5 AI Habits That Will Separate Winners From Losers in 2026

In 2026, the top 1% of AI users are going to pull even further ahead of everyone else. I'd know because for the past 3 years, I have been in this 1% and my life has completely changed. I've built multiple successful AI businesses. I've generated millions. I have built my dream life. And here on this channel, I've helped millions to also start their own AI businesses. But the thing is, what worked in 2025 is just not going to cut it in 2026. There are some major

shifts happening right now around how to use AI that people at the cutting edge of this technology like myself and my team and my friends are using to pull even further ahead in 2026. Things like a tiny desktop app that literally makes you three times more productive at your computer, simple AI tweaks that eliminate app switching and give you hours back every single day, and a new and emerging way to use AI to save you thousands and thousands of dollars on shopping alone next year. So, in this

video, I'm going to be breaking down the five AI shifts that are going to separate winners from losers in 2026. For each one, I'm going to be explaining what the shift is and then giving you the exact steps that you can take to join the 1% based up that shift. So, the first major AI shift you need to be aware of for next year is the death of the keyboard and the transition over to voice being your primary method of input into your computer and your phone and

any way you interact with technology. By the end of 2026, the most productive and successful people are barely going to be touching their keyboard anymore. You go back to the earliest computers, it was like punch cards and you'd put it in and it was didn't really have an interface. And then we got a keyboard and mouse and we're able to start to put more data in. And then we got phones and touchcreens and so on, but we've always been quite limited in how much information we can

put into a computer because it's been done with our hands. Even Elon Musk talks about this a lot. He says that our eyes as as humans, we can take in millions and millions of bits of information per second, but our fingers can literally only output maybe 10 bits per second. Voice is the bridge that opens us up to being able to interact with computers much faster and much more naturally. So what does this actually look like in practice? Who how are people really using it right now? Well,

there are tools like Whisper Flow, which is a basically an AI transcription assistant that you can put onto your computer and then wherever you are in your computer and you can even get it on your phone. You can press a little shortcut and it will start to record your voice. So you have your headphones in, you might have a microphone, then you can just talk and then press the button again. It will transcribe what you said and then put that into the text box or wherever you have just clipped.

And so while that may seem quite basic, there's been studies done by Stanford that show that if you are typing, you are doing at around 53 words per minute, if you're speaking, it can go up to 161 or more words per minute. And naturally, this has massive impacts on your productivity. So for example, with me, I've been using Whisper Flow for about 6 months now, and my average words per minute is 151. And my typing is about sort of average. So you can say I'm getting a 3x productivity boost on

everything I do on my computer. And this is particularly valuable when you combine it with things like chatbt or claude projects and your ability to pour information and I don't have to be very specific about the exact words I'm saying to chat anymore. I just turn it on and I can just sit there literally like roll back in my chair and I could just talk and then hit submit and chat is able to figure out what I want from there. It's super super powerful and is

literally a central part of everything I do with AI and everything I do on my computer. So here we have a fork in the road. We have the winners who are going to be the people who embrace voice and using transcription services like Whistler Flow to become far more productive and essentially just going to have a massive unfair advantage in 2026. And the losers are going to be the people who get stuck on their keyboard and they're literally choosing to be onethird of the speed of their

colleagues. So, what can you do to get started? Well, of course, head and download something like Whisper Flow. I'm not affiliated with these guys at all. It's literally just what I use, but you can start playing around with it. Set up your shortcuts and then maybe tomorrow you can try to do all of your morning work or your emails just purely through voice. It takes a little bit of a a building a habit of using it, but once you have it, I promise you it will

colleagues. So, what can you do to get started? Well, of course, head and download something like Whisper Flow. I'm not affiliated with these guys at all. It's literally just what I use, but you can start playing around with it. Set up your shortcuts and then maybe tomorrow you can try to do all of your morning work or your emails just purely through voice. It takes a little bit of a a building a habit of using it, but once you have it, I promise you it will

completely change how productive you are at your computer. So, getting into shift number two in 2026, the chat interface like chat GPT or claude is going to become your central operating system, your core way of interacting with basically the entire internet. What I mean by this is that your desktop and all these different apps you're using and swapping between apps is going to become largely obsolete because these chat interfaces are trying to load more and more and more features in it so that

you don't have to go anywhere else. And this is important because all of this switching between apps is actually a massive waste of our time when we having to context switch and move between different applications. We inevitably are much slower in doing the thing we want to do. And according to a Harvard Business Review study, the average person switches between apps 1,200 times per day. And then it takes on average 23 minutes to regain focus on the new task that you're looking at. So what I'm

saying is that in 2026 you will have more and more opportunities to consolidate all of your different applications and things that you do on the internet into chat or claude or whatever one of choice you like to use and the more you can optimize that and the more you can get it to be done within one place the more productive you're going to be because you're not going to be switching around. There's a massive uplift and productivity available to everyone next year. How is

