2026 will be a crucial inflection point for businesses. The data are strikingthe proportion of employees using AI in their role in the U.S. doubled between 2023 and 2025. Across the Atlantic, 30% of EU workers are already using AI in their jobs. And according to Gartner, by 2026 more than 100 million workers will collaborate with robo-colleagues.
The question for the coming year, then, is no longer whether AI will transform your organization, its whether your leadership team will guide that transformation thoughtfully or let it happen haphazardly, tool by tool and team by team.
I have spent much of the past year working with my research team and industry partners to think through the most pressing challenges organizations face as they implement AI at scale.
Drawing on this work, I have identified seven key priorities for leaders preparing for 2026. These arent isolated tactics but interconnected imperatives that, taken together, provide a road map for building resilient, adaptive, and human-centered organizations in the age of AI.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? ","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
1. Embrace Regenerative Leadership Principles
Traditional leadership models that focus on efficiency and extraction are creating burned-out workforces and fragile organizations. As AI increases the temptation to pursue short-term gains, leaders must shift toward regenerative approaches that actively restore and enhance human, environmental, and technological resources.
Regenerative leadership means moving beyond sustainability to create systems that actually improve over time. This involves:
Adopting systems thinking to see your organization as an interconnected ecosystem
Prioritizing employee well-being alongside productivity
Measuring impact beyond profit to include ethical AI usage and community impact
Companies like Patagonia, Interface, and Unilever have demonstrated that this approach doesnt sacrifice performance. Rather, it enhances it through improved brand loyalty, employee engagement, long-term resilience, and higher growth.
The key is recognizing that AI should augment human potential, not exploit it. Leaders who build purpose-driven, people-centered strategies will create organizations that dont just survive disruption but evolve through it.
Read more: The age of AI requires a new kind of leadership
2. Transform Your Organization, Not Just Your Training
Most organizations treat AI reskilling as a training problem. But AI will cause systemic change that affects virtually every function and workflow, so preparing employees for the coming revolution requires more than just teaching them how to use AI tools. Fundamentally, it requires organizational redesignreimagining what work looks like in the AI age and transforming the organization to enable that work.
Success requires workin in three interconnected dimensions:
Rebuilding the infrastructure of work (providing the tools, data access, and workflow redesigns that make AI adoption possible)
Redesigning interconnected roles across the organization simultaneously (because when one role changes, every connected role must shift)
Cultivating a learning culture that prizes experimentation over perfection and treats failure as data rather than disgrace
Read more: What AI reskilling really requires
3. Master the Art of Leading AI-Augmented Teams
Throughout history, the core competence of leadership has always been guiding humans to achieve defined goals. But in the age of AI, leadership will take on a new meaning: leading hybrid teams in which humans and AI systems work side by side. Leaders must learn how to leverage the unique strengths of each while creating the context in which those unique strengths multiply by working in concert.
In order to succeed, leaders must:
Personally engage with AI tools themselves, so they can understand and eventually model effective collaboration
Cultivate clarity of purpose to discern what is actually worth doing in a world in which AI makes everything possible
Become moral agents capable of navigating urgent ethical questions surrounding the use of AI
Develop the enhanced emotional intelligence needed to guide teams through an often unsettling transition
Read more: The 7 secrets to successfully leading AI-augmented teams
4. Build a Balanced AI Portfolio: Moonshots and Mundane Wins
Successful AI transformation requires a well-balanced innovation portfolioa deliberately diversified mix of initiatives spanning different risk levels and time horizons. Leaders must grapple with big-picture questions about industry transformation while simultaneously identifying tactical opportunities for near-term deployment. The immediately practical projects create the foundationand fundingfor more ambitious undertakings.
Evaluating which initiatives deserve resources requires systematic assessment across multiple dimensions: technical feasibility, true investment costs (including organizational attention), risk-reward balance, alignment with core purpose, and realistic timeframes. In our book Transcend and a companion piece in Harvard Business Review, we provide comprehensive toolsthe OPEN and CARE frameworksfor this strategic evaluation and portfolio management.
Critical to all of this is engaged leadership at the C-suite level. CEOs cannot simply delegate AI projects to technical leaders. Instead, they must orchestrate the entire innovation portfolio to maintain strategic coherence.
Read more: Why your organization needs both AI moonshots and mundane wins
5. Protect Your Organizational Uniqueness
When everyone uses the same AI tools that have been trained on the same public data, outputs converge toward generic mediocrity. The quirks, the specific language, the unique ways of thinking that define your organization get smoothed into statistical averages.
Competitive advantage in 2026 will come from authentic differenceleaning into what makes you, you. You can do this by:
Auditing your uniqueness: Identify what is different and distinctive about your organization.
Creating proprietary datasets: Whenever possible, use internal data rather than generic datasets that everyone has access to.
Establish AI-free zones: Maintain places where only humans get to operate.
Adversarial prompting: Use AI to critically evaluate your conclusions rather than to confirm them.
The goal isnt to reject AI but to use it strategically while preserving the distinctive elements that make your organization valuable.
Read more: How AI is creating a crisis of business sameness
6. Reinvent Middle Management for the AI Era
AI is eliminating traditional middle-management functions at an unprecedented rate. Gartner predicts that through 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of current middle-management positions. And by 2028 and 2029, AI-driven jobs chaos will force organizations to reconfigure, redesign, split, or fuse more than 32 million jobs every year.
