Crikey it's happening, one of my once in a blue moon musings!
I've been watching tech long enough to have seen a few gold rushes. The PC era, the dot-com bubble, mobile, cloud... each one had its "this changes everything" moment, followed by a settling down into something either genuinely useful or quietly forgotten. I wrote a piece a few years back reviewing old blog posts and was struck by how many technologies I'd written about with real enthusiasm that simply no longer exist. The Pebble. Microsoft Band. Microsoft basically anything from that era, to be honest.
So when I try to make sense of where we are in 2026, I'm doing it with that lens on. Cautious optimism, let's call it.
AI is everywhere right now. And I mean everywhere. Google just held its annual I/O conference and the word "Gemini" appeared roughly every thirty seconds. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet between them are planning to spend something in the region of $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone — data centres, chips, power, talent. That's not a typo. Nvidia is forecasting $91 billion in a single quarter of revenue. These are numbers that don't really mean anything at human scale, except to say: big tech is absolutely convinced this is real.
Here's what's personally interesting to me, though. I spent fifteen years at Nuance selling Dragon speech recognition software. For most of that time I was explaining to sceptical customers why talking to a computer was actually a good idea. Natural language, machine learning, accuracy rates... I knew the pitch inside out. What's happening now with AI feels like that, but with the dial turned up to eleven and then snapped off.
Dragon worked well because it did one thing. It turned speech into text, accurately, and without you having to adapt much to it. What the current generation of AI tools does is far broader and, frankly, still a bit unpredictable. I use AI daily at this point and it genuinely helps with a lot of things. But I also know it confidently gets things wrong sometimes, and that gap between "impressive demo" and "reliable tool" is still real.
What I find harder to square is the employment picture. Big tech is spending historically unprecedented sums on AI, and simultaneously laying off tens of thousands of people. Meta cut 8,000 jobs in May alone. Microsoft has offered voluntary buyouts to something like 125,000 employees. These aren't struggling companies — they're having record years. The implication is uncomfortable: the investment in AI is partly an investment in doing more with fewer people. That might not be wrong, but it's worth being clear-eyed about it rather than pretending it's just efficiency.
On the consumer side, things are moving fast too. Tesla is pushing fully autonomous vehicles in the US this year. SpaceX has filed for what could be the largest IPO in history. The pace of change is genuinely startling, even for someone who's been watching this industry since the late eighties.
I'll be honest — I don't know how it all shakes out. I've seen enough tech hype to be wary of breathless headlines, but I've also seen enough to recognise when something is real and when it isn't. AI feels real. The question, as always, is which bits survive the inevitable correction and which bits end up in the same pile as the Pebble and the Microsoft Band.
For now I'm watching it all with interest, using what's actually useful, and trying not to get swept up in either the euphoria or the doom. Same as I have since 1989, really. 😄