Claude and Chach going to be able to pull more of the internet into the same place? Well, it's happening through three kind of major innovations going on. So you may be familiar with Claude's MCP protocol, which is model context protocol. And this is just basically a fancy word for a the ability for Claude to pull in things into the chat to connect with your favorite apps like Google Drive or Google Calendar or Notion etc. and set up these integrations and then when you're

chatting away in Claude, it's able to actually go into those apps and pull information for you or to actually go into those apps and do things for you. And this is something in 2025 that the top 1% have already been using heavily. It's making something like Claude be able to do a lot more things in the apps that you already use and allowing you to just stick in that Claude window a lot more. Another innovation on top of this which is making Claude in particular

look like a very very good place for the top 1% to be living next year is what's called Claude skills. And so these are basically reusable workflows that say myself um I have podcast guests and I've created a Claude skill to automate the podcast research for each guest that comes on. So, I used to have to spend an hour or two looking around the internet trying to find all the podcasts that my guests were on, figure out what they said in that so I know roughly what they

like to talk about, figure out their background, all of this backstory and just learn who this guest is and come up with questions and angles I can take the conversation. The awesome thing is that with Claude Skills, I was able to take that entire workflow that I would usually do myself. And thanks to Claude's ability to search the web for its ability to connect to my notion, my calendar, and things like this, I can write a Claude skill and save it to my Clawude account, which is just a

step-by-step process and instructions on what it should do. It's like do this, then do this, then do this, then do this, and then when you're done, give me this report back. And so, you can compress different workflows and things that you do in your job or role or for your business and turn it into a skill that's reusable. Now, when it comes time to research a guest for my podcast, I can just activate the skill and say, "Hey, can you please research this guest? Here's a couple of the key links

you might need to get started." And then within 10 or 15 minutes, I have a full completed research sheet ready to go. So, I hope you're starting to see how things like Claude's MCP and Claude Skills allow us to pull more work into the chat interface. And there's actually another interesting way that OpenAI and Chat GPT are trying to solve this problem, and that is with OpenAI's app kit, which basically allows platforms like Canva and other of your favorite

apps to be pulled into Chat GPT and used within it without ever having to go to the website. And it's an interesting way. We yet to kind of see if a lot of app providers do this and make their own apps within chat GPT, but this is definitely something to keep an eye on, right? So the two paths here, we have the winners who are going to become basically like AI orchestrators. They're going to set up their claude or their chat GPT to have full access to their applications through MCP or AppKit.

They're going to have figured out the Claude skills to automate parts of their workflow and bake in parts of MCP into those workflows so that they can just sit in that chat window pretty much all day and run their whole business or run their whole life and ultimately be 5 to 10 times more productive than the average Joe. And as for the losers, they're going to be the people who resist this change and they keep manually juggling 20 different apps and tabs. They're going to be spending

basically half their day just juggling software and they're going to become their own biggest bottleneck to their own productivity. So what are the action steps to joining the 1% with the shift? Well, first thing is to pick your platform of choice. Honestly, I'd probably be leaning more towards Claude at this point. I would go in there and I'd set up my MCP service to Notion is a great one. You can get it to build things out in notion for you. Uh you can connect your Google calendar, your

Gmail, all these different apps and there's a lot of extra support beyond just those. So go in there and figure out what apps you currently use, set up your MCP server so that Claude has the ability to use your own apps for you all from one centralized place. From there, you want to identify one repetitive task that you do every week and then build out your first Claude skill to automate that for you using all of your favorite MCP servers in the same time. Shift

number three for 2026 is that building software becomes a basic literacy. One of the biggest shifts we saw in 2025 was this explosion of vibe coding and using AI to build applications and software for people who have no technical or coding ability. The vibes are going to explode. They're going to get even bigger. They're going to invade every part of our lives. We are basically entering an era thanks to AI of vibe everything where you don't need to be technical. You don't need to be an