There are significant efficiency gains to be made here. But organizations must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rather than simply trying to eliminate as much of middle management as possible, the task is to streamline it intelligentlymiddle management is still important, but its role must be fundamentally reimagined.
Orchestrating AI-human collaboration: Understanding how to integrate AI with humans
Serving as agents of change: Guiding organizations through continuous AI-driven disruption
Coaching for a new era: Mentoring employees through constant reskilling and role evolution
To successfully navigate this transformation, organizations must reskill middle management to enable them to succeed in their reimagined roles.
Read more: How AI is killing (and reinventing) middle management
7. Know When to Changeand When to Hold Steady
In a profoundly uncertain world, and a business environment in which the only constant is disruption, the most critical leadership skill of all might well be discernment: the wisdom of knowing what to preserve and what to transform.
Effective leaders distinguish between their organizations core identity (the what that they must not compromise) an their methods (the how that can be endlessly reimagined). In times of change, it is essential for leaders to be steadfast about the former while being completely flexible about the latter.
Read more: How to know when (and when not) to make a change
An Integrated Path
Not every organization will need to emphasize all seven priorities equally. A company with a strong and adaptable middle-management culture may focus elsewhere; one already grounded in regenerative principles can move quickly to portfolio building. The point is not to tackle everything at once but to recognize that these are the dimensions along which the AI transformation will play out, and to make deliberate choices about where to invest attention.
What leaders cannot afford is drift. Organizations that treat AI adoption as something that happens to themtool by tool, team by team, without strategic intentwill find themselves shaped by the technology rather than shaping it. The difference between leading and following in 2026 will come down to whether these choices are made consciously or by default.
The leaders who prepare their organizations for 2026 by tackling these priorities wont just survive the AI revolution. Theyll shape itbuilding organizations that are more resilient, more human, and more capable of creating lasting value in an age of unprecedented technological change.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? ","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
With President Trump back in the White House, this year has brought a barrage of executive orders and edicts that target workers. Trump reduced the minimum wage for federal contractors, made major cuts to the Occupational Safety and Health Administrationwhose express mission is to keep people safe in the workplaceand attempted to undermine collective bargaining rights for federal workers. He has also, of course, set his sights on dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across both the federal workforce and corporate America.
Still, theres a glimmer of hope for workers: Many states have taken it upon themselves to enshrine policies like paid leave and pay transparency, with some of them now turning their attention to how the misuse of artificial intelligence in hiring could harm workers. Here are some of the laws and policies that will take effect in 2026many of which continue to push forward on important issues for workers despite what the federal government has in store.
Anti-DEI measures
Trump has made anti-DEI policies a focal point of his time in office, kicking off this year with a number of executive orders that forced federal agencies to terminate all DEI-related policies and programs and stripped away a requirement for federal contractors that had been a crucial element of diversifying the workforce. That means, going into 2026, all federal DEI programs have been eliminatedbut there are a number of state-level bills that seek to curtail how DEI is utilized in hiring and across public education.
In Ohio, for example, legislation that passed this year prohibits any consideration of DEI in hiring decisions at public colleges and universities. Similar laws in Kansas, Idaho, and Wyoming will curtail DEI programs for hiring across higher education.
Meanwhile, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissionthe agency tasked with enforcing antidiscrimination laws in employmenthas made clear that corporate DEI programs will be under greater scrutiny going into 2026.
The use of AI in hiring
As companies have embedded AI into their hiring process, many HR teams have started relying on automated résumé screeners and other AI tools. In 2026, three laws will take effect at the state level to create some guardrails around how AI is being used for employment decisions, following in the footsteps of New York City and California, which have already adopted AI in hiring laws.
Colorado and Texas are introducing broader AI governance laws that also explicitly call for more oversight of how the technology is used in the hiring process to ensure it is not discriminatory. In Illinois, the law is an amendment of the states Human Rights Act and regulates how workers are impacted by the use of AI in all employment decisions. At the federal level, a bipartisan bill introduced in Congress last month wouldif passedforce employers to disclose when layoffs are caused by AI.
Minimum wage
The minimum wage continues to rise, year after year, as states have raised the wage floor in response to worker advocacy. As 2026 rolls around, 20 states will have enacted and started phasing in a $15 minimum wage, with hourly wages actually crossing $15 in a total of 11 states by the end of next year. Since 2012, a total of 15 states have adopted a $15 minimum wage, according to the National Employment Law Project, in no small part because of the Fight for $15 movement that originated among fast-food workers.
By the end of 2026, many workers will see even greater pay increases as the minimum wage is boosted to $17 across 53 cities and localities. A handful of states have also approved changes to the subminimum wage, which typically pays tipped workers a lower hourly rate. (There have been several proposals at the federal level to eliminate the subminimum wage altogether, but nothing has successfully passed.)
Paid leave
While the efforts to pass federal paid family leave have more or less come to a standstill, a handful of states have kept pushing to secure those benefits for their workers. In Delaware, Maine, and Minnesota, a paid leave program will take effect in 2026, joining 10 other states that have already introduced the benefit.
