Summary

Joe Reis reports from months of global travel during spring 2026 conference season, finding pervasive uncertainty driven by physical-world energy shocks (fuel shortages, food inflation, disrupted travel) and AI's rapid disruption of both vendor and corporate playbooks. He argues the Modern Data Stack era is over, vendors and leaders must rebuild from first principles rather than iterate on old models, and despite the upheaval, this is a great time for builders willing to bet on themselves.

Key Insight

The convergence of physical-world energy shocks and AI disruption has destroyed the old playbooks for vendors, practitioners, and leaders alike, but the resulting chaos is an unprecedented opening for those willing to rebuild from first principles.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 6

  If you're trying to run the old playbook from the MDS era, good luck.

• 8

  The MDS was human-centric, and we need to build for a world where humans are not the primary consumers of data. This is a revolutionary shift.

• 7

  Even the top 0.1% of AI (the people whose names you'd recognize) don't really know what's going on either. Nobody has the future figured out. We're all collectively staring off into the void, wondering what's on the other side.

• 8

  Organizations aren't clean machines you can just optimize. They're a morass of tacit knowledge, politics, and friction, and some of that friction is actually doing work.

• 7

  There are no guardrails left over from the old playbook telling you what you're allowed to build. If you know what you want to make, go make it. Be wild and be unhinged.

Tone

reflective