If you’re thinking about starting a company in 2026, consider building in one of these areas.
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With the rise of vibe coding, more people than ever are spinning up startups overnight. In 2024 alone, The U.S. Chamber of Commerce saw 5.2 million new business applications—a 49% increase since 2019. At the same time, AI tools have dramatically lowered the barrier to entrepreneurship. A report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce showed that by mid-2025, 58% of U.S. small businesses reported using AI, more than double the share from 2023.
Entrepreneurship is likely one of the most relevant careers of the future, especially as traditional white-collar roles shrink under the very AI systems fueling this boom. But many of today’s new ventures are agentic wrappers around the same foundational models, solving convenience problems rather than addressing the structural challenges shaping our society.
If you’re thinking about starting a company in 2026, consider building in one of the following areas—places where entrepreneurs can create true painkillers, not just another vitamin.
Lead The Way In The Great Workforce Reskilling
Tech layoffs have hit record levels in 2025, with October yielding the largest U.S. job reduction in over 20 years according to a Challenger report. Many of these displaced workers remain unemployed for months or even years as applicant pools massively outnumber available roles in fields like design, software, marketing and administrative work.
Meanwhile, the skilled trades, such as electricians, HVAC technicians, plumbers and carpenters, face a looming labor shortage. Much of the workforce is nearing retirement, and the boom in data centers and AI infrastructure is accelerating demand. There are already 400,000 unfilled skilled trade jobs in the U.S., and that is expected to rise to 2 million by 2033, according to a report by The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte.
This gap creates one of the biggest business opportunities of the decade: helping people pivot from shrinking industries into resilient, AI-proof careers. The trades provide stability, living wages, and hands-on work that algorithms will have a difficult time replacing. They’re also overwhelmingly male, with men making up over 95% of employees in construction occupations, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. There is massive untapped potential in training and supporting women in these fields.
Startups can play a vital role by building systems that make these transitions realistic and accessible. Potential solutions include:
- Gender-inclusive pre-apprenticeship programs
- VR-based technical training
- Job placement marketplaces for mid-career changers
- Wraparound services that support people through the transition, such as transportation, childcare, and community infrastructure
Without efforts to move workers across sectors, we risk a dual crisis of unemployment and unfilled essential roles.
Prevent Scams By Verifying Reality
Deepfakes, cloned identities and AI-generated content are becoming nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Social media personas are routinely spoofed, personalized spear-phishing is escalating, and the average person can no longer rely on their eyes or ears to verify truth.
This growing confusion has profound implications for trust, safety, and security. Startups focused on “proof of realness” will play a crucial role in the next decade. Ideas include platforms that:
- Require in-person authentication for connecting with and “tagging” people, to avoid profile spoofing
- Only allow photos or videos captured directly in-app, to avoid AI-generated media
- Track content provenance with blockchain-based trails, to verify its origins
- Only allow direct typing of text, to reduce the amount of AI-generated writing
Creating a new social or content platform is a massive undertaking, but a company that becomes the de facto source of reality — even for a narrow use case — will be indispensable.
Create Supply Chain Resilience
Recent disruptions revealed how fragile and expensive global supply chains have become. Between geopolitical instability, pandemic aftershocks, and new tariff laws, companies are increasingly localizing their production.
In 2024, U.S. companies announced 244,000 manufacturing jobs due to reshoring, according to a Reshoring Initiative report. Tariffs drove much of this shift, being cited as a motivator 454% more often in 2025 than in 2024. Even with these reshoring efforts, supply chain bottlenecks persist: by late 2024, delivery times for raw materials were still 25% longer than pre-pandemic.
According to Tjaard Zwaagstra, founder and principal partner of GlobalChain Consulting, component manufacturing is the largest bottleneck to reshoring. “Rare-earth materials and many electronic, electromechanical, plastic, metal, and optical components and sub-assemblies are predominantly manufactured in China and imported with tariffs in the 10-50% range,” Zwaagstra shared. “Many critical raw materials and final assembly capabilities are available locally, but without those components and sub-assemblies, total costs are often still prohibitive.”
These supply chain barriers open the door for companies that enable:
- Hyper-local manufacturing and micro-factories, particularly for components and subassemblies
- Community makerspaces for prototyping and small-batch production
- Circular business models like rental, secondhand and upcycling
- AI-powered tools that help small businesses forecast shortages or mitigate delays
With supply chain resilience becoming more of a competitive advantage, companies that make it easier and more affordable for businesses to localize or de-risk their manufacturing will have staying power.
Foster Human-AI Collaboration
AI adoption has already skyrocketed in the workplace. According to Stanford’s 2025 AI Index, 78% of organizations reported using AI in 2024, up from 55% the year prior. As agentic AI becomes ubiquitous and automation fatigue sets in, the next challenge involves helping people partner with AI in ways that preserve creativity, judgment and meaning.
Grin Lord, founder of mpathic.ai, shared an example of this in the medical space, where AI can expand the impact of rare medical experts and improve their communication. “Our products are being used in highly-regulated clinical settings to review recordings of clinical trials, mental health coaching, psychiatry, and pediatric surgeries to help reduce adverse events and increase trust and safety,” she told me. “The AI is not replacing anyone, but rather filling gaps, such as surgeons not getting important feedback on their communication skills. Our product has been found to increase empathy and collaboration amongst surgical teams and ultimately lead to safer and more efficient surgeries.”
Opportunities to enhance human-AI collaboration in other verticals include:
- Adaptive learning platforms that build new human skills
- Systems that provide guardrails and guidance to ensure AI knows how to collaborate well with humans
- Creative tools that amplify human originality, instead of trying to replace it
- AI-assisted governance, safety and back-office systems for small business owners and solopreneurs
As AI reshapes most verticals, systems that help people feel in control, indispensable and cared for will increase trust, adoption and success of AI usage, both at work and in life.
As we head into 2026, the most successful founders will be the ones solving the structural challenges shaping our economy: helping people adapt to new forms of work, rebuilding trust in what’s real, strengthening local production, and designing AI that expands human potential. Startups that take on these challenges will find strong demand and create lasting impact.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebekahbastian/2025/12/01/thinking-of-starting-a-business-in-2026-focus-on-these-4-high-impact-areas/