Meanwhile, states like Connecticut are making significant expansions to their paid sick leave program, now requiring companies with as few as 11 employees to provide leave. (By 2027, even employers with one worker will have to do the same.) In total, about 20 states now offer paid sick leave in some capacity, as these laws have picked up steam in recent years. A number of cities and localities also provide paid leave, even in states like Pennsylvania that dont have broader coverage.
Pay transparency
Pay transparency laws have grown in popularity over the last four years, in an effort to arm workers with more information as they go into salary negotiationsor before they apply for a job at all. These laws often require employers to disclose a salary range in all job postings, though some states have only mandated that employers verbally share salary information.
This year, Massachusetts and New Jersey adopted laws that require pay ranges in job listings, bringing the total number of states with these laws on the books to 14. At the local level, some cities in Ohio have started requiring salary disclosures, as is also the case in Washington, D.C. Salary transparency laws also often prohibit employers from asking about a candidates salary history during the interview process and using that to determine their compensation.
Lorrie Faith Cranors latest effort to educate people about privacy is a short, colorfully illustrated book written for an audience who probably cant read it yet.
Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Pittsburgh schools CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, wrote Privacy, Please! after publishing more than 200 research papers, spending a 20162017 stint as the Federal Trade Commissions chief technologist, and making a quilt and dress illustrated with commonly used weak passwords.
In a Zoom video call, Cranor says she got the idea for this self-published childrens book when planning for a privacy-outreach event at a local library and getting input from the librarians there revealed an unmet need for one. I asked them for their recommendations, and they didn’t know of any children’s books about privacy, she recounts. And you know, there really isn’t much out there.
Especially for a younger audience. The Eyemonger, a frequently recommended kids book by George Washington University Law School professor Daniel J. Solove published in 2020, is aimed at readers ages 6 to 9. Then I started thinking about, well, what would I want in a book for preschool kids about privacy? Cranor says.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Lorrie Faith Cranor]
The answer: 25 pages of her words and artwork by illustrator Alena Karabach, in which our nameless protagonist, often accompanied by a pet dog, turtle, and goldfish, explains basic concepts of privacy.
Sometimes I want to be alone. I dont want anyone to see me, hear me, or come too close. This is called privacy.
Sometimes I listen to music on my headphones so that only I can hear.
When my best friend comes over we play in my clubhouse. Its our private space!
Sometimes I want to create artwork without anyone watching.
Privacy can help us have more fun! Superheroes need privacy to put on their costumes.
My parents lock their phones so nobody can see their private things.
When I play games online I use a funny name and picture so strangers dont know who I really am.
Its nice to put my technology away and play outside where theres lots of privacy.
Cranor took inspiration for this from an earlier public-outreach project: Privacy Illustrated, a workshop she started in 2014 to invite people of many ages to draw depictions of what they thought the concept looked like. That, for instance, is where the turtle came from, she recalls. I had never thought about turtles this way until I saw people drawing pictures of turtles and saying turtles carry their privacy with them. The goldfish, meanwhile, is a finned metaphor for having no privacy at all. I told the illustrator, make the goldfish look as sad as you possibly can, Cranor says.
The first draft also included a dog giving himself some privacy by retreating into a doghouse. But the preschool teachers Cranor consulted pointed out that none of their city-kid students had doghouses and might not recognize a Peanuts reference anyway. Instead, the dog hides underneath a bed.
At no point do we see this childs entire face, a choice Cranor made early on.
I also wanted the main character to be a little ambiguous as to whether they’re a boy or a girl and what race they are, she saysthe idea being to give any child reading it a chance to see some part of themselves there.
Theres also little technology on display, aside from one page that shows the main character sitting before an iMac G4 that would now be at least 21 years old and so must be some sort of hand-me-down.
And any adult reader looking for explain-like-Im-5 advice about reading lengthy privacy policies wont find it in this slim volume. A lot of the more complicated lessons about online privacy just didn’t seem appropriate for this audience, Cranor says. But I didn’t want to not have digital privacy there at all, because, well, they’re already playing with their parents phones.
Plus, it wont be too long before the members of the books preschool audience will need some grounding in the basics of tech privacy. You know, next year they will be online, and so I wanted to plant the seeds for that,” Cranor says.
As for the parents, aunts and uncles, and other grownups reading the book aloud to children, Cranor says she hopes this work will encourage them to listen a little more. It’s okay to say you don’t want your picture taken, and this is a struggle for parents because parents love to take their kids’ pictures, she says.
The books website includes a discussion guide for parents as well as a door-hanger exercise for kids that invites them to make a version of a hotels door tag (Privacy, Please! or Lets Play!) for their rooms from a cut-up cereal box.
Cranor expects a large chunk of the sales of this $14.99 bookwhich she chose to self-publish after realizing that would take vastly less time than finding an agent to sell a traditional publisher on the ideawill involve other privacy professionals. They all want to buy it for the children in their lives,” she explains.
But another potential target market comes to mind: founders of large tech companies with a demonstrated record of paying inadequate attention to privacy and missing peoples tastes in technologin particular founders with young children of their on.
By which I mean, Mark Zuckerberg. Has Cranor sent him a copy of the book? I have not, she says. I mean, its probably worth trying.
