AI in 2026. Which Experts Will Still Win Next Year?

In 2023 and 2024, boutique consultants could still get paid to explain what a prompt is. In 2025, that window closed.

Executives stopped being impressed by the tool and began to judge the operator. ChatGPT moved from a shiny object to boring infrastructure. The buyers who sign serious checks now assume you can use it. Competence is the floor, not the fee.

Remember web community managers in 2002? These were among the best-paying jobs back then. By the time I organized a Web Managers Roundtable at The World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, it was already entry-level. It did not die. It got renamed, sliced up, and buried inside other titles. It's the job of volunteers or virtual assistants in free Facebook groups and forums like Slack, Discord, Substack, Circle, or Skool.

ChatGPT-related expertise is facing the same journey into oblivion. Here's why:

1. AI moved from “toy” to the default operating system for knowledge work

Things that matter here:

• ChatGPT hits 700M, then 800M weekly users, 2.5B prompts per day.
• 1M business clients last November alone.
• ChatGPT Enterprise, Team, Gov, Edu, Go plans, Asia data residency, “OpenAI for Countries”.
• In 2025, executives stopped asking “Should we try AI?” and started asking “Why is our organization still this manual?” The adoption hurdle dropped. Procurement, IT, and legal already know what ChatGPT is and often already have a license somewhere in the stack.

For boutique firms, this changed sales conversations. The differentiator is no longer “introduce AI,” but rather “make AI actually move KPIs.” The pain now is waste, duplication, and unmanaged AI usage.

How it will shape 2026:

• Expect buyers to assume you know the OpenAI ecosystem as well as they know Excel.
• Expect more inbound “We bought licenses. No one uses them right. Fix it.”
• Expect demand for playbooks by function, not by tool. Sales ops AI, finance AI, people ops AI.

In 2026, boutique consultants either become “the AI people for X type of business,” or they compete with every generalist who can drive ChatGPT.

2. ChatGPT became the firm’s knowledge router, not just a chatbot

Key updates:

• Company knowledge search across Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, and cloud connectors.
• Meeting recording and retrieval, MCP support, deep research agent.
• Atlas browser and Apps inside ChatGPT, plus the Responses API replacing the old Assistants API.

What changed in 2025:

You no longer need a custom stack to give a client “one brain” over their documents, tools, and web. OpenAI quietly gave boutiques an off-the-shelf knowledge OS.

In practice, this lets a small consulting firm:

• Drop internal wikis and build living playbooks inside ChatGPT.
• Give clients an AI workspace that sits on top of their stack, rather than reinventing everything.
• Sell “decision dashboards” that are actually chat-first and file-aware.

Impact for 2026:

Internal: Your own firm can run SOPs, onboarding, sales research, and proposal drafting in one AI workspace.

External: You can productize “AI copilot packs” by function and industry and ship them as part of your engagements.

The key to boutique consulting now is designing flows. This includes the questions people ask, the sources the AI uses, and the decisions that result.

3. Agents and automation turned AI from advice to action

Big ones:

• Operator and ChatGPT Agent that can operate a browser, book, shop, navigate tools.
• Responses API designed to build agents that search, scan company files, and navigate sites.
• GPT 5, GPT 5.1, o1, o3, o4 mini, GPT 5 Codex, and the Codex agent for code.
• Direct code editing from the ChatGPT macOS app into IDEs.
• Rumored vertical agents priced between $2K and $20K per month.

What this did to boutique consulting in 2025:

Clients started to see that “assistant” no longer means just text output. AI can actually click buttons, submit forms, refactor code, and run multi-step workflows.

This created two new lanes for boutiques:

1. Design and build agents that take over specific workflows. Sales qualification, reporting, onboarding, and procurement.
2. Audit and govern those agents for risk, failure modes, and handoff to humans.

Executives felt both curiosity and quiet panic. “If an agent can triage leads and write outbound, what does my sales team look like in 18 months?”

