AI in 2026 | 8 Predictions About What's Coming

I think 2026 is going to be a defining year for artificial intelligence, for social media, human behavior, devices, a tech resistance, and technology more broadly. I'm a futurist and strategic foresight advisor, so I spend my days immersed in research and white papers on emerging technologies and their impact on society, but also on businesses and business models, governments, national security, so I'm in this stuff all day. I'm not in the business of making predictions, but today I might make an exception and we're going to have a little bit more fun and I'm going to share the trends I'll be paying very close attention to in 2026. I'm Shea Bovell and this is I've Got Questions. I think 2026 is going to be the year of the offline renaissance. We're already starting to see in the data that we've reached peak social media, so after 2022, the time spent on social media platforms has started to decline. Between 2022 and 2024, it's declined by 10 percent, which is significant. Now, this is mainly for younger users. It's not for older adults, but still, the signals in this data are meaningful and there are myriad reasons why we've arrived here, I think not least of which being the experience on social media. People are maxed out, whether that's from the polarization, from the doom scroll, from being shown a bunch of content that you can't stop watching, but you never sought that out in the first place. You wanted to connect with friends or family. You wanted to connect with your family. Not being able to see the post from the people who you follow. All of these reasons why the online experience is just draining. And then you add into that the rise of AI-generated content and AI slop, so people genuinely don't know if they are filtering between a human-generated content or just AI nonsense. So I think the signals are there. What we're also seeing is these social and cultural signals that moving offline is the new flex or is much more socially desirable. So with teens, we're seeing the rise of flip phones and dumb phones. So these would be phones that you can't, like just the traditional cell phones from the late 90s, early 2000s, where you couldn't actually download any apps or anything. Those are slowly coming back in style for younger users. So that's a big signal about where younger generations are going. And even for Gen Z that are on social media platforms, a lot of them are actually spending time communicating with one another in messaging versus actually on platforms. So all of these signals are showing people want to go online. They want to go online. Where their actual communities are. And that tends to be in more offline worlds. And this isn't just with social media. We're seeing this with other types of digital platforms like dating apps. Year over year, dating app usage and paid usage has been declining. And people are now opting for things like running clubs to meet potential significant others. The rise of more speed dating, the rise of matchmakers are coming back in style. So people are really starting to invest in offline worlds. And I think in 2026, we're going to see a lot of people who are going to invest in an offline life and having a bigger offline presence than an online presence is going to start to be a social flex. And this trend is going to start to gain a lot of momentum. I don't think we're going to stay offline. I'm going to talk in a couple predictions from now about what I think is going to happen that brings us back in digital worlds, but in a different way. But what's interesting to me is Meta just recently announced that you'll be able to watch creator videos on TV platforms. I think they're partnering with Amazon. To me, this is a signal, that they know people are still going to be streaming content on streaming platforms. That's where eyeballs are going to go if people are going to slowly stop spending as much time on social media. So they are figuring out different ways to bridge their platforms into where traffic is going to move. That's my guess with that signal. But do you know what I think is also going to drive people more offline? Ironically, artificial intelligence. The better AI becomes, and the more our phones are powered by artificial intelligence, the less we're going to need to open our devices and do things on it. So the better AI gets and the more reliable it gets, the more I'm going to just say to my device, order that Uber, refill those groceries, and not actually need to take out my phone. Further breaking that behavioral loop of opening, swiping, clicking, typing, that's all going to start to move away. And I think in 2026, we'll hear from Google with their Android devices announcing the phone's powered by Gemini and people starting to use it a lot more. And I think that's going to drive people more offline. And I think that's Apple is going to have to make some announcement about Siri. I don't know if Siri, rest in peace, maybe Siri will be replaced. Maybe Siri's digital twin comes and saves Siri. Something has to happen there. But we will start to be able to talk towards our phones versus needing to use them as much. And that's, again, going to further move our behavior offline in a way. This leads me to prediction number two, that in 2026, it is going to become very apparent that we are rapidly moving towards a voice-first society, where we stop typing as much as we used to, and we start just talking. Talking to an AI to order the things that we need to order, sending voice notes. I think we're going to move towards more of a voice-first economy. And we're already seeing this, right? The rise of audiobooks, less reading, more listening, more talking. Artificial intelligence is going to ramp up those trends because we're not going to need to write those emails or write those text messages or even write those AI prompts. Why write an AI prompt? Why write an AI prompt when you can just ask AI to do something? And this has myriad implications, right? If we're moving to a voice-first society, in some ways, it's much more natural than typing. But typing was an extension of writing. So there were a lot of implications here and reading