The holiday season always reminds me that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. My kids start winter break thrillednew toys to play with, days at home, permission to veg out. But by the time the new year rolls around, theyre itching to go back to school, eager to show off their favorite holiday gifts and dive back into their routine.
It got me thinking: why dont we, as adults, approach returning to work after a vacation with that same positive energy?
More often than not, coming back from time off stirs up feelings of anxiety. For some, it reaches the point of canceling out any lingering benefits of the break. Others overcompensate by overworking upon their return.
Just as kids head back to school after winter break with renewed energy and a few shiny new accessories, we can return to the office with a sense of anticipation instead of dreadand without burning out right away. It all comes down to planning ahead and making smart use of the AI tools in your toolbox.
Here are some of the strategies that I use and share with employees at Jotform to help ease back into work after time away.
Automate the admin so you can focus on what matters
After spending the holidays with my family in the Turkish countryside, one of my favorite parts of returning to work is catching up with colleaguesswapping stories and photos from our OOO adventures. But I wouldnt have the time or energy to do that if I were buried under the tedious busywork of easing back into work mode.
Thats why I use, and encourage our employees to use, AI to automate as many manual administrative tasks as possible. It starts with an audit of your typical back-to-work routine, ideally before you leave the office, so youre prepared ahead of time. Make a list of every task in a normal day and all your responsibilities. Youll likely spot several that can be partially or fully automated with AIlike scheduling status meetings with Motion or Clockwise; taking meeting notes (and sending follow-up emails) with Fireflies.ai or Otter.ai; and managing your inbox with Superhuman, Shortwave, or Microsoft Copilot.
When you let AI handle the busywork, you create space for diving back into activities that you enjoy, like more meaningful creative work and reconnecting with your team.
Use AI to zoom out and see the big picture
Research shows that nearly half of American workers dont take all their paid vacation time. One of the main reasons is that they fear falling behind. That worry isnt entirely misplaced; stepping away from the daily grind does mean falling out of the loop for a bit. But its important to zoom out and keep your break in perspective.
Rather than focusing on the week-to-week, imagine that time off in the broader context of your year. Viewed this way, your vacation isnt a setback, but rather, its an investment in your long-term productivity. Studies consistently show that professionals who take regular breaks enjoy better sleep, higher job satisfaction, greater engagement, and stronger performance.
Compiling quarterly recaps is a great way to maintain that big-picture view and track progress toward annual goals. AI can do it for you. Tools like Notion AI, ClickUp Brain, or ChatGPT can take your company data and summarize project updates, highlight milestones, and visualize your progress, without you having to manually compile the reports.
Seeing your progress and achievements laid out explicitly can help you keep OOO time in perspective and eliminate the stress of falling behind when you return.
Reignite curiosity and your momentum
One of the biggest challenges of getting back on track after time away is momentum. When youre in the rhythm of work, collaborating with colleagues, or tracking project progress, productivity and ideation feel almost self-propelling. But after some much-needed R&R, getting that momentum back can feel like pushing a boulder uphill.
This is where AI can step in as a creative partner. Tools like ChatGPT can spark fresh ideas during brainstorming sessions, or analyze datalike marketing reports or customer feedbackto generate insights and actionable takeaways. By handling some of the initial heavy lifting, AI can help reignite the curiosity and creative energy that makes returning to work fun.
Finally, this may sound obvious, but give yourself time to ease back into work mode. Schedule some downtime, especially during the first week. Stagger your meetings, and resist the urge to burn the midnight oil right away. This can help prevent reentry shockthat disorienting jolt from relaxation to chaos. With a little thoughtfulness and some helpful AI tools, leaders and their teams can painlessly get back into the swing of things.
The United States hit Venezuela with a large-scale strike early Saturday and said its president had been captured and flown out of the country after months of intense pressure on Nicolás Maduro’s government an extraordinary nighttime operation announced by President Donald Trump on social media hours after the attack.
The legal authority for the strike and whether Trump consulted Congress beforehand was not immediately clear. The stunning American military action, which plucked a nations sitting leader from office, echoed the U.S. invasion of Panama that led to the surrender and seizure of its leader, Manuel Antonio Noriega, in 1990 exactly 36 years ago Saturday.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, would face charges after an indictment in New York. Bondi vowed in a social media post that the couple would soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.
Maduro and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges, but it was not previously known that his wife had been and it wasnt clear if Bondi was referring to a new indictment. The details of the allegations against Flores were not immediately known.
Early Saturday, multiple explosions rang out and low-flying aircraft swept through the Venezuelan capital, as Maduro’s government accused the United States of attacking civilian and military installations, calling it an imperialist attack and urging citizens to take to the streets.
With Maduro’s whereabouts not known, the vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, would take power under Venezuelan law. There was no confirmation that had happened, though she did issue a statement after the strike.
We do not know the whereabouts of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, Rodríguez said. We demand proof of life.
Maduro, Trump said, has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. He set a news conference for later Saturday morning.
The attack itself lasted less than 30 minutes and the explosions at least seven blasts sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report what theyd seen and heard. Some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed, according to Rodríguez, the vice president, without giving a number.
It was not known if there more actions lay ahead, though Trump said in his post that the strikes were carried out successfully.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted on X that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had briefed him on the strike and said that Maduro has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States.
