The Path Forward: AI in 2026

I spent four years building HonestDog — a consumer marketplace for finding and caring for dogs in Europe, bringing transparency to the continent’s third-largest illegal market. I scaled it to $25M in annual GMV, and learned more about building products, leading teams, and surviving as a founder than I ever could in any other setting. Then I handed the company over to agents to run. At the time, it was the best decision available — and looking back, it still is.

Why now

The most important technology of our generation is being built right now, and I want to be part of it — not as a spectator, but as an operator.

Long before HonestDog, I was already building business intelligence dashboards, ops flows, and automations the old-school way: Zapier, RPAs, VBA scripts. I did it at a five-person e-commerce startup, inside Amazon fulfilment centres, and at McKinsey, benchmarking the operations of multi-billion-dollar CPG companies — production throughput, logistics costs — against their industry peers.

So when GPT-3 landed, it was immediately obvious where this was heading. Tech and ops were about to be fundamentally rewritten. No more Zapier. No more RPAs. No more VBA scripts. A whole generation of tooling was about to become legacy in a single jump.

As someone who sits at the intersection of product, tech, business, and data, I’ve always been most valuable when I can move between those domains fluidly. AI amplifies that. Strategy, customer empathy, and operational discipline still have to come from somewhere — AI just lets one person act on all three at once, faster than a team could a few years ago.

The AI industry itself is at an inflection point. Foundation models are mature enough to build real products on. The tooling ecosystem is exploding. Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind aren’t just building models — they’re building the infrastructure for a new computing paradigm. And they need people who understand both the technology and the business.

That’s where I fit. I’m not a researcher pushing the frontier of model capabilities. I’m an operator who takes those capabilities and turns them into products, strategies, and revenue. I’ve done it before in a completely different industry, with fewer resources and no playbook. Imagine what’s possible when the product you’re selling is the most powerful technology ever created.

What excites me

I want to be where business meets technology in the messiest, most leveraged way. GTM, Solutions Engineering, Product, Strategy & Operations — the title matters less than the mandate. Close to customers. Close to the product. Empowered to ship.

I want to work with people who are building something that matters, and who move fast because they actually believe in what they’re doing.

If that resonates, I’d love to talk. You can reach me at hello@sufyanosamah.com or on LinkedIn.