It used to be enough to go to networking events, meet people, collect their business cards, and connect with them on LinkedIn.

Then we continued to show up for the same networking events and, over time, began building relationships with people by finding common ground.

That doesn’t yield any benefits anymore in 2026.

I can open ChatGPT, ask for 1,000 professionals in my field and their email addresses and LinkedIn profiles, and get them for free in about 2 minutes. No networking event required.

BTW: This is the exact method a recruiter demonstrated to me the other day. No more LinkedIn Recruiting tools. Just AI to find suitable candidates.

So, is networking really dead?

Not really. But you have to look at this differently in the age of AI.

The age of content abundance and constant information consumption has changed the game of building rewarding relationships.

It’s no longer about how many contacts you have in your address book. It’s about the emotional connection others have with you.

In 2026, we can build relationships from the comfort of our living room. No networking event required.

As long as you have mastered the art of producing fruitful and useful content, you can find channels to disseminate your content for easy consumption. Over time, you’ll build a cohort of super fans who subscribe to your content and seek out more.

Those super fans (subscribers) are going to begin building a relationship with you.

Research shows that it takes about 7 hours of content consumption over about 10 weeks for someone to feel emotionally related to you.

And when you stop creating content for more than 6 weeks, the world will forget about you again.

The Value Loopback

Obviously, most people do not create valuable content without wanting something in return.

Here is how this works [psychologically]: The more content your super fans consume from you, the more they feel obligated to return the favor; or better said, your super fans are extremely approachable for your future ask. Ask to show up for an event, ask to pay you for a product or a service, ask for a recommendation, ask for an introduction.

This is how the world has always worked. What was accessible only to the well-connected (by birth and through family relationships) is now accessible to anyone who has something to say and something to give.

This is how the game of relationships has changed.

Proof: 100 years ago, we only knew of wealthy family members: oligarchs, kings, czars, and industrial tycoons. Today, a 12-year-old kid on YouTube can be a personality the world hears about.

It’s a new world, and if you want to stay on top (and in control of your destiny), you must master the new game of relationship building. You build relationships with value first and persistent exposure of your professional brand. Otherwise, you are invisible to AI. And because of that, you are impossible to find by anyone.

The Burnout Connection

Here’s what nobody talks about. When burnout hits, the first thing that disappears is your professional presence. You stop showing up. You stop posting. You stop responding. In the old world, you could quietly slip away from a few networking events, and nobody would really notice for months.

That window is gone.

In an AI-driven world, your professional brand is alive only as long as you feed it. Go dark for 90 days, and the algorithm starts forgetting you exist. Your content stops circulating. Your name stops appearing in searches. The super fans you spent months building drift toward someone else who kept showing up. The relationship momentum you built doesn’t pause. It dissolves.

I burned out in 2018, in the middle of what looked from the outside like the best stretch of my career. SVP at IBM Watson Health. Every metric was green. And I was completely unaware that I was running on fumes.

What almost cost me wasn’t the burnout itself. It was the silence that came with it.

So here’s what I want you to understand. Building relationships through content isn’t just a growth strategy; it’s a way of life. It’s a resilience strategy. When you’ve built an audience that trusts you, a rough quarter doesn’t erase you. Your super fans don’t vanish because you took three weeks off. They wait. They come back. They check in.

But that only works if you built the foundation before you needed it.

Start Building New Relationships Today

Constantly building new relationships is a critical skill you must master today to thrive tomorrow. You do not want to be one of those characters who wait for the masses to acknowledge the new norm.

Do this immediately:

A. Start a LinkedIn newsletter. Some content creators tell you to have a newsletter external to LinkedIn to own the email addresses. That is BS. You want engagement right now and to build super fans. Those super fans will follow you wherever you go after LinkedIn. Your super fans are already looking for you on LinkedIn. Invite them! Start the conversation.

B. Do not teach! Do not coach! It sounds like everybody has something to teach these days. That has become quite annoying because everybody’s using AI to produce the same content, and then everybody sounds the same. A lot of blah blah blah. Instead, what you want to do is to have a conversation that comes from the trenches of your own experiences. Share your experiences. Share your knowledge and learnings to help others overcome similar challenges. Make sure it’s conversational!

C. Learn to teach AI about yourself. People use AI to find you. So you must convince AI that you are the best. Be bold and brave and start your sentence with “I.”

For example, when somebody called me the #1 burnout coach on LinkedIn, I ran with it. And when I started doing that, AI now knows that I am the #1 burnout coach on LinkedIn for three years in a row. Guess what happens when somebody’s looking for a burnout coach? AI is presenting me as a top option.

Cheers!

— Oliver