← The Martell Method w/ Dan Martell
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By the end of 2026, AI spending will reach $2 trillion. And that kind of explosion is going to create nine major trends that most people have no idea is coming. I'm not talking about ChatGPT getting slightly better. I'm talking about a complete transformation of daily life as we know it. I've spent years investing in AI companies, building AI products, and tracking every major move in this space. And what I'm seeing behind the scenes is about to make 2026 the biggest year in AI yet. It's going to take over businesses, shopping, even your freaking toothbrush. And you have the opportunity to be ahead of all of it. Welcome to the Martel Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter@martell method.com so let's start with trend number one. AI will buy from AI. Currently, AI does a lot of cool stuff, but the humans have to be in the loop. People still have folks on their team to do things like buying things for them. Every purchase today for most people requires human approval emails. Most people are using AI to write them. And then when the reply comes in, the person used AI to reply. 90% of mine already are, via my assistant. Humans will be taken out of that process in 2026. Here's why I know that experts say that by 2028, not far away, 90% of all business purchases will be handled by AI agents, moving $15 trillion in spend. Essentially, what that will look like is AI bots will do the research for you, buy for you, return things for you, coordinate things for you, scheduling things for you. And then on the other side, the AI will receive that order. Coordinate any missing data with your AI without you involved, and just take care of the transaction. All of this gets done with no human intervention. Here's a simple example. Your fridge sees everything in the fridge. It'll know you're low on tomatoes, It'll know that you don't have enough chicken, and it will automatically coordinate with the other AI apps to purchase and get it delivered. So all of a sudden, you'll never have to tell anybody what you want to reorder. Do you see how cool this gets? So here's what this means for you. Your job shifts from from placing orders to managing the AI that places orders from configuring them from monitoring them, giving it more data. See, the AI can get better if you don't learn how to talk to it and coordinate it and train it. The cool part is faster ordering means fewer mistakes. And it works 24. 7. Doesn't take rest days, doesn't take sick days, doesn't talk back. It just gets it done. So that's AI becoming the customer. Now here's something even more personal. AI is about to be part of every single device in your home. Trend number two, everything gets smarter. Here's the current state. Most of the devices in your house are kind of dumb. Think about if it has a battery or it's got power to it. They say this is a smart toothbrush. Why? Because it vibrates. That's not a smart toothbrush. The smart devices, that was like a branding thing. They exist, but they're not actually smart. They're not learning, they're not personalized. They don't really help you. 2026, massive transformation. The smart home market. It's $174 billion industry by the end of the year. On. My brother's a home builder, so he tells me about this. The AI brain inside of every device. Your toothbrush, your coffee maker, your thermostat, the doorbell, your fridge, literally, your TV will change the way these devices talk to each other. Your scale's gonna talk to your fridge. Okay? Like, it's gonna tell you, you can't order that. Cause you told me you wanted to lose weight, so I'm gonna help you. Here's what this means for you. Your home becomes an AI helper that knows what you need. People say to me, it's like, dan, that's a scary future. You know what? Here's what I know. Everything that's been electrified will be cognified. Right now, it's the laptops, it's your phone. But everything that has power or a battery will have cognition because the AI is getting smaller, faster, and deployable on those little devices. And they'll be able to talk and coordinate. No different than you set up AI automations to do things for you at work that comes into your home through the devices. If your toothbrush is about to have AI, your business better have it. But most business owners say, I'm using AI, I'm using ChatGPT it. But your team really isn't. You don't know how to automate stuff. You don't even know how to do custom code. In the world of disposable apps, you need to know how to do that. So if you want my internal AI playbook for how I deploy AI in every frigging department in my life, just find me on Instagram and message me AI business and I'll send it right over. Look, your devices are about to get smart. But AI won't just be helping with the task. It's about to help you with everything else in your life. Trend number three, everyone will have an AI assistant today. Everyone still handles their own calendar and their email and their research reports. But the truth is, we've seen a glimpse of this already. The Ironmans of the world, right, where everybody's got a Jarvis. It's crazy because workers still spend 60% of their time on boring admin work. None of that work is being helped or co pilot or