What 2026 Will Make Obvious

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.”
— T.S. Eliot

When T.S. Eliot wrote those lines in 1942, he was pointing to a simple but uncomfortable truth. Language carries the logic of the era that produced it. When circumstances change in fundamental ways, the words we once relied on stop working. Progress depends not just on new ideas, but on recognizing when old descriptions no longer fit reality, and on finding a new voice to replace what once passed for the status quo.

That observation feels uncannily accurate for payments, commerce, and the broader AI economy today.

We keep reaching for familiar terms to explain what is happening around us. Checkout. Credit. Data. Regards. Authentication. Convenience. But those words increasingly fail to capture the dynamics reshaping how consumers and businesses interact, transact, and make decisions.

What makes that mismatch impossible to ignore is the year we just left behind.

AI and agents are no longer features layered onto existing systems. They are becoming embedded in the infrastructure itself. Intelligence is moving into the transaction. And when that happens, everything around it begins to change: how consumers are authenticated, how payments are routed and priced, how credit is underwritten and used, and what customers expect interactions to feel like. Faster. More contextual. More autonomous. Less visible.

As intelligence becomes native to commerce, the economics that supported the old system begin to crack. Long-standing roles blur or disappear. New players emerge. And deeply held assumptions about who owns the customer, who controls the data, and who captures the margin are challenged.

Each year, I begin with a piece that looks ahead. Not to predict headlines, but to surface the signals forming beneath them. The shifts where pressure is building. The points where existing models strain. And the moments where incumbents and challengers alike have an opportunity to act differently.

Taken together, these signals point to a year that will demand new language, new frameworks, and, in Eliot’s words, a new voice.

The year ahead will belong to those willing to find it.

And do more than just talk about it.

Join the conversation by visiting my bio on LinkedIn, where, for a limited time, you can download the What 2026 Will Make Obvious eBook for free, or download it here.

Until NEXT time.

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PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, healthtech and real-time payments firms, including a non-executive director on the Sezzle board, a publicly traded BNPL provider.

She founded PYMNTS.com in 2009, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries.