AI is 2026's Honey Badger

The debate about AI is over. And somehow, unusually, everyone agrees.

Lauren Berkowitz · Apr 28, 2026

If you are not familiar with the honey badger, a brief introduction. It is a small, thick-skinned animal most famous for being impervious to threats and indifferent to inconvenience. It does not ignore danger. It registers the bee sting, the snake bite, the predator twice its size, and continues anyway. Nothing stops it, nothing slows it down, and it certainly does not wait for anyone to be ready.

Last weekend, reportedly over 700,000 people cleared three days of their lives for a free AI summit hosted by Tony Robbins. Three days, online, free, no HR department organized it, no training budget funded it. They just showed up to learn AI. This is not how the last two technology shifts looked. Manufacturing automation shed 7.5 million jobs over four decades, painful, but slow. The digital transition was quieter still. Roles didn't disappear. They eroded. Both had one thing in common: time. That runway is gone.

Five-star retreats are back, sponsored dinners are fully booked, futurists are predicting only ten companies survive what's coming, all inside organizations that announced layoffs in the same quarter. Nobody is denying the AI wave. Everyone is trying to be ahead of it, or at least look like they are. Awareness plus access plus fear. That's why this time is different.

What is striking about this moment is how fast that adjustment came. The 700,000 people at the summit, the packed dinner calendars, the employees reskilling on their own time without being asked, none of it was coordinated and none of it was slow. Nobody coordinated it. Nobody had to.

As for the honey badger? It's already moved on.