In 1975, a 24-year-old Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson built the world's first digital camera. It weighed 8 pounds. It captured a black-and-white image in 23 seconds. It stored pictures on a cassette tape.

It was, by any measure, extraordinary.

His bosses reviewed the prototype. Then they made a decision that would end one of the most dominant companies in American industrial history.

They classified it. Locked it away. And told Sasson not to tell anyone.

Kodak was printing money - 90% of the US film market, 85% of cameras sold, $10 billion in annual revenue. Their own research told them digital would arrive in about ten years. They ran the numbers. They knew what was coming.

They just couldn't bring themselves to be the ones who made it happen.

The rest of the world built digital cameras anyway. Sony. Canon. Then smartphones. By 2012, Kodak had filed for bankruptcy. The patent for the very technology they'd buried - digital photography - was sold off to pay their creditors.

Here's what makes this story land differently in 2026: AI is not coming at your business in ten years. It is here. And unlike digital photography, it doesn't require your industry to change - it requires you to change first.

Kodak's leaders weren't fools. They were prisoners of their own success. The hardest thing to reimagine is always the thing that's working perfectly right now.

The question isn't whether AI will transform your business. It will. The question is whether you'll be the ones holding the camera - or the ones in photographs.

In 1899, Nikola Tesla stood in a laboratory in Colorado Springs and transmitted electricity through the air.

No cables. No connections. Just energy, moving freely across open space.

He called it the World Wireless System - a global network of towers that would deliver free electricity to every human being on earth, regardless of where they lived or what they could afford. Universal. Borderless. Transformative.

His investors called it financial suicide. They pulled his funding. His laboratory burned down. His patents were contested and eventually stripped. He died in 1943, alone in a New York hotel room, $2,000 in debt. His personal papers were seized by the US government.

Marconi - who built his transatlantic radio transmission using 17 of Tesla's patents - received the Nobel Prize for it. Tesla received almost nothing.

Wireless energy transfer - the technology Tesla demonstrated in 1899 - now charges your phone without a cable. The global network of interconnected nodes he described? We call it the internet. The world he imagined, dismissed as fantasy, became so ordinary we forget to find it remarkable.

Here's what's different now.

We are living through the first moment in human history when the gap between imagining and building has collapsed. AI doesn't just process information faster - it sees patterns across complexity at a scale no human mind can reach independently. It doesn't replace human imagination. It gives imagination somewhere to go.

Tesla had the vision. He didn't have the infrastructure, the tools, or the partners to make it real in his lifetime.

You have all three. The only question left is what you're willing to imagine.

What are you working on that the world isn't ready for yet? Because - right now, in this moment - it might be ready sooner than you think.