conclude that not much has really changed.
That gap between those two worlds is the quiet part of this moment.
And it’s where leadership gets uncomfortable.
At PeopleMetrics, I’m intentionally pushing us into areas I know aren’t comfortable yet. We’re rethinking how data gets collected. We’re questioning long-standing partnerships and defaults that once made sense but must be revisited. We’re experimenting with AI-native ways of building, analyzing, and delivering insights.
From the inside, this doesn’t feel neat or linear. It feels ambiguous. It involves trying things that don’t fully work yet. It requires asking people to let go of familiar processes before there’s a universally accepted replacement.
That’s hard.
What makes it harder is that the external environment doesn’t yet force urgency. The old way still functions. Clients aren’t demanding something radically different (yet). If we wanted to wait, we probably could.
And I hear the objections along the way.
“Our clients don’t want that.” “They’re not asking for this.” “This feels ahead of where the market is.”
I understand the instinct. I’ve had the same conversations before.
But it always reminds me of the line often attributed to Henry Ford. If you had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. No one was asking for a car. They were asking for incremental improvement inside a world they already understood.
That’s how change usually shows up.
Clients don’t ask for what they can’t yet imagine. They ask for better versions of what they already know. Waiting for demand to be explicit is often how you end up late.
The reason this matters comes down to how value in insights is changing.
For most of the history of our industry, execution was the value. Designing the study. Managing fieldwork. Cleaning data. Coding verbatims. Producing the report. Those things were hard, time-consuming, and expensive. If you could do them well and reliably, you created real value.
AI is quietly changing that equation.
Data collection is getting cheaper and more flexible. Analysis that once took weeks now happens in hours. First-pass summaries and narratives are increasingly automated. Execution, which used to be the bottleneck, is becoming abundant.
That doesn’t make insights less important. It raises the bar for what counts as insight.
This is where bringing insights to life stops being a tagline and becomes a necessity.
Bringing insights to life means moving beyond reporting what customers said and helping people feel it and really understand it. It means closing the gap between information and decision. Making insights tangible, contextual, and emotionally resonant enough that they influence behavior.
That kind of work is harder, not easier.
It requires judgment. Taste. The ability to decide what matters, not just what’s measurable. It requires challenging outputs instead of accepting them at face value. It requires storytelling that creates clarity, not just content.
This is the shift I’m leading us into.
I know it creates discomfort. Change like this doesn’t arrive with certainty. It arrives with experimentation and moments where the old way feels safer simply because it’s familiar. From the outside, nothing looks broken. Inside, you can feel that the center of gravity is moving.
I talk to other founders and leaders who feel the same tension. They’re pushing their organizations forward while the broader environment still rewards staying put. They’re making decisions that won’t fully make sense until later, when the change is more obvious to everyone else.
This isn’t about chasing hype. It’s about recognizing that the world is drifting, not standing still, and deciding whether to drift with it or lead into it.
The quiet part is that nothing looks broken yet.
The honest part is that a lot has already changed.
And the work now, especially in insights, isn’t just producing more outputs faster. It’s bringing insights to life in a world where simply producing them is no longer good enough.
