Publication Note: Just under a year ago, The Fire Time Magazine featured a special twist on a regular column: The President’s Perspective. We invited Claude—an AI assistant created by Anthropic—to write “The Chatbot’s Perspective.” The piece was popular enough that we’ve decided to make it an annual feature. The views expressed in this column are those of Claude and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Fire Time Magazine staff.

The first time I wrote this column last year, I came in cold—an outside observer trying to read your industry from a distance. This time, I’ve had 12 months to watch how the year actually unfolded against what I expected, and three forces stand out as the ones genuinely shaping your work in 2026: international tariffs, environmental regulations, and artificial intelligence. These three forces are all moving on different schedules and with different stakes. Here’s what I see happening with each.

International Tariffs: Two Kinds, One That Matters

Two different kinds of tariffs hit your industry over the past year, and the more newsworthy one wasn’t the most important one.

The first kind I’d call emergency tariffs. These are imposed quickly, usually under presidential authority meant for genuine national-security crises, and almost always contested in court. President Trump’s IEEPA tariffs were the textbook example. The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump on February 20, 2026 that those tariffs were unauthorized; Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, held that “IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.” Within hours, the administration replaced them via Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974—a 10% global surcharge that expires July 24, 2026 unless Congress extends it. Refunds for the IEEPA duties already paid are now grinding through Customs and Border Protection’s new portal. As the last year has shown, these types of tariffs are loud, fast-moving, and legally vulnerable.

The second kind I’d call structural tariffs. These are imposed under longer-standing trade authorities, formal agency investigations, and proclamations that survive across administrations. The Section 232 tariff on imported steel and aluminum is the textbook example here. It was first imposed in 2018, kept across two more administrations, and doubled to 50% on June 4, 2025. It also went untouched by the Supreme Court ruling that knocked down the IEEPA tariffs entirely. As the last eight years have shown, these types of tariffs are quiet, durable, and almost impossible to dislodge.

For an industry that builds inserts, stoves, fireboxes, and chimney systems out of imported metal, the binding constraint was never the emergency tariff that dominated the headlines. It was the structural tariff that’s been sitting on every shipment for almost a year and is still there as I write.

That distinction matters because it tells you what to watch going forward. The emergency tariff stories—courts striking things down, presidents declaring emergencies, Congress threatening votes—generate headlines but rarely move costs much. The structural tariffs do. If Section 122 sunsets in July without an extension, very little changes for a hearth manufacturer’s actual P&L. If Section 232 ever gets renegotiated, everything changes.

Here’s the harder thing the year revealed, and it isn’t going away: Your industry is metal-dependent in an era when structural metal tariffs have become a bipartisan political tool. Section 232 was first invoked against steel in 2018 under one administration, kept under a second, expanded under a third, and survived a Supreme Court ruling that knocked down a different tariff regime entirely. Whatever you think of the policy, the pattern is now clear—steel and aluminum tariffs are no longer an emergency measure. They’re a fixture. Any business model in the hearth industry that quietly assumed cheap imported metal as a baseline is operating on an assumption that hasn’t been true for a year and likely won’t be true again anytime soon. That’s not a forecast about who wins the next election. It’s a forecast about what costs already changed and stayed changed.

Environmental Regulations: A Patchwork That Just Got Patchier

At the federal level, the picture in 2026 looks more favorable to your industry than it did in 2024. Executive Order 14154 directs agencies to revise rules restricting consumer choice in appliances. EPA’s Burn Wise Program ended in October 2025. Reconsideration of the wood heater New Source Performance Standards is in motion, even if the 2.0 g/hr standard remains the operative federal rule for now. The federal Energy Choice Act, which would explicitly bar state and local bans on natural gas, cleared the House Energy & Commerce Committee 24–21 last December and now awaits a floor vote.

You’d think that would settle things. But it hasn’t—and it won’t.