How it spills into 2026:

• Agent strategy and implementation become billable line items, not free extras.
• Done-for-you agent builds will move into $5K to $50K projects fast, and many will renew as retainers.
• Firms that offer "prompt help" will seem less valuable than those that say, "We will design, deploy, and govern your AI agents.”
• The money now sits where AI presses keys on the client’s systems, and not only where it writes pretty answers.

4. AI as the front door for search, shopping, and decisions

Key events:

• Atlas browser launch.
• Instant Checkout and AI shopping features, Walmart partnership, Etsy, and Shopify integrations.
• Shopping recommendations inside ChatGPT search.
• Tasks, reminders, Pulse morning briefs, group chats, Study Mode.

What shifted in 2025:

Many people now begin buying, researching, or organizing work in ChatGPT. They skip the browser or email.

For boutique consultants, this means:

• Your client’s buyers will find vendors more through AI summaries and agents. Classic SEO funnels will matter less.
• Your firm can use "AI-first" research and outreach. ChatGPT can handle the initial scan of markets, filings, content, and product catalogs.
• Strategic tasks, like figuring out the best move in this market, can use agents that check live data. This is better than relying on outdated slide decks.

Impact in 2026:

You can credibly sell “AI-assisted market scanning” and “AI channel strategy” as distinct services.

• The e-commerce, retail, CPG, and DTC sectors need consultants skilled in AI. They should understand how to use ChatGPT as a sales channel.
• SEO consultants must focus on “AI era visibility,” not just page one rankings.
• The new front door for many decisions is a chatbot. Consultants who design those conversations gain leverage.

5. Safety, regulation, and lawsuits created a new risk advisory lane

Important updates:

• Teen suicide lawsuits, OpenAI’s mental health safeguards, parental controls, and safety consultations with mental health experts.
• Biorisk safeguards for reasoning models, watermarking work in progress, open model safety work.
• European copyright cases, Munich music ruling, Studio Ghibli-style image concerns, libel and privacy complaints, and data retention policies.
• ChatGPT Gov, data residency in Europe and Asia, OpenAI for Countries.

What this did to boutique consulting:

Leadership teams realized that AI is no longer a side experiment. It is a regulated surface like finance, privacy, or safety.

• For boutique firms, this opened lanes for:
• AI uses policy design, staff training, and enforcement for non-technical companies.
• Regulatory readiness for sectors like health care, finance, education, and government vendors.
• Vendor and model risk assessment across OpenAI and competitors.

In 2026, more RFPs will ask, “What is your AI governance approach?” Firms that show clear guardrails, use logs, and have escalation paths will win. This is better than stating, “We exercise caution.”

This is a space where your calm, careful approach sets you apart from automation cowboys.

6. Education, knowledge work, and “critical thinking erosion”

Notable items:

• Study Mode, Study Together, group chat.
• MIT Media Lab study shows lower brain engagement when people lean on ChatGPT.
• Pew numbers on teen use for homework and OpenAI’s own concern about AI therapy.

Why this matters to consulting:

Clients will bring teams to you who depend on AI. Many will be fast and shallow. Some will be brilliant and over-reliant.

You can position your programs around:

• Teaching teams how to pair AI with first principles and critical thinking instead of outsourcing thought.
• Designing prompts and workflows that force human judgment at the right steps.
• Helping leaders measure the quality of AI-assisted work instead of only its speed.

In 2026, consultants will earn the premium when they focus on improving the quality of thinking in AI-enabled teams, not just their output.

7. Open source and multi-vendor chips lowered platform risk

Key moves:

• Open source models GPT-OS 120B and 20B.
• OpenAI is using Google’s AI chips in addition to NVIDIA.
• Data center expansion and OpenAI for countries.

Net effect for boutiques:

Executives expressed less concern about being tied to one GPU vendor or relying on a single black box when adopting AI. It remains concentrated, and it is now showing visible diversification.

This lets boutiques sell multi-vendor strategies. For example, “Operational AI on OpenAI plus sensitive workloads on open models running on client infra.”

In 2026, this lowers perceived risk. It also opens doors to more serious AI projects focused on core processes.