created with AI to make it personal. It's just stuff that's got to get done. The transformation in 2026 is crazy. Soon every worker gets their own AI assistant where it does 50, 70% of the daily task on its own. Not a tool. We already got that. An actual AI assistant that knows you. It knows your sensitivities, it knows your beliefs, it knows your values, it learns your writing style. Yes, I already have that. No you don't. Because you got to tweak it every time. Imagine you never have to touch it. The first time you ask it to do something, you actually say, this is the outcome I want. And it goes to work to get you that. It manages the project files, it updates your slack, it updates your Trello board, it updates everything. And it's not just me saying it. Okay? People using AI assistants are already saving more than 30 minutes per day. And that's just the tipping point. Here's an example. You wake up and you find out your AI already rescheduled three meetings that had conflicts, drafted 15 email replies and sent some of them in your voice. And it prepared a summary of all the documents and information you needed to know to start your day with a vengeance. Here's what it's going to mean for you. You get to work on important and strategic work. You become the manager of the AI. You configure it, you teach it. This is already here today. It's called RLHF. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. Meaning that's what you get to do in the future. You get to let it learn on its own. And you give it the data to learn from and then you give it feedback to make sure it's doing the right thing. That is how AI is trained today. It's just it's going to move to the people so that you have an AI assistant doing it all and you get to tweak it so that you can focus on what really matters. Your creative work, the things that brings you joy, the stuff that allows you to have the time to talk to the people. That's what business really is. Business isn't B2B. It's H to H, human to human. The AI does all the computer stuff so that you can talk to somebody. So that's personal AI doing half your job. Next, let's talk about something you deal with almost every day. Customer service. Thanks for listening to the Martell method before we get back to the episode. If you're like a real AI founder and you have a product and customers who are paying you and you want to scale f, here's the deal. I want to work with you at Martell Ventures. You don't need another investor. What you need is a partner with distribution, proven playbooks, most importantly, connections. We'll focus on adding customers instead of you wasting all your time fundraising. So if you want to work with me, just go to danmartel.com ventures. Trend number four, no more waiting on hold. It is wild that when my credit card has fraud, I have to wait to talk to a person. See, and it's crazy because they get support teams that needs humans answering phone calls 9 to 5. If it's after hours and nobody's around, you're out of luck. Here's how I know. In 2026, that's going to change completely. IBM and Zendesk say AI can handle 80% of customer questions and cut service costs by 30%. It's just not widely deployed today. You've already seen this. You can chat with support, you can have it book meetings for you. You can answer questions. You know, you can qualify leads. It sounds fully human, it never complains, it never gives you attitude. And the coolest part, it doesn't take any days off. Here's an example. I want to go to the gym in the morning. I call the gym, it's closed. I want to talk to somebody, get signed up, get a day pass, answer my questions, know if you have equipment. If you don't have AI answering that call, you don't get me there in the morning as a customer. You have AI sit there and take that call. It'll get me as a customer. Right now there's tools like your atlas.com that's part of my portfolio where all the inbound calls to the business is handled by AI. IT Qualifies. It answers questions. It scheduled a call. Do the sales call. Send them a text message with a link so the business owner can focus on doing the business. But this is what it means for you. Businesses never close. Customers can get help 24. 7. There's no wait time. I would love to call a bunch of different companies to spend more money with them if I knew I wasn't going to be put on hold. Okay, you as a business owner, you'll never miss a lead again. You'll never miss a customer again. You'll never get a pissed off person that doesn't bother con because they don't want to talk to somebody that's uneducated on your team you just hired because they're 22 and they don't know anything about your company. Oftentimes the customer knows more about your product than the person you hire to support them. AI knows more than the customer and the support person combined times a thousand. If you want to check it out for yourself, go check out youratlist.com and actually do the demo on the website to see how it works. So here's the big idea. No more waiting on hold. And that same AI technology is about to run entire departments in your business. Trend number five, AI agents running entire departments today. Every department, it still needs a human. Okay, you still have somebody that leads sales support. Your finance department. It's