My January 2026 best business reads roundup
/Reflections on AI
The Adolescence of Technology. Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI – Dario Amodei
https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
I have a soft spot for writers who has a sense of style and substance. This essay by the founder and CEO of Anthropic works on both levels: clear, reflective, and surprisingly grounded.
/AI, Work, and Strategy
What product leaders should care about in the age of AI – Figma
https://cdn.sanity.io/files/599r6htc/regionalized/eda96dd6a77a754a5a6522ae675ea210fe46d1da.pdf
We’re drowning in autogenerated sameness. Figma’s report makes the point: AI isn’t replacing us; it’s forcing us to stop outsourcing thinking. A wake‑up slap for anyone who confuses “more output” with progress.
Closing the capability gap between frontier AI and everyday use in 2026 – Fidji Simo
https://open.substack.com/pub/fidjisimo/p/closing-the-capability-gap
Basically, Open AI research roadmap this year (TL;DR: personality capabilities can’t be one‑size‑fits‑all)
Get Good at Agents – Nathan Lambert
https://open.substack.com/pub/robotic/p/get-good-at-agents
Why your existing mental models won’t work for agentic systems. The line I sent to my team: “Software is becoming free; good decision making in research, design, and product has never been so valuable.”
Boston Consulting Group AI Radar 2026 – As AI Investments Surge, CEOs Take the Lead
AI is no longer a CIO side quest. It has become a CEO priority, with 82 percent of CEOs expecting stronger ROI this year (CIOs are far less optimistic).
/AI, Markets, and the New Infrastructure
LLMs vs. Marketplaces – Dan Hockenmaier
https://www.danhock.co/p/llms-vs-marketplaces
Why LLMs won’t vaporize marketplaces overnight (some will be easier to replace, but the same truth applies as always: resilience lives in the unsexy work).
It’s About Time: The Copilot Usage Report 2025 – Microsoft
https://microsoft.ai/news/its-about-time-the-copilot-usage-report-2025/
Copilot isn’t just a productivity tool anymore. People use it like a therapist at 1 a.m., a gaming companion on weekends, and a personal coach all day long: AI is becoming deeply personal.
/Bonus reads:
(paywalled, old) The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder – Wired
The mindset of the free‑solo climber Alex Honnold hit a nerve among Cloudflare’s founding team. It reminded them of Lee Holloway, the company’s technical co‑founder, whose extraordinary talent collided with undiagnosed frontotemporal dementia: https://x.com/i/status/2015644174796910980
The Year of Manufacturing the Body. And Booty. And Boobs – Vanessa Friedman, New York Times
Fashion has begun exaggerating, or distorting, the female form like never before. What exactly is going on?
(Photo of the month: Grok AI flooded users’ feeds with sexually explicit images of women and minors in late December and early January. A reminder that not all progress moves in the right direction.)
Originally shared as a LinkedIn post. Check it out here.