That means one thing if you run a boutique firm: you no longer get paid to know AI. You get paid to design how it works in a business. You focus on specific decisions and set clear guardrails.

If you feel some tension reading that, it's accurate. It says you are already outgrowing the old offers and have not fully claimed the new ones.

So let us close out 2025 cleanly and then step into 2026 with intent.

We will use three stories you already know from my newsletters, podcast, or LinkedIn posts. The failed knowledge base projects. The finance team that lets AI handle 90% of invoices. The executive thinking exoskeleton is built from real memos, not platitudes.

Each one points to the same thing. ChatGPT is no longer where you earn your fee. It is where you pay your rent.

Your premium sits somewhere else.

Story 1: When Knowledge Bases Were A Multimillion-Dollar Nightmare

You've heard me talk about how big companies used to build knowledge.

A few years back, if a big organization needed a searchable knowledge base, it faced a nightmare. A multimillion-dollar, multi-year project. Custom content management systems. SharePoint restructuring. SAP implementation. Salesforce rollouts.

And it almost always failed initially. Not because the idea was bad, or the software didn't work, but because of human resistance to adoption. Or the effort to migrate and learn how to input and manage data was too high. Implementations took longer, cost more, and did less than expected. Not for everybody, of course, but for a great number of implementers.

That story matters more in December 2025 than it did when those projects were live.

Especially smaller organizations can now drop an enterprise LLM on top of Slack, email, internal drives, and line of business tools. The model reads and synthesizes across silos. It becomes a passive, always-on knowledge layer. It watches for patterns. It answers in natural language.

So what is the fundamental change here for boutique firms?

In the past, vendors sold search and structure. Now the model shows that as a near-utility. In 2025, the value moved to how you design the knowledge operating system. What it is allowed to see. What it is allowed to answer. How it escalates risk. How it protects judgment time.

Crowd behavior in 2026 will be to keep selling generic "AI knowledge hubs" and "ChatGPT portals". Same pitch, new label.

If you act as an Original Intelligence operator, you do the opposite.

You have one key question: What's the one decision that keeps failing in this firm because people lack the right information when they need it? Then you design the knowledge layer only for that.

Not a portal. A decision system.

You move from "we built you a knowledge base" to "we changed how this one decision is made every week."

That is what ChatGPT changed for you in 2025. It turned the knowledge base nightmare into a cheap, flexible substrate. The premiums now lie in judgment design.

Underneath the headlines, three things changed your world this year.

First, AI moved from toy to operating system. Serious buyers no longer ask if they should try AI. Instead, they question why their organization still relies on manual judgment. A model can analyze everything at once.

Second, ChatGPT became a connective tissue across tools. It reads emails, chats, documents, tickets, and logs. It can build a single narrative across all of it. You are no longer selling isolated use cases. You are deciding which flows deserve that narrative and which do not.

Third, the agent layer grew up. ChatGPT is no longer just writing. It is clicking, updating, routing, tagging, summarizing, and queuing. It acts.

That is why the prompt workshop era is over. Buyers assume the open AI ecosystem. To them, it is like Excel or PowerPoint. Table stakes.

The groupthink answer in 2026 will be to double the volume. More prompt packs. More generic "fifty ways consultants can use ChatGPT". That is conformity in a new outfit.

Your move is different. You get specific. You sell fewer things, but with greater depth. You tie ChatGPT to revenue, cost, or risk in a way that is provable, simple, and difficult to copy.

The tool is no longer scarce. The architecture still is.

Story 2: The Finance Team That Let AI Take 90 Percent Of The Pain

In my latest podcast, we walk through a concrete pattern in finance.

AI handles 90% of routine invoice processing. It pulls the invoice and checks it against the purchase order and contract. Then, it applies standard rules, logs the result, and sends the clean cases forward smoothly.

The remaining ten percent are exceptions. Invoice variance. Compliance flags. Odd timing. Those cases go to the CFO with the full context already prepared. The AI attaches a short brief. What is different? What rules were triggered? What options exist?

The impact is simple. You cut chaos for 90% of the work.