very human centric. Growing a department today, it's gonna be completely different. I'm already seeing it. My head of finance, Jared literally has a plan already in place where 80% of his work AI powered tools like HelloFrank. AI is literally a CFO AI that small business owners use already to manage and run the whole finance department. The good news is it's going to allow you to talk to the people on your team, invest in your people, develop your people to make them better. And it's not my opinion. This is what the data says. I think I read like by 2030, 30% of hours currently worked in the US could be done by AI. Instead of hiring five salespeople and three finance people, you have an AI agent handling sales and handling AI finance. Now does that mean the whole stack of sales are AI? Maybe not. Maybe 90% of it, maybe 80% of it. But it's definitely not going to be none. That is the future AI running departments. How does this impact you? First off, some departments you'll become a director of the AI, not managing people. The human focus is now on strategy. It's on special cases, it's on big decision, it's on sequencing. Because sequencing equals success. That's what you should get good at. Check out HelloFrank AI to see how this looks, but it will automate the whole finance department for small businesses. So now we talked about how AI replaces departments. Let's talk about how this affects your home from a different angle. Trend number six, household AI robots. In my home, I still have to do certain things and I wish that I didn't have to pick up after myself because then I could move through the world easier. My wife wouldn't get upset with me and she wouldn't text me saying, I rarely get insulted when you leave your stuff around. I get it. I have this rule that I'm trying to get to where you can't tell what room I've been in. If I've been in the house. That's my goal. I don't know if I'll get there, but that's the philosophy. If I had what I'm about to share with you, that would be there today. The truth is, today the best we have is like a robot vacuum. Where we're going in 2026 is a completely different world. And we've seen it already. Cheap AI powered robots with arms that pick things up, that help with tasks. I'm talking load the dishwasher, clean up after yourself, all this stuff. If you had a full time butler, the AI will do for you. And you might be like, oh, Dan, that'll never happen. All right, go check out Optimus by Tesla. Elon's check out neo backed by OpenAI. Check out Figure 3. They just came out with their latest model by figure AI. When you see these things, it looks like it's fake, like cgi. But I'm telling you, these are real robots that learn by watching you do things. And they're smart. The household robot market will hit a $17 billion market by the end of 2026. Elon has 800,000 square feet of production manufacturing in te ready to go for the Optimist. And in 2026, you're going to start going to your friends houses and meeting their robots. It's going to be wild. So what does this mean for you? This is where I get super excited. The guy who wrote the book buy back your time. This one is near and dear to my heart. Think about all the time you spend on household chores. All that time you get back now in your week. You get to go to the gym, you got time to call your parents, you got time to read books, you get Time to take care of your kids better. You get time to take care of yourself better. Here's my prediction. In five years, hiring a human to clean your home will sound as crazy as hiring a human to run calculations for you on a calculator. So now we got robots in your house doing chores. But it won't be just in your house, it'll also be in your car. Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it@martell method.com Trend number seven, AI robots will drive your car. Today we have self driving cars. A lot of the Teslas have full self driving FSD built into it. But what's happening is a lot of these car manufacturers are like, look, we could try to solve that problem, but then we got to build the AI know how and we got to change the hardware in all the cars for it to work so that the car can drive itself. Here's what you're going to start to see in 2026 and you kind of see it with the Waymo. The Waymo is self driving. If you've never used it, it's crazy. AI powered robots sitting in your car will drive your car. Now every vehicle becomes self driving. The same robot that can do all the household chores or doing work for BMW or UPS stores today, that's what figure and all these companies do will be able to see the road. They'll use the pedals, they'll turn the steering wheel just like a human. Like your 2005 Tacoma now becomes an AI powered truck. Tesla announced they're going to build 50,000 Optimus robots in 2026 using the exact same software and hardware as their cars. The same AI powered chip that they built for themselves for the cars are going to go in the robot. Why wouldn't they drive the car? How much more productivity could you get if you could sit in the backseat with your laptop and your robot drives you around? So with AI robots driving your car, I think we can expect for AI to take over even more. Trend number eight, AI powered delivery. I mean today if you think about it, delivery needs still