2026 may be remembered as the year AI became our intermediary in life and business
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We were told 2025 was the year of the AI agent. And while some people think 2026 will be when we finally usher in consumer grade robotics, I predict a different technological breakthrough will dominate this year: the rise of the AI intermediary.
To better understand my thinking let’s discuss an increasingly common situation. It’s late at night and you just received a dreaded client email. It’s the kind of message you wish you’d put off reading until morning. Now, you cannot unread it. More importantly, it requires a tactful response.
A few years ago, you might’ve had your spouse look over what you wrote. With their input you could determine if you responded respectfully, politely pushing back on any unreasonable request. You could still assert your authority without burning bridges.
Not so much anymore.
Increasingly, professionals are turning to AI for that second pair of eyes. It’s serving in a diplomatic capacity, helping you find the right words and phrasing to steer conversations, especially contentious ones. Statistics around AI adoption demonstrate such usage is on the ascendancy. “Some 24% of employees say they use AI to draft or edit workplace emails all the time or daily, 21% say they use AI often…” according to MarketingProfs.com. Tellingly the same piece asserts, “More than one-third (35%) of employees say they have used AI to draft a sensitive workplace communication.”
From Science Fiction to Science Fact
This situation isn’t what TV shows like The Jetsons or Star Trek depicted when imagining our future. Those sci-fi series featured more elaborate technological innovations like flying cars and spaceships floating through space. While those developments may be on the horizon, for now, humanity is engaged in a different kind of dynamic with innovation: a reality where the dominant, guiding presence in your life is an AI serving as a mediator or translator.
It’s natural to suggest AI will occupy this more sophisticated middleman role, especially in academia. In the few years since ChatGPT’s arrival, AI has become a kind of T.A. for busy professors, filling in the mental gaps required for more intensive intellectual work. “Morehouse professor Dr. Muhsinah Morris says every professor will have an AI assistant in three to five years,” according to news.morehouse.com. The mass exodus of Baby Boomers, coupled with widespread instructor burnout, are just two significant reasons Morris cites for the profound classroom shift.
AI, Our New Digital Cupid?
On the personal side, we are also witnessing an explosion of AI intermediaries on dating sites. Users are turning to AI to better cultivate how they look on their profile, and of course, polish the words they use to describe themselves and their interests. It’s a safe bet many are even consulting AI in real-time as a kind of digital Cyrano de Bergerac to tell them how to respond to direct messages.
Scientific American broke this story back in October. “It’s a well-worn adage of the Internet age: people often aren’t what they seem to be online. But until recently, you could at least be assured that they were people. Now, though, ‘chatfishing,’ a new wave of online deception, is taking over dating apps. Instead of ‘catfishing’—using an entirely fake identity—people are using artificial intelligence to help them chat up prospective love interests and secure dates.”
The piece reveals how daters now employ AI as a behind-the-scenes influencer. Many will directly copy and paste messages into ChatGPT or Grok for love advice. There’s even a name for the recent phenomenon: Wingman apps. You can download various kinds, appropriately named Rizz or YourMove AI to coach you through the right responses to elicit a romantic connection.
The Troubling Side of This Phenomenon
This situation can be problematic for a host of reasons. “As AI becomes more ingrained in how people interact and present themselves online, it’s critical to recognize both its benefits and the ways it can be manipulated by bad actors,” said Leyla Bilge, Director of Scam Research for Norton, published in GenDigital. “With online dating offering more ways to connect than ever before, it’s also giving scammers more opportunities to exploit people. This rise in suspicious profiles and scams underscores the need for caution.”
Caution is definitely needed for Year of the AI Intermediary. With increasingly sophisticated deepfakes and online chicanery flooding cyberspace, it’s hard to know just who to trust. Last year, an employee working for a multinational firm was duped into wiring millions of dollars during a conference call. “Believing he was interacting with his company’s chief financial officer and colleagues, the worker later discovered all participants were deepfake imitations. The scam involved a request for a confidential transaction, leading to the transfer of approximately $25 million USD ($195m Hong Kong Dollars),” EFTsure.com explains.
In light of horror stories like these, many companies have resorted to using protective methods to safeguard their assets, including multifactor authentication and “safe words” to thwart fraud. Even so, it’s not inconceivable that criminals would use their own deepfake AI intermediary to trick victims. It sounds like a scene out of Ocean’s Eleven but it’s quite possible that a bad actor could create a realistic-looking fake of a company’s banker pretending to be the very person they trust to get the victim’s guard down. Convinced there’s nothing untoward going on, the company could be persuaded to part with their money before ever knowing they were so spectacularly fooled.
Transforming the Human Touch
Beyond fraud, dating, academics, and email writing, a subtler form of the AI intermediary is popping up in offices around the world. Not long ago, executive assistants and before them secretaries, served as a corporate go-between. They answered phones, booked appointments, took dictation, arranged travel plans, managing anything and everything their bosses needed them to do.
We may wonder if that will continue now that you can so easily sync up any number of apps, including your calendar to ChatGPT. One of the chief benefits of AI is its ability to detect patterns no human could possibly discern. Unlike a human assistant you could use AI to figure out what blind spots in your daily routine you are missing and how you could improve your efficiency. But there’s a downside to this arrangement. You stand to miss out on the human connection that occurs from relying on a person to serve as your intermediary.
For now, all this talk of AIs performing intimate functions humans once handled is surreal. The idea that your AI assistant will navigate both business and family life still feels like something out of a movie like Her but it’s here. Much like the Internet roughly 25 years ago, AI is quietly becoming an organizing layer between all aspects of life. As time marches on, we may wake up one day to realize it’s just there, acting beneath the surface, bridging and managing all the tedious, yet necessary aspects of life.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelashley/2026/01/21/forget-flying-cars-ais-real-revolution-is-playing-middleman/
