How to extract value from AI in 2026? I’ve summarized the approach into a core idea: you must ask the "AI system."

Compared to the methods in 2025, the key addition is this layer of cognition—the "AI system."

The logic is actually simple; when broken down, it consists of three parts:

True output of the AI era = Human insights × Context engineering × Model intelligence

All three dimensions are indispensable. Human insights refer to your depth of understanding of the problem; context engineering is how you structurally feed information to the AI; and model intelligence is the ceiling of the tool itself. To extract value from AI, you need to excel in all three areas—you can't just rely on the model's intelligence, nor only on human ideas. The key is how to connect them together. This is the so-called "AI system" thinking.