New Tools, Same Tricks: Reflecting on Business Strategy in 2026

Let’s get the irony out of the way immediately: yes, AI helped accelerate the writing of this blog post.

It’s a little corny to admit, but it proves the point I want to make today. AI has given us unprecedented tools for acceleration in almost every aspect of digital life, from drafting simple thoughts like this to editing video to writing complex code.

I know many of my colleagues view "Agentic AI" software generation with skepticism, citing valid concerns about code quality and context limitations. But technical hurdles aside, my experience has taught me a more fundamental truth: Technology is rarely the answer on its own.

You can build the "best of breed" software stack, but technology changes. More importantly, customer appetites change. AI is a powerful tool, but it is not the final answer. Driving value is.

The "Old Trick" that drove a 30% Uplift

Years ago, during my time as a Lead Digital Architect, I spent months designing and implementing a powerful, all-encompassing platform for a well-known organisation. It was a technical masterpiece, covering almost every conceivable ground.

Nearing the end of that engagement, we onboarded a new CIO and Growth Strategist, Mr. Wayne McMahon.

I distinctly remember one evening, walking towards Town Hall Station in Sydney. We were discussing the complexity of the digital landscape, and he stopped me with a single statement:

"It's not about the technology as such, it's about how it's applied to facilitate consumer convenience and drive multiple channels."

In a couple of weeks, he proved it. He didn't use my massive platform. He built what we technically called "throw-away tech": simple, focused, and ephemeral.

The result was an immediate 30% uplift in sales.

He didn't chase architectural purity; he chased value.

New Tools, Same Rules: The 2026 Strategy

That story is relevant today because while the tools have changed (from cloud platforms to AI Agents), the trick remains the same: Business Strategy must lead Technology Strategy.

In 2026, we must stop looking at AI as a monolith. To drive real value, as Wayne did, we need to apply this "value-first" lens to three distinct areas of your business:

1. Open Information: Evolving Standards

The traditional web has served us well to date, but the standards are changing, and so is the number of "crawls" in the market. How information is read, ingested, and prioritized has fundamentally evolved.

As human beings, we have a "fight or flight" mode baked into our DNA. In a world where AI agents constantly scrape and synthesize data, customer anxiety is heightened. They are drowning in noise.

Your business must examine how it transforms that fight-or-flight response into trust. The AI world is training on the information you put out. If your "Open Information" is structured correctly for these new standards, clear, authoritative, and helpful, you are essentially training the algorithms to trust you.

2. Core Business: The Safety of the Known

If you have an existing revenue-generating business, protecting it is your primary duty.

For service businesses, the traditional operation remains king: ensure the customer is looked after and, crucially, that they "feel safe" with you.

AI plays a role here, but it must be invisible. It should be used to ensure the speed of your service remains consistent and that you aren't outpaced by competition. But do not let AI erode the human connection that makes a customer feel secure.

3. Value Drivers: The Unicorn Opportunity

This is the area everyone wants to play in, but not every business qualifies immediately.

It is imperative that you evaluate the opportunity, but do so with your eyes open. Back in January 2025, Sam Altman noted that OpenAI was losing money on pro licenses, and shortly after, they began hiring for paid marketing platform engineers. It was the signal that the "free lunch" was over. Google, of course, has long been the king of Ads.

But ads are not the only way. The "Value Driver" for 2026 is ensuring your business can expose its unique value through "AI Channels" safely. This hedges your business’s success against a changing web.

How Do You Navigate This

This is where the rubber meets the road. How do you expose your business to these AI opportunities without exposing your IP or customer data to risk?

At Artrilogic, we don't just "plug in AI." We explore together with your business to identify what "throw-away technology" you can build today to drive immediate value without the pain of long-term technical debt.

We achieve this by building robust frameworks and guardrails for AI Readiness:

• Standardization (MCP): We help you implement the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This ensures your services expose data in a standardized way that AI agents can reliably understand and act upon, without you having to rebuild your core systems.

• Knowledge Management (RAG): We design Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models. This framework allows you to dynamically inject your specific business context and proprietary data into AI responses, ensuring accuracy without training public models on your secrets.

Technology changes. The "best" software will be obsolete in a year. But a strategy based on customer convenience, trust, and safety? That never expires.