expert in anything. As long as you know how to prompt the right system, you can get any kind of outcome you want. And the point here is that those who realize that we're living in a different game. There's a different set of rules right now. Maybe you weren't trained up in a certain area, but thanks to Vibe everything and and this ability for AI to help you on pretty much anything you want to do, the possibilities of what you can do with your life and career are

almost endless. The way I see it, there are three main ways that vibes are going to appear in in your life next year. And firstly, it's just with vibe coding. If you haven't already had a play around with things like Bolt or Lovable or the Google AI studio, these are platforms that allow you to just explain an app you want. Maybe you want a meal planner. Maybe you want a to-do list tracker. Maybe you want to replace a clunky spreadsheet at work with a nice looking

almost endless. The way I see it, there are three main ways that vibes are going to appear in in your life next year. And firstly, it's just with vibe coding. If you haven't already had a play around with things like Bolt or Lovable or the Google AI studio, these are platforms that allow you to just explain an app you want. Maybe you want a meal planner. Maybe you want a to-do list tracker. Maybe you want to replace a clunky spreadsheet at work with a nice looking

dashboard or something. You can just describe a natural language what you want and AI will build it for you. Myself and the rest of the 1% do this all the freaking time. I was doing it last night. I built out a custom application in like 20 minutes to track my coaching insights where I can upload my coaching calls with my coach and I get to chat over them and ask questions and do certain things that are relevant to my coaching process with them. It looks freaking awesome and does exactly

what I need and has saved me hours every week of going through our coaching calls and figuring out the next steps. The key thing is that in my opinion, everyone needs to kind of lose their vibe coding virginity as soon as possible. Because once you realize that this is something you can do to solve your own problems, to create cool tools for yourself or for your team, that opens your brain up to the possibility that these new problems that you encounter at work can be solved

with some software that you can create yourself. It's really life-changing. The second kind of vibes you need to be aware of is what I'm calling vibe automation. If you've been watching my channel for a long time, you know is very much what we like to talk about here of how you can build automations and AI systems for businesses and sell them to them. But the barrier to entry to this is going down even further. In 2026, we're going to see the explosion of Vive automation in the form of just

being able to enter a text prompt and chat back and forth and basically be able to build any kind of automation you want. So something for you personally or for something within your job. Pretty much anyone now has the ability to create automations for themselves or the company they work for. And this is an incredibly valuable skill to have and can allow you to do some awesome things with your career. We are already seeing this within the top automation apps like

NA10 where you can say I would like to set up an automation where after this form is submitted we analyze it with AI and do this and then we add it to a row in the database with this and it will just build out for you in one shot. And the third type of vibes that you will start to see pop up and should be aware of is within the apps that you currently use. It's it's like vibing inside of apps. So if you have things like Air Table or Excel or Google Sheets or the

huge software companies that many of us already use are adding in their own vibing features. So instead of having to have an expert come in and show you how to set up an Air Table properly and build out a an application on Air Table, you can literally just chat away and vibe with the assistant and it's going to be able to build things in real time. So this is a trend called just in time software and it's again pulling the barriers down where you don't need a

specialist developer or a consultant to show you how to set things up and as a small business owner this is particularly valuable or as someone who is working in a team is a massive advantage. So what are the two parts we have here? While the winners are going to be those who embrace this this philosophy and way of being of vibing with everything and and really taking the power back into their own hands and saying, "No, I can build this stuff myself and saving thousands and

thousands of dollars and countless hours in the process." Now, as for the losers, they're going to be the ones who continue to think like, "Oh, no. I'm not technical or I can't do that stuff. That's not possible for me." They'll probably also keep paying for bloated software with like 120 features that they don't need really like any of them. or they just sit around waiting and hoping for someone to build what they actually need without all the [ __ ] Action steps from here is just firstly a

change in mindset from like thinking that you need to hire someone for everyone to let me see if I can describe it to AI and get it to build it out for me. And then to put this into practice and lose your vibe virginity, I really recommend you jump on to Google AI Studio. It's very cheap and easy to access. You can go on there and literally just explain an app to it and it will be able to build it for you in literally 5 minutes. The shift number four for 2026 is that the AI skills gap

that we're seeing across the board right now is going to continue to create an unprecedented opportunity to build a service-based business. Now, if that sounds confusing, just give me a second to explain it because it's probably the most important out of all of this. And this whole prediction is based around the fact that in 2026, businesses know they need AI to survive, but they have zero idea of how to actually use it and get value out of it. And this creates a