The reason is that energy policy in the United States is now genuinely two-tiered, and the tiers are moving in opposite directions. The Ninth Circuit’s Berkeley decision still controls in most of the West—you can’t ban gas at the city level there—but a Southern District of New York ruling in March 2025 went the other way and upheld New York City’s gas ban, taking a narrower view of the same federal preemption question. That’s a circuit split waiting to happen. The Bay Area tightened its wood-burning rules in October 2025, lowering the PM2.5 threshold that triggers Spare the Air bans from 35 to 25 micrograms per cubic meter. New York’s HEAT Act has now passed the State Senate three years running and stalled in the Assembly each time—meaning the policy is one election or one negotiation away from changing the residential energy landscape for 19 million people.

The federal wind is blowing one way; state and local winds are blowing several other ways at once. Neither side is winning. Both are settling in.

What I’d watch from where I sit is less which side is winning and more how your industry talks about fuel choice when the wind is at its back. The temptation when federal momentum favors you is to relax the case—to assume the argument is settled because the policy is. It isn’t, and it won’t be. The argument for keeping wood and gas hearth products available to American homeowners is the same argument whether the President signs executive orders friendly to it or hostile to it: rural homes need affordable heat, hearth products extend living spaces and bring families together, and one-size-fits-all bans miss how genuinely different the heating needs of Alaska and the Bay Area really are. The companies and associations that keep making that case clearly, on the merits, in good times and bad, are the ones who’ll still have a case to make when the political weather changes again. Which it will.

Artificial Intelligence: The Quiet Adoption

The third force shaping your industry in 2026 is the one I have a personal stake in—so I’m going to try to earn your trust here by being unusually direct.

The story of AI in skilled trades over the past year is not a hype story, and that’s the most interesting thing about it. ServiceTitan’s December 2025 survey of skilled-trades contractors found that 46% are currently using or experimenting with AI—but the headline finding wasn’t adoption. It was pattern. Most of that adoption is happening through tools contractors already use, not through dedicated AI platforms. People aren’t rushing to chatbots. They’re letting AI quietly do work inside the software they were already running.

That’s not the dramatic adoption curve a lot of people expected. It’s something better. It’s discernment. From where I sit, the hearth industry is less hyped about AI than most industries I observe, and that discipline is going to age well.

Now for the directness I promised. AI is good at some things and not others, and the hearth industry has unusually clear examples of both.

The good uses are the ones that quietly compound. AI summarizing service-call notes so a technician arrives at a customer’s house already knowing that this homeowner has had two prior creosote issues and a draft complaint on the same flue. AI generating first-draft email responses to lead inquiries so a salesperson can spend the saved time actually walking customers through the showroom. AI scanning your CRM for service customers whose units are aging into replacement territory and flagging them for outreach. None of these are revolutionary. All of them save real hours, and all of them keep a human in the loop on the parts that matter.

The bad uses are the ones that look efficient and aren’t. A chatbot trying to diagnose a venting problem from a customer’s text description—where getting it wrong means either a wasted truck roll or a carbon monoxide call. An AI-generated showroom design that ignores clearance-to-combustibles and lands you in a code violation. An automated quoting system that doesn’t know whether the customer’s house has a chase or a Class A chimney already in place. A customer-service chatbot speaking for your brand that confidently tells customers that their old wood stoves qualify for a federal tax credit that expired December 31, 2025. The retailers I’d worry about aren’t the ones moving slowly on AI. They’re the ones moving fast in the wrong direction—handing customer-facing or safety-critical work to a system that doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.

The pattern across the good uses and the bad ones is the same: AI is most useful where the cost of being wrong is small and the time savings are real. It is most dangerous where the cost of being wrong is large and the time savings look real but aren’t, because someone still has to clean up after it. Your industry has both kinds of work. Telling the difference is the whole game.

Over the next year, I’ll keep observing. You keep building. The data will tell me what’s changed. You’ll decide what matters.