The faster AI gets, the more the physical world matters

First, a time stamp. I am writing this in June 2026. AI is moving fast enough that nobody can say with confidence what the landscape will look like a couple of months from now, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. So read this as a snapshot, not a prediction. The specifics will age. I think the direction underneath them will not.

The output boom

The current wave is agentic. Models no longer just answer questions, they carry out work. Research, code, design variations, video, full campaign drafts. I build these pipelines for a living and the speed still surprises me. Tasks that used to take a studio a week now take an afternoon. The output of people who use these tools well is incredible.

The pressure follows the output. In a 2024 Upwork study, 96 percent of C-suite leaders said they expect AI to raise their company's productivity, and 81 percent admitted they had increased the demands on their workers within the past year. The honest footnote is that controlled studies are mixed on whether AI makes work feel better or worse. But you do not need a study for the part I see every week. The ceiling keeps moving up, and a lot of people are already working close to theirs. It is hard to imagine the pace increasing much further without something giving.

Imperfection can be faked

When output becomes cheap, taste shifts. You can see it happening. People reach for things that feel imperfect and human. Film grain, handheld footage, rough edges, visible brush strokes. There is real research behind that instinct. In a well-known set of marketing studies, people paid around 17 percent more for an identical product when it was labelled handmade.

Here is the uncomfortable part, speaking as someone who builds generative pipelines. Imperfection is a style, and styles can be generated. Grain is a prompt. Camera shake is a prompt. "Shot on expired film by a tired human" is a prompt. If your authenticity strategy is an aesthetic, it will be reproduced at scale by the same tools it is reacting against.

What cannot be generated

What cannot be reproduced is the experience of being somewhere with your body. What a room feels like. What the food tastes like. What another person's full attention does to a conversation. None of that ships over a screen, which increasingly means none of it can be flooded.

Smell is the cleanest example. It is the one sense with no digital channel at all, and it is having a moment. Fragrance was the fastest growing beauty category in the US in 2024, reaching 28 percent of the prestige market, and Euromonitor expects it to contribute more to global beauty growth through 2029 than any other category, with younger customers doing much of the buying. I do not think the timing is a coincidence. The generation that grew up with infinite screens is spending its money on the one thing a screen cannot do.

Community is not a nice-to-have

The same logic applies to connection. The US Surgeon General called loneliness a public health epidemic back in 2023, and everything since has pushed in the same direction. More time with machines that talk like people, less time with people. The reaction is visible if you look for it. Run clubs, supper clubs, listening bars, talk series, parties where phones stay in your pocket.

This is part of why I put time into XD Network, a collective in Berlin that runs community events around technology and culture. Not as a counterweight to my AI work, but as the same observation applied. The conversations that change how I think happen in rooms, not in feeds.

What this means for the work

If you build products or brands, the practical reading is this. AI moves production from scarce to abundant, so production stops being the differentiator. Use the tools. The efficiency is real, and your competitors will have it too. Then spend what you save on the things that cannot be generated. The event, the store, the object in someone's hand, the smell of the room, the person who knows your name.

My own work sits deliberately on both sides of that line. I automate what should be automated, so there is more room for the part that should stay human.

The technology will keep accelerating. Bodies will not. That gap is where the value is going.