This helps the most expensive people be 50% more effective at the 10% that truly matters.

That sequence is not a hypothetical dream board. It is a pattern any boutique firm can productize. Nothing in it is science fiction.

You have a narrow domain. You have structured data. You have clear rules. You have a small set of exception patterns that repeat across clients.

The crowd will pitch this as "AI for finance" in vague terms. High Performance Consultants with an AI-First mindset do the opposite.

They define one specific flow. For example, invoices over a certain amount with variance beyond a certain threshold, with clear compliance tags.

They sell three things together. A knowledge layer that reads the contracts and policies. An agent that runs the checks and prepares the brief. An exception design that routes only the hard calls to the CFO with the right prompts in front of them.

That's how you are no longer selling "AI productivity." You are selling less cognitive load on the CFO and fewer late-night escalations. You are selling the story we tell in my latest podcast. Only now you offer to own it for a niche.

This is the posture shift 2025 forced on you. ChatGPT made it cheap to build the underlying capability. Now, your firm can deliver this level of precision to mid-market buyers. They couldn’t afford a big vendor before.

You risk getting stuck selling "AI brainstorming." Meanwhile, the quieter firms focus on one key flow. That could win the retainers that last.

The 2026 Inversion: Stop Optimizing Speed. Start Reducing Decisions.

Listen to the language around you, and you can already hear the 2026 groupthink forming.

"AI will help your team work faster." "AI will free up time for strategic work." "AI will make your consultants more productive."

All of that sounds nice. It also keeps you in the commodity lane.

Anyone can say it. Anyone can claim it. Price shoppers will enjoy these promises. They can easily compare vendors and get better deals.

So we invert.

We stop asking how to make people faster. We start asking what they can stop thinking about entirely.

Where can ChatGPT help lighten the mental load? This lets your clients focus on the key decisions that affect profit and risk.

That question forces a different design.

Now you care deeply about which ten percent of situations reach a human and in what state. You create systems that manage standard patterns. They send only the unusual, costly edge cases to humans with a clear brief.

You care less about "time saved per task" and more about the "quality and calm of the escalated 10%.""

ChatGPT in 2026 is the default first pass. Your role is the architect who decides what never shows up on human radar again.

Story 3: The Executive Thinking Exoskeleton

One of the highlights in my latest podcast is the executive thinking exoskeleton.

The idea is disciplined and simple. You stop treating ChatGPT as a general assistant. You create a private workspace focused on four to six key strategic decisions for one leader. Capital allocation. A major hire. A significant competitive response. A shift in pricing. The same patterns that come back quarter after quarter.

You feed the model the leader's own material. Past memos. Decision write-ups. Notes on wins and regrets. They already stated these principles in writing. This includes the 2024 memo's recommendations, which favored efficiency over expansion.

Then you design how every serious decision conversation starts.

The model pulls similar past decisions. It surfaces the stated principles. It asks friction questions. Does this option align with your own rule from that memo? What data contradicts your current instinct? Where have you made the opposite choice before, and what happened?

The AI is not trying to be the brain. It is acting as an exoskeleton built from the leader's own history.

The benefit is clear. You force structured thinking based on their own past wisdom instead of the mood of the week. You reduce regret. You increase strategic consistency. You change vague "AI for executives" into a steady retainer built on an intellectual partnership.

And you get to ask hard questions that most vendors avoid.

How does your current advisory offer stack up against this? What would it mean to be the architect of your client's thinking environment instead of just a voice on their Zoom calls?

What happens to your retention when your system becomes the place where they confront their own history every time a big decision lands?

You are not adding flair. You are changing how they use themselves.

How Boutique Consultants Should Use ChatGPT In 2026 To Stand Out

Pull the three stories together, and the pattern becomes obvious.

First, ChatGPT turned the old knowledge base projects into something cheap and flexible. That freed you to sell decision systems instead of portals.

Second, ChatGPT made it easy for AI to manage most routine tasks. It only sends exceptions to humans with context. That freed you to frame offers around reduced chaos and better use of expensive people.