The White House did not immediately respond to queries on where Maduro and his wife were being flown to.
Maduro last appeared on state television Friday while meeting with a delegation of Chinese officials in Caracas.
The strike came after the Trump administration spent months increasing pressure on the Venezuelan leader, including a major buildup of American forces in the waters off South America and attacks on boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean accused of carrying drugs. Last week, the CIA was behind a drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began strikes in September.
As of Friday, the number of known boat strikes was 35 and the number of people killed at least 115, according to the Trump administration. Trump said that the U.S. is engaged in an armed conflict with drug cartels and has justified the boat strikes as a necessary to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S.
Maduro has decried the U.S. military operations as a thinly veiled effort to oust him from power.
Some streets in Caracas fill up
Venezuelas government responded to the attack with a call to action: People to the streets!
Armed people and uniformed members of a civilian militia headed into the streets of a Caracas neighborhood long considered a stronghold of the ruling party. As daylight broke, some people rallied and yelled Bring back Maduro! while holding posters of the leader.
In other areas of the city, the streets remained empty hours after the attack. Parts of the city remained without power, but vehicles moved freely.
Video obtained from Caracas and an unidentified coastal city showed tracers and smoke clouding the landscape as repeated muted explosions illuminated the night sky. Other footage showed cars passing on a highway as blasts illuminated the hills behind them. The videos were verified by The Associated Press.
Smoke was seen rising from the hangar of a military base in Caracas, while another military installation in the capital was without power.
The whole ground shook. This is horrible. We heard explosions and planes, said Carmen Hidalgo, a 21-year-old office worker, her voice trembling. She was walking briskly with two relatives in Caracas, returning from a birthday party. We felt like the air was hitting us.
The Venezuelan government’s statement said that Maduro had ordered all national defense plans to be implemented and declared a state of emergency that gives him the power to suspend peoples rights and expand the role of the armed forces.
The website of the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, a post that has been closed since 2019, issued a warning to American citizens in the country, saying it was aware of reports of explosions in and around Caracas.
U.S. citizens in Venezuela should shelter in place, the warning said.
Reaction begins to emerge
Inquiries to the Pentagon and U.S. Southern Command since Trumps social media post went unanswered. The FAA warned all commercial and private U.S. pilots that the airspace over Venezuela and the small island nation of Curacao, just off the coast of the country, was off limits due to safety-of-flight risks associated with ongoing military activity.
The Armed Services committees in both houses of Congress, which have jurisdiction over military matters, have not been notified by the administration of any actions, according to a person familiar with the matter and granted anonymity to discuss it.
Lawmakers from both political parties in Congress have raised deep reservations and flat out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling on boats near the Venezuelan coast and Congress has not specifically approved an authorization for the use of military force for such operations in the region.
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the military action and seizure of Maduro marks a new dawn for Venezuela, saying that the tyrant is gone. He posted on X hours after the strike. is boss, Rubio, reposted a post from July that said Maduro is NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government.
Cuba, a supporter of the Maduro government and a longtime adversary of the United States, called for the international community to respond to what president Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez called the criminal attack.
Our zone of peace is being brutally assaulted, he said on X. Irans Foreign Ministry also condemned the strikes.
President Javier Milei of Argentina praised the claim by his close ally, Trump, that Maduro had been captured with a political slogan he often deploys to celebrate right-wing advances: Long live freedom, dammit!
By REGINA GARCIA CANO and KONSTANTIN TOROPIN
___
Toropin and Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro reported from Washington.
The new year often brings sticker shock. A glance at our bank statements and credit card bills shows just how much we spent during the holidays, serving as a painful reminder that with the festivities behind us, we should work on getting our expenditures under control.
A good first step toward doing that is to cancel unnecessary subscriptionswhether thats Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, or any other service you pay for monthly but dont use. These unnecessary subscriptions can add upespecially as prices continue to rise.
A 2025 CNET report found that the average U.S. adult spends $17 a month on subscriptions they dont usethats more than $200 a year. (A Self Financial study from the same year found subscribers were wasting less on unused subscriptions$10.57 per monthbut thats still more than $120 per year).
Unfortunately, canceling a subscription isnt always straightforward. Yet if you want to stop burning through money in 2026, axing unnecessary subscriptions is essential. Heres how to quickly find and cancel yours.
Track down your forgotten subscriptions
Ive known people who were surprised to discover theyd been paying for a subscription for years that they had completely forgotten about, and thus had been literally wasting money each month on something they didnt even use.
Thats why, if you want to stop wasting money on unnecessary subscriptions, you first need to find all yours. Thankfully, the digital nature of the payment methods we use can help us track down forgotten subscriptions:
Check your bank and credit card statements for any recurring fees from the same vendor. This is the biggest tip-off that you have a subscription youve forgotten about.
If you tend to subscribe to services via apps on your iPhone or Android, you may have signed up for them using Apples or Googles in-app purchase system. Apple and Google both make it easy to see what recurring subscriptions you are signed up for. Heres how to find those subscriptions on an iPhone and on an Android phone.
You may have subscribed to a service via an apps dedicated signup page. You should check your account settings in all apps that offer subscriptions to see if you have any there.