and so forth that we're going to get into in another episode. But that is my prediction number two. It's going to start to become very apparent. We're rapidly moving towards voice-first. My third prediction, 2026 will be the year of AI glasses. So we saw it from Meta, but I think Apple is going to step into the game with their AI glasses and that will make Apple Glass hopefully make more sense. I think Google is going to announce their AI glasses. And this, again, the rise of AI glasses means less and less interactions with a smartphone. It doesn't mean the smartphone is going to go away. It's the same way you have a smartphone and a computer, but you just don't bring your computer on your morning walk to do things. You bring your phone. We're going to start to use our phones less. And then again, this changes what type of platforms make sense because no one's going to be scrolling through the internet. And then again, this changes what type of platforms make sense because no one's going to be scrolling TikTok with their eyes or even just social media in general when you have this display that close to your face. So it's going to lead to different types of behavior. And you can imagine if you have your smart glasses on, you would just talk to the AI in your glasses and then maybe take out a phone if you need to see something. But we're moving towards a lot of different behaviors. The privacy implications with smart glasses, the ethical implications of smart glasses. We got into a lot of this in our episode on AI glasses. We're going to start to see a lot of different behaviors. So believe me, we have covered this with one of the leading experts on this topic. My hope is that AI glasses are not a surprise. They've been on the market for years. I think they're going to go more mainstream in 2026, that policymakers are thinking about this and we don't pretend that we didn't see this one coming because we can. And even if you might be watching right now or listening right now and thinking that you would never wear smart glasses and I don't have smart glasses, but we said the iPhone was predicted to fail and fail badly. AirPods were seen as very unattractive pearls that nobody's going to wear. So we tend to say all these things. My philosophy is that we're better to be prepared than scrambling when things do start to take off. So that's kind of my vote there. My fourth prediction is that in 2026, we are going to hear that artificial intelligence systems, the current AI systems we have built, have reached their limit. In terms of what they'll be able to accomplish in terms of their level of intelligence. In other words, large language models is the current architecture that powers chatbots that we interact with. So whether that's ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude, these AI systems are powered by large language models. These algorithms analyze and read a ton of data, almost all the textual data that's ever been published on the internet. They learn to spot patterns in that data and then they make predictions about what word should come next. In a sentence, based on the patterns in the underlying data, the sky is, it would probably say blue, for example, next token prediction. That has been very significant in terms of progress in AI. But when you think about true intelligence or advancing intelligence, the world doesn't work by reading a bunch of books and then predicting what should come next in a sentence. The world has physics and all sorts of different types of data that an AI system would really need to be able to understand beyond just text, right? So I think we're hearing some of the biggest voices in AI say we've reached the limit of what this version of AI can give us. The data that AI is learning from the internet is now becoming much more sloppy with AI generated data. So it's much more messy. So we don't even have a lot of good quality data to feed into these AI systems. I think we're going to hear much more about we're at the beginning of the end or hitting the capacity for what this current version of AI can do. But this isn't the end of the AI story. We're going to hear a lot more about something called world models. So AI systems today predict the next word. World models build simulations of reality. They take in all sorts of data, visual video data, sensors, audio. They understand the dynamics of physics and they predict not what words should come next, but what should happen next. And this is vital if you think about a robot in the world. It doesn't need to predict the next word. It needs to predict, you know, there's a car moving, there's water falling from the sink, the sink wasn't turned off. It needs to be able to predict the is seen, just the word. Drive-less vehicles, there are many use cases where world models make a lot more sense. But it might not just be world models. There could be AI models that are based much more on biology. I think we're going to start to hear more and more about what's going to come after large language models. But here's where we have to pay attention to markets. Depending on where this next breakthrough comes from and whatever is going to replace large language models or get built on top of them, if it is not in the MAG-7 or in an American company, it could shake the stock market. We could have another deep-seek moment like we did last January, where the Chinese AI model deep-seek came out of nowhere. Nobody saw it coming. It was just as performant as many of the American models, but cheaper. And it knocked trillions off of the U.S. stock market. It recovered. But if there is a breakthrough in AI and it doesn't come from the American companies leading the stock market, the markets will feel that. My fifth prediction is that we're going to start to see much more of a resistance towards artificial intelligence. In 2026. And this is going to be the culmination of many different forces. AI's impact on the workforce, I think, is going to continue to expand or that's going to continue to grow. We talk about this all this time on the podcast, from what's really happening with these layoffs, what AI can and can't do, how to prepare. So that's something that we cover a