ChatGPT lets us transform a leader's history into a dynamic space. This space supports their values while also addressing their blind spots. That freed you to sell deep, personal leverage instead of one-off sessions.

The crowd will still sell awareness and decor. High Performance Consultants with an AI-First Mindset resist that.

They narrow. They pick a niche where they already know the patterns. So, here is my challenge to you.

Pick one recurring decision or flow in that niche.

Define the model's knowledge. Specify its actions and outline the escalations that require human intervention.

Then you install an impact ledger for every project. You measure cycle time, error rate, escalation volume, and decision quality. You make your value auditable.

A price shopper will not love this. They will look for a cheaper "AI workshop" instead. That is fine. To speak with Mel Robbins: Let them.

The buyers you care about will see that you are not selling a toy. You are selling a way for their people to think less often about the wrong things.

Guardrails And Risk: Where The Premium Really Sits

Once you move into agents and exoskeletons, you also enter the realm of liability.

A model that reads across all systems can expose information that someone never meant to combine. An agent that touches invoices can introduce new failure modes. An executive environment that only mirrors old principles can freeze a company in place.

If the AI only reinforces past beliefs and never asks about conflicting evidence, it becomes a dangerous echo chamber. If it becomes predictable in the wrong way, the system turns from an advantage into a catastrophic failure.

The big firms will respond with thick policy decks that nobody reads. Committees. Centers of excellence that never ship.

You do the opposite.

You design just enough guardrail to keep judgment honest.

You bake in prompts that force executives to confront contradictions. You define rules on what the agent cannot do without a human green light. You keep a human in the loop on the edge cases that carry real risk.

You are not slowing the system down. You protect the only thing that cannot be automated: quality of judgment.

That is where your premium sits in 2026.

Closing 2025 And Opening 2026 With A Single Concrete Move

Time to run a self-test.

What is the one recurring decision or workflow in your favorite client segment where you know the pain, the data, and the politics? How would you let ChatGPT handle the 90% that is boring and repetitive, while packaging the ten percent for human judgment with clear context? What four numbers would you track on an impact ledger to prove that your system made their world calmer and their best people more effective?

If your answers are vague, you have your first serious work block for 2026.

Protect ninety minutes. Close your inbox. Pull up the transcript if that helps you remember the patterns. Write out one decision system, end-to-end, for one niche.

When you walk into January with that diagram in your hands, you are not just another boutique that "uses ChatGPT."

You view conformity as a risk. You value thinking time. You transform a dull infrastructure tool into a unique advantage for clients who still value judgment.

If you are still reading, that's a signal.

You know you are not the “prompt tricks” person. You are the one who wants to own the systems, the guardrails, and the outcomes.

I built a short Sweet Spot Assessment to help you find that system. It walks you through your best niche, the one recurring decision or flow you should own, and the concrete numbers you should track to prove your value. It is simple, no fluff, and designed so you finish with one clear play you can sell in 2026.

Take the Sweet Spot Assessment next. Give it two focused minutes. See exactly where your work, your clients, and AI automation line up in a way that makes your offers irresistible and your pipeline calmer.

If you are ready to rebuild your offer and delivery around decision systems, join the High Performance Consultant Academy and do this work with structure, support, and deadlines. That is where we turn this way of thinking into IP, assets, and offers you can sell.

About Andrew Lawless

Andrew Lawless helps boutique consultants get paid for the systems they design, not the hours they spend talking about AI. He works with firm owners who want fewer offers, cleaner positioning, and one clear decision system they can sell at a premium.

For more than two decades, he has coached leaders at the FBI, Special Forces, World Bank, and Fortune 500 companies. He was a finalist for the Kolbe Professional Award and was named America’s Top High Performance Coach for Consultants by Coach Foundation. His work focuses on calm, reliable performance under pressure and on offers that pay the bills, not the ego.

Andrew runs the High Performance Consultant Academy, where we build AI-first offers around specific flows, numbers, and guardrails. No vague “AI workshops.” You pick a niche, define one recurring decision or workflow, and install a simple impact ledger so your value becomes measurable.