Part 1 posted 2025-12-09, Part 2 2025-12-10, Part 3 2025-12-11.
That’s why untangling unstructured data becomes a generational opportunity.
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Content creation is one of the killer use cases of AI, and I expect we’ll see multiple successful products across use cases and types of customers from meme makers to Hollywood directors.
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While the ecosystem feels notably more mature, we’re still in the early days of a truly AI-native data architecture.
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As we move to a future based on outcome-based pricing that perfectly aligns incentives between vendors and users, we’ll first move away from screen time reporting.
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Energy, manufacturing, logistics, and infrastructure are back in focus, and the most important shift is the rise of an industrial base that is truly AI native and software-first.
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The same revolution is coming to the physical world.
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The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.
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As model capabilities progress across modalities and robotic manipulation capabilities continue to improve, teams will accelerate their pursuit of autonomous scientific discovery.
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I’m excited to see voice agents expand into handling entire workflows (which might be multi-modal) and even into managing full customer relationship cycles.
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Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals.
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But now, privacy by itself is sufficiently compelling to differentiate a chain from all the rest.
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Prediction markets have already gone mainstream, and this coming year, they’ll only become bigger, broader, and smarter as they intersect with crypto and AI — while also posing new and important challenges for builders to resolve.
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The founders who focus on the “product” part of product-market fit may end up the bigger winners.
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Just as humans need credit scores to get loans, agents will need cryptographically signed credentials to transact — linking the agent to its principal, its constraints, and its liability.
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As these on/off ramps mature, with digital dollars plugging directly into local payment systems and merchant tools, new behaviors will emerge: Workers can be paid in real time across borders.
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That’s where stablecoins come in.
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Messaging needs open protocols where we don’t have to trust anyone.
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To mature, DeFi security needs to move from bug patterns to design-level properties, and from “best-effort” to “principled” approaches:
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But I’m expecting AI research to enable, and reward, a new type of polymath research style: one that favors an ability to conjecture relationships between ideas, and quickly extrapolate from even more conjectural answers.
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The key transition for the coming year will be moving from static licensing to real-time, usage-based compensation.
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Tokenized assets, programmable lockups, prediction markets, and onchain histories offer stronger foundations for trust: A commentator can publish an argument and also prove they’re putting their money where their mouth is.
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That’s why I believe we need secrets-as-a-service: New technologies that can provide programmable, native data access rules; client-side encryption; and decentralized key management enforcing who can decrypt what, under which conditions, and for how long… all enforced onchain.
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But as more asset classes are tokenized, crypto rails enable strategies — personalized with AI recommendations and co-pilots – to be executed and rebalanced instantly and with minimal cost.
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But crypto market structure regulation — which the government is closer to passing than it’s ever been — has the potential to eliminate all of these distortions next year.
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In 2026, AI will break this cycle and close this hiring gap by automating much of this repetitive and redundant work for cybersecurity teams.
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In 2026, the biggest infrastructure shock won’t come from outside companies, but from within.
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In 2026, video stops behaving like something we passively watch and starts feeling like a place we can actually step into.
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In 2026, the real disruption in enterprise software is that the system of record will finally start to lose primacy.
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2026 unlocks multiplayer mode.
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In 2026, people will start interfacing with the web through their agents.
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In 2026, a new healthcare customer segment will take center stage: the “healthy MAUs.”
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In 2026, AI-powered world models will revolutionize storytelling through interactive virtual worlds and digital economies.
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2026 will become “the year of me”: the moment when products stop being mass-produced and start being made for you.
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In 2026, I expect we’ll see the birth of the first AI-native university, an institution built from the ground up around intelligent systems.
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In 2026, I think we’ll see companies approach challenges spanning energy, mining, construction, and manufacturing with a factory mindset.
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In 2026, it will be defined by data constraints and the next frontier in the crusade for data: our critical industries.
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In 2026, we’ll see this logic extend across industries, as AI systems deepen alignment with their customers’ incentives and create compounding advantages legacy software can’t touch.
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As the final piece in the consumer product cycle, this new distribution channel is set to kick off a once-in-a-decade gold rush in consumer tech in 2026.
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2026 marks the death of the prompt box for mainstream users.
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In 2026, the risk of not modernizing to take full advantage of AI will outweigh the risk of failure, and we’ll see large financial institutions let their legacy vendor contracts lapse and start implementing newer, AI-native alternatives.
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In 2026, enterprises will shift further from isolated AI tools to multi-agent systems that will need to behave like coordinated digital teams.
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2026 marks the year major consumer AI products shift from productivity to connectivity.
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In 2026, we’ll see the emergence of companies that simply could not have existed before recent model breakthroughs in reasoning, multimodality, and computer use.
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2026 will be the year that we see the startups going greenfield reach scale across a host of enterprise software categories.
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Along similar lines, in 2026 we’ll see more “origination, not just tokenization” when it comes to stablecoins, which went mainstream in 2025; outstanding stablecoin issuance continues to grow.
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In 2026, zkVM provers will hit roughly 10,000X overhead with memory footprints in the hundreds of megabytes — fast enough to run on phones, cheap enough to run everywhere.
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But in 2026, emerging primitives like x402 make that settlement programmable and reactive.
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