lot. But I think more companies are going to start to downsize and shift and get AI ready. And that's going to impact the workforce. We haven't heard anything from policymakers on how to protect workers through this time. What are the social safety nets? How can people apply for reskilling programs? What is the general plan? We don't hear anything about that. So I think we're going to start to see a lot more resistance from workers. I think people are going to start to feel like AI is cognitively impacting them. They're not thinking as as deeply as before. Issues with AI disinformation. I think all of this is going to culminate to some form of a backlash or resistance against artificial intelligence, some sort of movement and some sort of bargaining towards or resistance against AI progress. I do see that happening in 2026. My prediction number six, AI will go mainstream in politics. Up until this point, we have hardly heard anything from policymakers in campaigns about artificial intelligence and the impact of AI on people, not the impact of AI on national security, not the impact of AI on driving productivity in the economy, not the need for sovereign AI. The impact of this technology on individual people in society, on their jobs, on their education. I think we're going to see a politician make AI the center of their campaign, and they will talk to all of these points. And I can't tell if this is me manifesting this and hoping that this happens, but I think in 2026, AI is finally going to become much more part of political discourse. And not just kind of these open generic statements from politicians, but also politicians about AI is doing this, but a plan, an actual plan. This is how I hope to deal with it. And not just we're going to randomly stop all AI, something that's much more thoughtful. I think that it's long overdue, and I think we see it in 2026. My seventh prediction for 2026 is that there's going to be a massive cultural moment with artificial intelligence in entertainment. So whether that is an AI-generated song that genuinely, goes viral, not because of the novelty that it's AI, but because the song is well-liked, or maybe it is a character in a show or in some type of content. And it really splits culture because there are people that are like, you know what? I've accepted it. This song is great, or this piece of content is great. And people that say, this is atrocious. We didn't deal with the copyright. How can we ever accept AI-generated content? This is just a mockery of art. I think it's going to, it could really split forces. And I'm not sure that the content comes even from America. I mean, there's many countries and many artists all over the world working with artificial intelligence. So it could come from anywhere. But I think in 2026, AI makes a big moment in culture. If we look at the entertainment companies, right, and what they've, the moves they've been making, even the last couple weeks alone, there's been billion-dollar deals between Disney and OpenAI record labels that have. previously sued AI companies are now partnering with them. So the entertainment industry is showing what they are betting on. And so I think we start to see some of the outcomes of that. But if you've been following me on social media and seeing my writing, or you see me kind of talk in public on this stuff, I mean, where I stand, I find it very uninteresting to think about using AI just to create a digital twin of somebody and making content that is just digital copies of existing actors. To me, that doesn't make sense. It would make no sense to me. It would maybe be possible. Yes. Not interesting. An ethical nightmare. What's more interesting to me is the new type of entertainment that gets created with AI. That is what I am focused on. But I think in 2026, we see some clashes. And I wrote a piece called The Post-Reality Era. And this speaks directly to it, where reality is going to become AI-generated, and people decide if they think it's real or not. I mean, if you like the AI song, it's real to you. Somebody else may think, this is AI-generated, this isn't real, I'm not subscribing to it. So we start to get into these different types of bubbles. And my eighth prediction is that there is a massive medical breakthrough, or a breakthrough in biology, that is driven by artificial intelligence. And the world sees that AI is a medical necessity, whether that is how we understand and are able to treat a disease, whether that is a fundamentally different approach to medicine and healthcare altogether. For the last couple of years, biology researchers, medical researchers have been working with customizing AI models. So building AI models that are relevant specifically for cancer research, or neurodegenerative diseases, or autoimmune illnesses, really focused on data sets relevant to a specific disease, and an AI architecture relevant to solving those problems. They have been quietly working in the background for the last couple of years. We are going to start to see the result of some of that work. And I think the world is really going to see, this is why these parts in particular of AI are worth fighting for. And I think that's where most of us tend to agree on our future with AI, what it could do for healthcare. I think we all know there's so many aspects of healthcare that are broken, that aren't working. Things take so long, access, it's so expensive. I think this is where AI is going to shine. And I think in 2026, we see the first example of it changing the game in medicine. So those are my predictions for 2026. And again, I'm not in the business of predictions. I'm making an exception for today. I want to hear your predictions. So write them in the comments. If you found this episode interesting, please share it with somebody who also might like it. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. And in terms of thinking about the future of work and some of the other areas that I discussed today, we also write a weekly newsletter where I go in more depth on these topics. So we'll link that below. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. Have a great day. And I look forward to seeing you at the next one.