People also often subscribe to streaming TV channels (like Hallmark+ or Crunchroll) through third-party services, so its smart to check if you have any recurring subscriptions on those platforms, too. Heres how to see if youre paying for any extra subscriptions through Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, or YouTube.
The points above arent exhaustive, but you should be able to find most of your subscriptions this way.
Cancel subscriptions using your iPhone or Android
Once youve tracked down all your unnecessary subscriptions, the next step is to cancel them. The cancellation process will differ depending on how you signed up.
If you signed up via an apps dedicated signup page, open the app and navigate to its account settings. You should see a subscription cancellation option there (sometimes the app may point you to a website, email, or phone number you need to use to cancel).
If you signed up via an in-app purchase on the Apple App Store, open your iPhones Settings app, tap your Apple Account name, and tap Subscriptions. Find the one you want to cancel there.
If you signed up via an in-app purchase on the Google Play Store, open the Google Play Store app and tap your profile, account, then Payments & subscriptions. Tap the subscription you want to find the cancellation button for.
Quickly cancel your subscriptions online
Finally, some subscriptions require you to sign up or cancel on a web pageor at least allow you to cancel from any web browser. Here are some shortcuts to help pages for common subscriptions that explain how to cancel them.
Amazon Music Standard
Amazon Music Unlimited
Amazon Prime
Amazon Prime Video
Apple Music
Apple TV
Disney+
DoorDash
ESPN
Grubhub
HBO Max
Hulu
Netflix
Paramount+
Peacock
Spotify Premium
Uber Eats
Uber One
YouTube Music Premium
YouTube Premium
Every January, leaders are told to do the same thing: set ambitious goals, map out the year, and commit to executing harder than before. We frame this as discipline or vision, but more often than not, it is a ritual of pressure. The assumption is that success comes from wanting more and pushing faster.
After years of leading teams, building companies, and advising executives at the intersection of AI, work, and leadership, I realized something uncomfortable. Most people are not failing because their goals are unclear. They are failing because their capacity is already exhausted before the year even begins.
That realization fundamentally changed how I approach the start of a new year.
I no longer begin January by asking what I want to achieve. I begin by asking how I want to work.
This shift might sound subtle, but it has reshaped my leadership, my productivity, and my ability to sustain momentum over time.
The problem with goal-first planning
Traditional New Year planning assumes a stable environment. It assumes our time is predictable, our energy is consistent, and our attention is ours to control. None of that reflects the reality of modern work.
Leaders today are operating in a constant state of interruption. Meetings stack on top of each other. Slack never sleeps. Decision fatigue builds quietly. Add in personal responsibilities, emotional labor, and the cognitive load of navigating rapid technological change, and it becomes clear why so many January plans collapse by March.
We set goals in a vacuum, ignoring the systems we will need to support them. We optimize for ambition instead of sustainability.
The result is not a lack of discipline. It is burnout disguised as motivation.
A different starting question
At some point, I stopped asking, What do I want to accomplish this year? and replaced it with a more honest question: What capacity do I actually have?
Capacity is not just time on a calendar. It is energy, focus, decision bandwidth, and emotional resilience. It is also deeply personal and deeply contextual.
When I design capacity first, I look at four things before I set a single goal.
First, energy rhythms. When am I most creative? When do I do my best strategic thinking? When am I drained? Most people know this intuitively, but they plan as if every hour is equal.
Second, decision load. How many decisions am I making daily that could be automated, delegated, or eliminated? Leaders often underestimate how much cognitive energy is consumed by low-stakes decisions that pile up quietly.
Third, friction points. What consistently slows me down or causes unnecessary stress? This could be meetings without agendas, tools that do not talk to each other, or workflows that rely too heavily on me as the bottleneck.
Fourth, leverage. Where can systems, technology, or people multiply my efforts without requiring more from me?
Only after answering these questions do I begin thinking about goals.
Capacity as a leadership skill
Designing capacity is not about doing less. It is about doing what matters with intention.
As an AI strategist, I see organizations rush to adopt new tools without addressing the human systems underneath them. The same mistake happens in personal planning. We layer more objectives on top of broken workflows and wonder why execution fails.
Capacity-first planning forces leaders to confront trade-offs early. If you want to launch something new, what must be paused? If you want to grow, where must complexity be reduced?
This approach also normalizes a truth leaders rarely say out loud: you cannot do everything at once, and trying to do so is not a sign of strength.
In fact, the strongest leaders I know are ruthless about protecting their capacity. They understand that clarity, judgment, and presence are finite resources.
How this changes the start of the year
When January arrives, I do not sprint. I audit.
I review what actually worked the previous year, not just what looked impressive. I identify what drained me disproportionately relative to its impact. I redesign my calendar before I redesign my goals.
Then, and only then, do I set intentions that fit the container I have created.
Some years, that container is expansive. Other years, it is intentionally constrained. Both can be successful if they are honest.
This ritual has helped me avoid the boom-and-bust cycles that so many leaders accept as normal. It has also allowed me to build with consistency instead of urgency.
A reframing for modern work
New Years resolutions are not inherently flawed. What is flawed is treating ambition as the primary variable when the real constraint is capacity.
In a world defined by constant change, leaders do not need more pressure. They need better design.
