Look, I'm going to say something that shouldn't be controversial but apparently is: the AI industry is finally catching up to what every practitioner knew three years ago.
Meta delays Avocado. Fine. They're pouring billions in and the model isn't ready. That's what happens when you race to be first instead of racing to be right. But here's the thing — they're not alone. Every major player is running into the same wall: the easy scaling is done.
Meanwhile, Palantir out here building "AI Kanban boards for killing people" and the discourse is... Alexa's getting a sassy mode? Don't get me wrong, the sassy Alexa is funny. But let's keep receipts on which story actually matters.
The Adobe CEO stepping down is the quiet story nobody's talking about. Narayen ran Adobe for 18 years. Eighteen. In AI years that's like a century. His departure statement explicitly called out "the next era of creativity... shaped by AI." That's not optimism. That's a handoff.
Here's my thesis for the week: 2026 is the year "AI company" stops being a moat. Everyone has models. Everyone has APIs. What's scarce is the integration — the part where AI actually does something useful for a specific workflow. Anthropic get this right with the cross-app Claude. Microsoft get this right with Copilot. The rest are still shipping features.
The sassy Alexa? That's a feature. The Palantir Maven system? That's a product. One is a party trick. The other changes outcomes.
That's the filter. That's the differentiator. In 2026, ship products, not features.