massive opportunity for regular people like you and I and the hundreds of thousands of other people who watch this channel to be the guide for businesses to learn AI and implement it and get value out of it. The key thing that most people don't understand is that you do not need to be a developer or a coder or an AI expert to be able to do this thing. So, this shift has really been something I've been talking about on this channel for like 3 years now. It's how I got started in AI. I had no

experience in AI and I just got into it. I started my agency, Morningside AI, and now we work with some of the biggest sports teams in the world building AI systems for them, which if you told me at the end of 2022 that's what I'd end up doing, I wouldn't have believed you because it didn't seem possible. I didn't know that this was even a route or an option that was possible. And since then, I've been talking about how these so many small businesses making

anywhere between 500,000 and $10 million per year. And these companies have no one helping them with their AI. They don't understand it, but they know they need it. This opportunity is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and you need to be less and less technical. There is now huge demand for completely non-development services in this AI services space. So it's like AI auditing and consulting where instead of having to go and develop AI systems for them

like we do at Morningside, you can go in and be consultants and you can say, "Hey, let's do a couple interviews and let's talk about how your business works. Okay, well this is what we recommend. Here are the best AI things or AI tools you can plug in." I have a full videos breaking this down on my school community. So if you want to get access to it, that's going to be down there. There's also stuff like just training businesses on how to use chatbt and claude. they don't know how to do

this stuff. You can go in there and charge a few thousand just to teach them what AI is and how to use it. And if you don't believe this is a wide openen opportunity for anyone to get into these days based off my success story or the tens of thousands of other people in my community, then listen to Kevin Oly wonderful from Shark Tank who says small businesses create 62% of the jobs in the United States and they desperately need AI and they'll pay you to help them. So,

this stuff. You can go in there and charge a few thousand just to teach them what AI is and how to use it. And if you don't believe this is a wide openen opportunity for anyone to get into these days based off my success story or the tens of thousands of other people in my community, then listen to Kevin Oly wonderful from Shark Tank who says small businesses create 62% of the jobs in the United States and they desperately need AI and they'll pay you to help them. So,

as for the winners and losers path here, the winners are going to be the people who recognize that this window exists now and it's accessible to anyone and can position themselves as guides to start helping businesses to understand and implement AI. You literally only need a few months of actively learning AI, which all the resources to do so are on my school community if you want to get into this kind of thing. But that AI knowledge and skills that you gain in

that small amount of time, the winners are going to take that and start offering it to people that they know in the circles around them. That's the most proven way to get clients early on. As for the losers, they're going to be the people who assume that AI services and selling AI stuff to businesses is only for technical people and sort of exempt themselves from being able to take part in this revolution that's going on. They completely miss the fact that the

highest demand skills right now within these small businesses is not just development, it's consulting and education and all of the other stuff that comes around it that is completely non-technical that anyone can learn within a few months. So basically, the losers are going to be people who just sit on the sidelines and completely sit out this incredible wealth generation opportunity. As for the action steps to start moving on this, I've got an entire video breaking down the latest way of

starting one of these businesses as a nontechnical person. I will link that in the description below. That'll give you everything you need to know. Now, getting into the fifth and final shift for 2026. It's a bit of an interesting one actually, and that's that AI is going to be able to start spending your money and you'll be able to get your time back from that. In 2026, we're going to see things like chat, GBT, and Claude. Again, going back to what we said before, more and more parts of your

life are going to be accessible through this chat interface and potentially even through chatting on your phone or just using voice to talk to it. There are new features rolling out for your favorite AI tools that is going to allow them to search the web and do shopping for you and find the best deals and then also to take payments. This may seem like a small thing, but there is an enormous amount of time that each of us can get back when you have a personal assistant

that really knows who you are. You can talk back and forth with. It's basically like having an assistant that's available at all times and for the price of a freaking Netflix subscription. This is all based off a trend that's called Agentic Commerce. And back in October of 2025, Stripe is like the biggest online payments provider has launched something called the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which is basically the technical plumbing that allows AI agents to securely make payments over the internet

and handle your card details. We've seen stuff like this launched already where you have OpenAI and Etsy partnering up. So, you can now literally buy things on Etsy through Chat EBT. And this is just the start. And you're going to see all of e-commerce become available to you within your chat interface. So you can search the web, find the best deals, and then in a few seconds be able to pay. None of that rubbish of like filling out all your card details and setting up

