As we close 2025, the noise around AI has been deafening. I have spent the year auditing distressed HR tech projects and rescuing stalled implementations. If there is one lesson to take into 2026, it is this: Pragmatism wins. The “hype cycle” is dangerous. It convinces leaders to buy tools they don’t understand to solve problems they haven’t defined.
I read the World Economic Forum piece on the forces shaping work, and it resonates with my daily battles. The demographic shifts, the skills scarcity: these are not theoretical problems. They are operational threats. I see companies in Morocco and across MEA rushing to adopt “Generative AI” without having a clean Core HR database. You cannot generate intelligence from chaos.
My strategic advice for the coming year is simple: Return to fundamentals. Audit your data stack. Secure your governance. Train your people not just on tools, but on logic and ethics. Technology is a powerful accelerator, but if you accelerate a bad process, you just hit the wall faster. Be the architect of your transformation, not just a passenger on the vendor’s roadmap. Let’s make 2026 the year of boring, effective, measurable ROI.