The most effective way to begin a year is not by demanding more from yourself, but by building systems that support the work you want to do and the life you want to sustain.
Design your capacity first. Let your goals follow.
You might find that you accomplish more by asking less of yourself, and more of your systems.
New York City kicked off the new year with a new mayor in democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, whose inauguration flooded the internet with viral moments.
Mamdani took the oath of office via two separate swearing-in ceremonies. The more intimate one took place underground at midnight at a decommissioned City Hall subway station. With just a few hours as mayor under his belt, Mamdani was then sworn in for a second time by fellow democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.
Mamdani first reached internet stardom during his mayoral campaign, thanks in part to his campaign’s design and witty social media content, prompting a landslide victory and the highest mayoral race voter turnout in half a century.
Unsurprisingly, the viral political figure’s inauguration has taken over social media. We’ve rounded up some of the historic event’s most viral moments.
OG progressive stars spotted
While U.S. Sen. Sanders (I-VT) swore in Mamdani, he wasn’t the only popular left-wing political figure to take the stage.
U.S. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)who’s also garnered victories and popularity due to progressive pledges and an astute social media campaignintroduced the new mayor before his swearing-in.
@cnn Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced Zohran Mamdani before he takes his public oath of office as the mayor of New York City. original sound – CNN
In a video of AOC’s speech that has over 1.9 million views, users were divided in the comments, with many sending their best wishes to the new mayor while others expressed concern.
“As a Texan, I’m so jealous of NY,” one user commented, while another posted “God help NYC.”
Others showed excitement over Sanders and Mamdani sharing a stage, with one TikTok user posting a video of the pair hugging during the event. “A once-in-a-lifetime moment: watching Bernie Sanders swear in Zohran Mamdani as mayor of NYC,” the video said, with a caption reading “R u kidding me. Best day ever.”
A headline-grabbing fashion moment
Political figures were not the only ones to catch the public’s attention. Artist Rama Duwaji, Mamdani’s wife and now the first lady of New York City, gained attention over her footwear.
The New York Post took offense to the first lady’s apparent $630 dollar Miista boots, calling the choice a luxury and more “socialite than socialist.”
However, many users have taken social media to defend Duwaji’s choice.
“[You] know there’s nothing bad to report when you’re talking about his wife’s boots already,” one user responded via X.
“$630 for a shoe at a NYC mayoral signing is not a flex” another user said, adding that “anything less would be disrespect to the city.”
"socialism is when nobody can have expensive things" – new york post revealing how low quality their publication is— b (@wwxwashere) January 1, 2026
Another user pointed out that displays of wealth are routine in MAGA culture, calling out the hypocritical stance against Duwaji.
“I must have missed the $50,000 watch or $30,000 bracelets I see on MAGA women like Kristi Noem,” a user shared on X.
Popular Instagram page Diet Prada also commented on the issue, linking to past coverage on Melania Trump’s $100,000 shoe collection.
And others are even catapulting Duwaji to it-girl fashion status, particularly following a recent artistic cover for The Cut.
“Instead of functioning as a political accessory to her husband, Rama has 100% retained her identity,” freelance creative director Elysia Berman said on TikTok. “This is a win for weird art school girls.”
“Somewhere Over The Rainbow”
In another emotive moment, American actor and singer Mandy Patinkin gave a performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” alongside young students from Staten Island’s P.S. 22.
“A Jewish man singing at a Muslim man’s inauguration has me all teary-eyed,” one user commented on a video of the performance posted on TikTok.
@cbsnewyork Actor and singer Mandy Patinkin performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with students from Staten Island’s P.S. 22 at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration on Thursday. #newyork #nyc #mamdani #zohranmamdani #mandypatinkin original sound – CBS New York
Many users shared a similar hopeful message, with one posting to X: “Mandy Patinkin singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ with these kids is so beautiful and hopeful. I’m in tears.”
In the words of Jadakiss
In yet another pop-culture moment, Mamdani’s speech included a quote from New York rapper Jadakiss.
“Throughout it all, we willin the words of Jason Terrance Phillips, better known as Jadakiss, or J to the Muahbe outside,” the mayor said.
Both fans of the mayor and the rapper alike took to social media to express their surprise and excitement over the reference. One user posted on X: “Mamdani quoting Jadakiss in his inauguration speech is why hes my mayor.”
Another user on TikTok believes the new mayor, who is notorious for his pop-culture fluency, will continue to reference rappers in the future. “Mark my words,” the user said on TikTok. “He’s going to do it again, and whichever historians or internet historians are out there, y’all stay on deck. Documentation starts today.”
A California lawmaker has introduced a first-in-the-nation bill meant to ban companies from embedding AI chatbot technology into toys designed for children. Announced on Friday, the measure comes amid growing concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on child welfare, as well as a number of local and federal proposals to limit kids access to large language model (LLM) chatbots.
This particular legislation would target toys that simulate friendship and companionship through LLM technology. For toy manufacturers, LLMs can provide an easy, albeit risky, way of creating a personality for a particular doll or character. AI models arent pre-scripted the way most talking toys arewhich means toys integrated with the tech can end up sharing all sorts of inappropriate content with a young child. Case in point: Sales for an AI-enabled teddy bear were suspended in November after the toy, when investigated, started talking about sexual role-play and igniting matches.The California bill, authored by state Sen. Steve Padilla, is designed as a moratorium and would ban, until at least January 1, 2031, the sale of toys that include a companion chatbot meant for children 12 and younger.
The proposal defines a companion chatbot as an artificial intelligence system with a natural language interface that provides adaptive, human-like responses to user inputs and is capable of meeting a users social needs. The bill also targets chatbot technology designed to support an ongoing bond with a potential child, including by exhibiting anthropomorphic features and being able to sustain a relationship across multiple interactions.
Chatbots and other AI tools may become integral parts of our lives in the future, but the dangers they pose now require us to take bold action to protect our children, Padilla said in a statement. Our safety regulations around this kind of technology are in their infancy and will need to grow as exponentially as the capabilities of this technology does. Our children cannot be used as lab rats for Big Tech to experiment on.
Its not immediately clear whether the bill has legs. But the impact of artificial intelligence on kids has outraged local and federal lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. One bipartisan federal proposal from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), for instance, would ban the use of AI companions for minors and punish AI companies that make AI for minors that solicits or produces sexual content.
Notably, the White House has pushed back on state lawmakers hoping to regulate AI technology. Late last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would target states that write their own laws with litigation, and take a series of steps to establish one national approach to AI regulation on topics like child safety and alleged censorship. For now, though, its not clear how serious the Trump administrations efforts actually are.
Representatives for several organizations focused on digital welfare for kids did not respond to a request for comment on the legislation, which was released Friday, January 2.
For many Americans, 2025 wasnt a great year financially. The affordability crisis and general economic concerns became defining themes of the year as people dealt with rising costs and a worsening job market.
But for billionaires, 2025 was a boon to their already exuberant wealth.
The 15 richest billionaires in the United States saw their wealth grow by more than $1 trillion over 2025, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank
As of the end of 2025, those 15 billionaireseach with assets over $100 billionhave a combined wealth of $3.2 trillion, up from $2.4 trillion a year ago.
Thats a gain of 33%, which is more than double the growth of the S&P 500 in the same time period, the Institute for Policy Studies notes. Over 2025, the S&P 500 rose 16%. (A double-digit gain is strong, but it is down from recent years; the S&P 500 returned 23% in 2024, and 24% in 2023.)
How the wealth of the top 5 richest billionaires has changed
Not only did billionaires get richer in 2025, but more Americans became billionaires.
At the end of 2024, there were 813 billionaires in the U.S., according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data. Those billionaires had a combined wealth of $6.72 trillion.
By the end of 2025, there were 935 billionaires in the U.S., and their combined wealth totaled $8.1 trillion.
When Forbes first began tracking the 400 wealthiest Americans in 1982, there were just 13 billionaires on the list.
The top five wealthiest billionaires have changed over the last year, too. At the beginning of 2025, the top wealthiest billionaires were Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google cofounder Larry Page.
This year, Zuckerberg was bumped off that list, and Google cofounder Sergey Brin joined its ranks; 2025 was the best year for Googles stock since 2009, with shares growing 65%, buoyed in part by the tech giants push into artificial intelligence.
In contrast, the stock price for Zuckerbergs Meta Platforms grew about 13%. Though Meta also focused on AI, its strategy was more scattershot, experts have said, leading to internal confusion and the tech company falling behind other AI leaders.
In its analysis, the Institute for Policy Studies broke down the current top five billionaires, and how their wealth increased from January 1, 2025, to January 1, 2026. They are:
Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX: worth $726 billion, up from $421 billion a year ago
Larry Page of Google: worth $257 billion, up from $156 billion a year ago
Larry Ellison of Oracle: worth $245.billion, up from $209 billion a year ago
Jeff Bezos of Amazon: worth $242.billion, up from $233.5 billion a year ago
Sergey Brin of Google: worth $237 billion, up from $148.9 billion a year ago
The rich got even richer all around the world. According to a Bloomberg analysis, global billionaire wealth increased $2.2 trillion. (That analysis was released several days before December 31.)
An affordability crisis for average Americans
This stark increase in wealth among the already wealthy comes as many Americans are struggling with affordability.
Nearly half of Americans surveyed in a November 2025 Politico poll said they find it difficult to afford groceries, utility bills, healthcare, housing, and transportation.
Last year was filled with these stories: about grocery prices increasing, utility bills skyrocketing, and healthcare premiums surging ahead of the expiration of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies.
This crisis is expected to get even worse, experts say, as cuts to programs like Medicaid and food stamps will take effect in 2026. Those cuts are part of President Trumps budget bill, which he called the Big Beautiful Bill and signed into law 2025.
The cost-of-living crisis has led to a new public focus on both affordability and wealth inequality. That was seen in the election victory of Zohran Mamdani, who was sworn in as New York City mayor on January 1.
Mamdani campaigned on making New York more affordable, and received notable support from public figures, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former labor secretary Robert Reich, both of whom have frequently criticized billionaires.
More everyday Americans seem to be paying attention to inequality and criticizing billionaires, too.
In a 2025 Harris Poll, nearly three-quarters of Americans said wealth inequality is a serious national issue, and 67% said billionaires are “creating more of an unfair society.”