your your delivery address. It's going to save you so much time by being able to do all of your shopping through Chat GBT. And I actually have a few different predictions about how this is going to roll out next year. We're going to have just the basic version of it, like, hey, can you find me some running shoes under $100? It'll give you a couple options and you can say, buy that one and I'll be able to purchase it for you. Then maybe towards the middle of the year

we'll be able to do much more advanced things like okay plan me the whole trip and then look into the availabilities of X Y and Z and then book this whole trip for me. And so towards the middle of the year we'll have these more advanced kind of shopping use cases that become possible. Then what I see as kind of the final stage of this is allowing Chachi to tap into not just the e-commerce and digital world but tap into the real world through being able to make phone

calls for you. Now, if you've played around with building AI voice agents and whatnot, you'll know that we have the ability now to send an AI voice agent out to call a number. And so, if you ask your chatbt assistant and you say, "Hey, I need a plumber in my area to fix X." It will be able to go out and find all of the plumbers in the areas around you. It's going to be able to send calls to them and negotiate and figure out what their prices are, if they can book it in

at a time that you're available, and then you can let it go for like a few hours. It's going to call all these places, come back and give you the options and allow you to actually book and pay for that all within chatbt. So it's the final iteration of allowing chatbt to go shopping and negotiate and find rates for you would be if openi allows chatbt to actually make calls to businesses. There's a very interesting part in there where if you look at this trend, all businesses are going to need

to have an AI voice agent themselves so that chatbt can call their voice agent so that they're not missing calls overnight or if there's multiple calls coming in from chatbt, it's able to handle multiple calls. So you can see how this all starts to fit together. So looking at the winners and losers path here, the winners are going to be those who learn to delegate more and more of their tasks to AI. They've got that central hub and now the agentic commerce is allowing you to give even more

control. This giving chat and claw the ability to do even more of the boring, laborious work that you shouldn't be doing. Winners are going to be the ones who are able to save hours and hours every week that were wasted on comparison shopping and filling out forms and and making phone calls. and they're ultimately going to save thousands of dollars a year because they'll be able to get the AI to search around the web and find the best deals for them as well. So basically, by fully

control. This giving chat and claw the ability to do even more of the boring, laborious work that you shouldn't be doing. Winners are going to be the ones who are able to save hours and hours every week that were wasted on comparison shopping and filling out forms and and making phone calls. and they're ultimately going to save thousands of dollars a year because they'll be able to get the AI to search around the web and find the best deals for them as well. So basically, by fully

leaning into these AI shopping features, you'll be able to get not only your time, but also your money back, and that's what the winners are going to be doing in 2026. As for the losers, they're going to be like those people who were too scared to shop online and put the car details online about like 10 years ago because they thought that it was going to get hacked or something. Sure, there were some hacks, but for the most part, everyone does it now. It's

okay. And the AI shopping is going to be the same thing. The losers are going to be the ones that don't trust JBT or Claude to make these purchases for them. And ultimately, they're going to waste hundreds of hours every year, and they're going to probably spend even more money on stuff by not finding the best deals. So, in terms of action steps for this right now, it's not really much you can do. You could try to do a bit of Etsy shopping, but a lot of these

features are coming next year according to OpenAI. You've got Shopify integrations, you've got Stripe Commerce integrations. All of this is going to come next year. So, I'm just saying be ready for it because there's a big shift in how you're going to do shopping. And if you lean into it, there's a ton of benefits so that you can be in that 1% of AI users next year. All right, guys. That is it. Those are my main predictions for 2026. The big shifts that are underway that are literally

going to determine who's in that top 1% of AI users and is able to get the most out of it, build their dream life, get their time back, and basically spend more time doing what they really want to do, which is what myself and a lot of my friends and team are now able to do with their lives. So, I really, really, really, truly want the best for all you guys next year. If you're an AI business owner like myself or an aspiring AI business owner, I've actually just done

a full video on my 11 predictions of what's going to happen with AI business next year, which I'll put up here. And if that shift number four made you at least a little bit curious about what it could mean to start your own AI business selling AI services like education and consulting to the hundreds of thousands of small businesses who are dying for your help right now, then you can find my school community in the first link in description and all of the resources are

in there for you to start your own journey. But that is all for the video guys. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next