As we begin the New Year, we spoke to industry leaders to reflect on the shifts that shaped 2025 and the forces expected to define 2026. For Chetan Asher, Founder & CEO, Tonic Worldwide, 2025 marked a year of hurried adoption driven less by clarity and more by collective anxiety.
Reflecting on the defining trend of the past year, Asher notes, “2025 was the year everyone jumped on, whether they knew where the wagon was headed or not. Everyone wanted an AI piece of work out there as a signal that we are adapting the new ‘cool’ thing. The real story wasn't the technology. It was the anxiety driving adoption. Fear of being left behind trumped strategy. The hard questions got drowned out by the noise of ‘we need to be doing this.’ 2025 was about motion, not direction.”
Looking ahead, Asher believes 2026 will be less about keeping up and more about recalibrating value, with human judgement, brand thinking and content systems taking centre stage. He highlights that the trends shaping 2026 will be:
“The Human Premium: As AI-generated content floods every feed, the scarcity shifts. What becomes valuable isn't production anymore. It's taste. Judgement. Cultural intuition. The strategist who knows what to make. The creative director who can spot soulless output. 2026 will position humans as the quality filter, not the assembly line. Speed is table stakes now. Discernment is the differentiator. Brand Building would be back in focus: CACs are broken, attention is fragmented, and algorithms have become unreliable. Smart brands will shift budgets back to building the brand with distinctive assets, emotional resonance, and cultural relevance. Always on content systems: Attention is scarce, continuous, not episodic. The brands that win in 2026 will think in systems, not campaigns. Always on content will be the need of the hour to play the attention game.”
(As told to Ruchika Jha)