humans. Like there's still somebody drops off things at my house, the Amazon guy, the food delivery, which means that it's limited in its ability to deliver me stuff at speed and there's still high costs for that Last mile, right? The last mile is going from the warehouse in a city to the home. It's actually the most expensive part on getting something from point A to point B be okay. In 2026, what you're going to see is delivery drones. You're going to see warehouse bots. You're going to see last mile robots everywhere running up and down. You're already seeing in certain cities where there are food delivery boxes driving down the sidewalk and they like come and then they text the owner and you open your door and then you take the thing out of the box and takes a picture of you, a picture of the stuff, and it's off to the races. Amazon has already said this. They aim to deliver 500 million packages per year. Buy drone by 2030. Just the drone side of things. And I think it starts in 2026 in a meaningful way. Here's how this makes your life better. First, faster, cheaper, delivery as a customer. If we can get the last mile down to zero, then everything gets cheaper because that's where you're paying for stuff. And think about a new business, ideas, they get unlocked. If all of a sudden the cost of logistics and delivery goes to zero, there's a whole lot of other businesses that can come from that. And if you run a business with delivery, this is a game changer. We're kind of moving from like people bringing stuff to stuff bringing itself. So all these parts of life will 100% be infused with AI. But there's one final trend, the one that determines if you win or you get left behind. Trend number nine, knowing AI will be the biggest career advantage today. AI is still like the nice to have. It's definitely needed in my world. But there are still jobs that don't, like, make it a must. Most people literally are like dabblers at best. And companies haven't yet made it a requirement. They haven't said, show me your proficiency just like they would to say, show me that you can use Google Docs or show me that you can type fast enough or whatever it is. Right? Like that's not there yet. 2026 gloves are off. The number one conversation I have with all the CEOs that I coach is how do I force my employees to adopt it? How do I get them to learn it? I'm done. I'm sick of it. AI hackathons are going to be the new future. Hiring new people that are AI native, that can code, can build apps, can actually configure the AIs. That's the new Norm, if you don't learn how to do this, trust me, 2026 is going to be the year where you're going to start to feel it in your job. This is not just ChatGPT, this is knowing how to use the AI tools and prompt it to do your job. And the crazy part is the next wave of millionaires and billionaires will come from AI innovators and AI experts. And here's how I know this. On LinkedIn, job posts mentioning AI has grown 3.5 times faster than any other job category. And AI skills can literally boost your salary up to 56%. I'm literally looking at my teams execute and the person that learns how to set up, make and automate their work so it actually frees up their time to go work on harder and more fun projects. They're getting the opportunities. So here's what this means for you. Learning AI now puts you ahead of 95% of people. Early adopters win big. They always have laggards. They're the ones that get disrupted and left behind. It's not like you're not hearing this from people. The future isn't AI versus human. It's AI powered humans versus the rest. The gap between AI users and AI avoiders is getting wider every freaking day. People want to say, well, I don't agree, I don't like it. Here's the thing. I know a belief that doesn't support my future isn't a belief I want to nourish. And there's no way you're going to stop this from happening. It's a foregone conclusion. I just don't want you to think you've got another year. If you haven't made the decision to go all in on AI in 2026, this is the year where it's going to hurt your bank account, it's going to hurt your opportunities, it's going to hurt the people you love the most because you won't be prepared. And that's why I continue to try to show you and explain you and bring the data and give you the use cases and invite you into my world where I'm inside of it at the highest level, building software with the smartest engineers in the world seeing 18 months in the future. And I bring this to you and if you think, well, I don't know how to get started, I'm telling you yet again, you use AI to teach AI. Let it close the gap in real time. Talk to it, ask it to teach you. It will. There's no more excuses. Stop pretending not to know. I need you to win. So if you're down this year, comment below AI. I want to hear AI in the comments below. That's your commitment to me and to yourself that 2026 is a year of the trend where you jump on them and you change your life. And remember, if you're an entrepreneur and you want to implement AI into your business, just find me on Instagram and message me AI Business and I'll send you over my internal playbook. Thanks for listening to Martell Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck, reclaim their freedom and build their empire. Pirate.