The AI Question You Must Answer in 2026

What I’m thinking about: How does your land business actually create value?

If you can’t answer that question with precision, you can’t transform your business with AI. Period.

I’ve been digesting this article from Section (my fave AI strategy newsletter), about the three AI strategy investments leaders should make in 2026.

But before you even think about AI investments, you need to answer two foundational questions:

1. How does our company actually create value?
2. What are we NOT going to invest in anymore so we can fund the future?

Most operators skip straight to “let’s throw AI at this problem” (*raises hand*) without doing the careful work of understanding their business mechanics first.

Let me break down how I’m thinking about this for our business… as inspiration for you to think about yours.

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Where Land Businesses Actually Create Value

This was harder to answer than I expected.

When I was building out our Hormozi ACQ AI system (more on that in a minute), I had to get crystal clear: Are we a service business or a physical products business?

You’d think real estate is obviously physical products. I mean… what’s more physical than land?

But here’s the reality for most land businesses (including ours as a capital partner):

We’re a service business.

The entire model is oriented around a unique, repeatable strategy for the acquisition of land. 

The disposition side gets tons of attention (especially in this brutal buyer’s market we’re navigating)… and yes, it’s probably the most difficult part of the business right now, on average.

But that’s NOT where you’re creating (or capturing) value.

You can be aggressive with pricing. You can utilize creative dispo strategies that may be amplified with AI. You can work with the best realtors in your market.

But if your buy price is wrong, none of that matters.

You make your profit on the buy. Every single time.

(Inclusive of subdivides and value-add plays. If you misprice the cost of those tactics, your project falls apart. Again, all of the value is reliant on the acquisition.)

So when you’re thinking about AI transformation, you need to start here: What’s the true value creation within your business model?

That’s your North Star. That’s where AI needs to make you more effective, faster, and reliable.

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The Reallocation Question No One Wants to Answer

Next: What are you NOT going to invest in anymore so you can fund the future?

This one hurts.

We all want AI to add capability without taking anything away. We want to keep the entire 2025 plan intact, sprinkle in some “AI initiatives,” and plan for transformation.

That’s not how this works.

Nothing can change if nothing gets cut.

A few painful cuts over the past year:

• Let go of operating Land Pricer (huge time/money investment toward it, but now my focus on SLC is razor-sharp, AND we can implement the AI initiatives that have been sidelined for months.)
• Pulled back significantly from Land Daily Diligence (we still show up when convenient for batched deal reviews, but it’s not a routine priority)
• Punted on a handful of AI projects we had high expectations for after significant investment (see example below)
• Various SaaS products that no longer kept pace with our standards or use cases (Check your overhead monthly with an executioner’s mentality.)

No sacred cows.

(Well… except your reputation and staying out of jail! Those are the only two ways to ruin yourself according to Nassim Taleb. Everything else can be sacrificed or overcome.)

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My Biggest AI Dead End (And What I Learned)

There was a ~2-3 week period in mid 2025 where I spent large chunks of my best work hours building out a “Chief of Staff” AI project.

Super in-depth. Over 100 questions interviewing me across my entire life and business.

As the name of the project implies, the goal was to supercharge our day-to-day operations, oriented around my ideal self’s decision-making, key advice from masterminds and mentors, plus copious internal business data.

It was illuminating…and practically useless.

It never fit into our workflow. The underlying data was tricky to use for actual breakthrough insights.

Now, as noted, we’re heavily invested in the Hormozi ACQ AI, which continues to improve every week. It forced us to calculate metrics we should have known YEARS ago but never bothered to track.

Now we know precisely which levers we need to solve our core constraint, and get to the next level. It’s informed by data from business owners many steps ahead of us.

Better than our Chief of Staff project in every way, AND it can still incorporate the 100+ questions I answered.

Salvage what you can from any failed project or dead end, and move on.

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What a $1M Subdivision Taught Me About AI vs. SaaS

Here’s a recent example that crystallized a lesson from the above Section article for me.

We’re reviewing a minor subdivision deal outside a major metro in the Northeast (one of the most macro-bullish areas of the country from a RE perspective…something I’ve been harping on for 6+ months).

As a non-exhaustive list, it requires an in-depth understanding of:

• Recent development trends
• Engineering requirements
• Local ordinances for subdivision (typically much more stringent in the Northeast and Midwest)
• Variable comp set in an area where vacant land is uncommon
• Recent new build home sales values
• Local income growth and demographic trends

This isn’t a standard land comp analysis. This is multivariate underwriting that requires pulling together data sets that don’t normally talk to each other.

And here’s what hit me: No SaaS product can handle this currently (nor can any out-of-the-box LLM).

This is why SaaS tools are going to get hit hard over the coming months/years.

The future isn’t rigid (or even flexible) software with limited features. 

The future is AI tools that adapt to your custom needs (such as Seth’s and Mike’s Stride CRM), just like LLM models can be customized precisely to each company’s unique workflows.

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The Framework: Incremental vs. Transformative AI

The Section article breaks down AI opportunities into two categories:

• Incremental: AI makes existing workflows faster/cheaper.
• Transformative: AI enables workflows you literally couldn’t run before.

Almost every company has been focusing on incremental shifts.

It’s far more difficult (and frightening) to ask: “What can we do that was literally impossible before?”

For example, we are hurtling into a world where it will be plausible to have alerts set up for ANY potential subdivide in the US, the moment they arrive on market, having initial underwriting automated, and offers sent out on your behalf within a matter of minutes to hours.

That’s the new bar, thinking beyond what even the most sophisticated team of humans could accomplish pre-AI. The opportunities are only limited by your creativity…and execution.

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Long-Term Games

Our AI push in 2026 is our #1 investment. 

That means accepting tradeoffs:

• Team bandwidth reallocated to learning and implementation (expect some output dips during reskilling)
• Capital redirected from “safe” investments to AI infrastructure and experimentation
• Short-term inefficiency for long-term capability building (the trend across all industries will be to build instead of buying…as building becomes simpler and cheaper.)

If you can’t lead through that discomfort…your company will never reach its full potential.

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Your Assignment (If You Want It)

The end of year holidays are a collective time for reflection (or in our culture, binging content. But you’re playing to win, right?)

Take 30 minutes this week and answer these two questions honestly:

1. How does my business actually create value? (Not what you or your team does day-to-day…but where the actual profit mechanics live.)
2. What am I going to stop investing in so I can fund the AI transformation my business needs?

Be specific. Share the answers with your team if you have one.

Then ask the follow-up:

What can I do with AI that was impossible before?

Not faster. Not cheaper. Couldn’t do at all.

That’s your transformative opportunity. That’s where the ultimate leverage is.

2026 is going to separate the operators who understand this from the ones who don’t.

Let me know what you come up with, I’m all ears.

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Looking for a funding partner who’s investing in the long game instead of chasing quarterly wins? We’re writing checks from $50K to $1M+. Land investing experience preferred, but not required.