Four months into 2026, I can tell you that the vision board prophecy held—but not in the way I expected. This is the 90% nobody sees.

By Ben Anchor — Wednesday, 29 April 2026 · Listen to the podcast episode

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in around March when you’re trying to launch something genuinely new in broadcast AI. The webinar buzz has faded. The follow-ups get harder. Procurement processes inside broadcasters slow everything to treacle. And meanwhile, you’re still invoicing clients, retraining the voice agents on your website, and wondering whether any of this is actually working.

I’ve just recorded an episode about the vision board I drew on 15th January—four quadrants, marker pens, the whole earnest setup—and what’s actually happened in the four months since. It’s a more personal episode than usual, and I want to pull out a few threads here that I think matter beyond my own diary.

The Prophecy and the Pattern

I had a strange, unrationalised feeling in January that Chinese New Year would mark a shift. Not a forecast based on pipeline data—more like a knowing. And I had a second premonition that April would bring another lift. I’m not given to mysticism, but I’ve learned to notice when a pattern repeats itself: the moments when things break through are rarely the ones you schedule in the CRM.

What actually happened: on 18th February, the day before Chinese New Year, I went live with a webinar—”Nowcasting in Media: From Theory to Practice”—alongside Chris Redmond and three think tank leaders (Adrian, Maria, and Karel) who have shaped my thinking all year. The audience was exactly the one I’d been writing for without quite reaching at scale: CTOs, commercial heads, product managers across broadcast, FAST, and streaming. And within a week, I had two genuine pilot conversations, a partnership lead that had been stuck since December suddenly opened up, and a much sharper view of what a productised nowcasting offer would actually look like.

The prophecy held. But the delivery didn’t look like what I thought it would. It wasn’t a single big door opening. It was a season of small alignments that compounded.

The 90% Nobody Sees

I opened the episode by talking about the iceberg. People see the shiny slideware, the webinar, the podcast episode, the LinkedIn post. That’s the 10% above the waterline. The 90% underneath—the late nights, the conversations that go nowhere, the moments of genuine doubt, the kindness of people who pick up the phone when you need a steer—that’s the part nobody sees, and that’s the part that actually builds the year.

Adrian, Maria, and Karel gave me steer after steer, on goodwill, on kindness, on the strength of their own deep experience. They didn’t have to. They did anyway. Their names won’t be on any deck, but without them, the framework I presented on 18th February wouldn’t have had the sharpness it had.

Then there’s Vinay, a longstanding industry colleague. In late winter, I solidified a partnership with him on the technology side of nowcasting. The data science and machine learning headaches that had been breaking me through the early part of the year lifted. I could focus on what I’m actually good at: the broadcast domain expertise, the commercial framing, the change management around implementation. They take the engineering. We meet in the middle. That’s what aligned partnership feels like—and you can only spot the difference once you’ve been through enough misaligned ones.

This is the iceberg. And I think the broadcast industry, and frankly anyone trying to launch something new in AI right now, needs honesty about this more than it needs another deck.

The Invitation Economy

One quadrant of my vision board said: “Invitation. Offers. Note the word: invitation. I did not write pitch. I did not write hustle.”

By March, I was starting to feel a pattern. The partnerships that were going to work were the ones where I didn’t have to convince anyone of the basics—the ones where the conversation started halfway up the mountain instead of at base camp. The invitation idea is not passive. It’s selective. You’re still working hard, but you’re working hard on the doors that are already cracked open, not battering at the ones that are bolted shut.

This matters because most of us in this industry are oscillating between concept, product, commercial model, partnerships, IP protection, the data science build, broadcast sales, and thought leadership. That’s eight discrete jobs, and if you’re trying to do them all in the same week, something has to give. What gave for me was the illusion that I could force alignment where it didn’t exist. What emerged instead was a clearer sense of where the energy was mutual.

April: Foundation Pouring, Not Fireworks

April has been quieter on the surface and louder underneath. The conversations from February have started to convert into shape: pilot scope discussions, data access conversations, the unglamorous stuff that actually precedes a contract. I’ve had three weeks where on paper nothing was visibly happening, and underneath, all the foundations were getting set.

The feeling I had in January—that April would matter—has held. Not in a fireworks way. In a foundation-pouring way.

And that’s the real lesson from the four months: you can’t tell from inside the storm whether any of it is working. You can only tell from the foundation you’re pouring, and from the people quietly holding the thing up underneath the water.

The Line at the Bottom of the Board

There was one line on my vision board, written in block capitals underneath the four quadrants: “In 2026, I am building a life that feels good deep within myself.”

Four months in, and that line is still doing the work. It’s the actual strategy. Everything else is tactics. The nowcasting pilots, the voice agent partnerships, the webinars, the podcast episodes—they’re all in service of something deeper, which is the discipline of not pushing closed doors, of working with people who are aligned, of trusting the premonitions when they come, and of being honest about the iceberg.

If you’re listening to this, and you’re wearing 12 hats and quietly wondering if any of it is working: the answer is you can’t tell from inside the storm. But the foundation you’re pouring matters. And the people quietly holding the thing up underneath the water? They’re the ones who will make the year.

The board is still on the wall. A little more creased than in January. A few items crossed off. A few new ones added in different colours. And the line at the bottom is still the real KPI for 2026.