Influence in 2026: The Opportunity Opening for Executives and Senior Experts

 It sounds like an odd moment to be optimistic about influence.

Snippet: AI is disrupting expertise and restructuring organisations, yet the same forces open an advantage for executives and senior experts who see beyond the boundaries of their role. Influence now depends on the quality of the questions asked, and those questions come from a wider terrain.

AI is disrupting established expertise. Organisations are being restructured. Long-held assumptions about careers, authority and influence are becoming less reliable.

For some executives and senior experts, influence will decline. Those whose authority rested on holding knowledge that others lacked face the sharpest exposure. Their position depended on a gap that is closing.

For others, the same forces open an opportunity. The difference lies in what each recognises is changing around them.

A changing terrain

The mechanics of influence remain familiar. Organisational politics. Competing agendas. Power. Relationships. The difficulty of getting important things done when authority alone is insufficient. None of that has become less important.

The terrain on which influence is exercised is another matter. It is shifting quickly.

Access without direction

Executives and senior experts now have extraordinary access to information. Specialist advisers surround them. World events can be followed in real time. AI can investigate almost any question in seconds.

Answers are plentiful. Direction is scarcer. Someone still has to know which questions to ask.

Forces from outside

The inputs that should shape those questions now arrive from well beyond the boundaries of a role, profession, organisation or industry. Technology changes the economics of expertise. Energy constraints alter technology strategy. Geopolitics reaches into supply arrangements. Regulation changes operating discretion. Capital reprices previously unremarkable infrastructure.

These forces rarely respect the lines on an organisation chart. A change in energy policy reaches a technology roadmap. A regulatory shift reaches a hiring plan. The person who sees only their own function meets the consequence after it has arrived.

AI changes where authority and judgement sit, as well as how work gets done.

Nobody can master every one of these fields. Nor should they try.

Wider awareness

The task is different. It is to hold sufficient awareness of the wider terrain to recognise when something outside the established domain has become consequential inside it.

This is the territory of Domain Mastery. Deep expertise remains valuable. So does experience accumulated over decades. But neither guarantees visibility of forces emerging beyond the boundaries of that expertise.

Building outwards

Executives and senior experts already hold what takes years to acquire. Deep knowledge, experience, relationships and judgement.

That base gives context for interpreting new signals. A newcomer sees an event. An experienced executive recognises how the event interacts with relationships, incentives and precedent already held. That depth of situated understanding is difficult to replicate through information alone.

Building outwards from it changes what becomes visible. Dependencies that were not previously important. Shifts in where power and control sit. Assumptions that no longer hold. Risks and opportunities that would otherwise stay outside the field of vision.

Better questions

A wider terrain changes the questions asked. Better questions change the decisions made, the arguments advanced and, ultimately, the influence exercised.

Domain Mastery depends on an accurate enough map of the territory relevant to the judgement being made, held while that territory keeps changing. Accumulating more knowledge does not supply that.

The advantage sits with those whose map stays current while the terrain moves.

Colin Gautrey, October 2026