Azeem Azhar

I will give you one small example

of this.

I'm sure like many of you have also been through this where you're looking for just the right note taker on your computer and you've moved from Notes to Notepad to Evernote to Notion to Roam and to the next thing.

Well, I knew exactly what I wanted and

It's very simple.

It works in my browser.

It syncs across to my phone.

And it took me 30 to 40 minutes to build quicker than it takes me to navigate around a complex notion.

And it's exactly the thing that I want.

So this is a really remarkable moment, like this revolution in building that we're starting to see through the capabilities of these agents.

And that's the second part of this tentpole, which is this agentic coding revolution.

We have moved across the line, I think, if 2024 and 2025 was largely about productivity boosts, in particular, say, for software engineers.

In 2026, there is a notion that one of the things that a software engineer did, which was that they translated real-world needs into code that computers could turn into apps that met that real-world need.

Well, it feels to me that that particular attribute is becoming obsolete.

And product managers who sit one level up closer to the end user would do some of that translation as well.

And I think they still have an important role, but you can start to see that the gap between the user and the code that the user wants to get something done or the analysis the user wants is huge.

I use the word smushing when I was writing my notes for this.

It's smushing and smushing fast, if indeed that is a word.

There was a really interesting story a few days ago that BCG, which is that strategy consultancy, had operationalized what they called the consultant as creator model.

Their consultants have built over 36,000 custom tools using AI.