Okay, picture this for a second. You're on the
highway, and in the lane next to you, there's
this old, beat -up 2005 Toyota Tacoma. Right.
Seen better days. Exactly. Yeah. But there's
no person driving it. There's a humanoid robot
in the driver's seat, hands at 10 and 2, physically
pressing the pedals. And the owner's in the back,
just taking a nap. Yes. And the owner is just
napping in the backseat. It sounds like total
science fiction. But as of today, February 4th,
2026, that's not fiction anymore. That's actually
the plan for this year. Welcome back to the Deep
Dive. Today, I think we need to slow down a little.
We're standing here in early 2026 and things
are moving so fast. They really are. We're working
from a report by Max Ahn, nine biggest AI trends
for 2026. And honestly, the scope is, it's heavy.
It feels like a real turning point. It is. And
just to set the stakes before we even get into
the details, but projection is that global AI
spending will hit $2 trillion by the end of this
year. $2 trillion. $2 trillion. That's the financial
ground we're standing on. It's a number so big
it almost loses its meaning. It's just an abstraction.
So our mission today is to make that concrete.
Yeah. What does that money actually buy? Right.
We're going to walk through how this tech is
moving from our screens into our actual physical
world and how it's changing what it even means
to work. It's a journey from software to hardware,
from the screen to the street. So let's start
with the money then. Trend number one, the report
calls it AI buying from AI. For the last hundred
years, commerce has been a very human thing.
I see an ad, I feel something, I buy something.
But that's changing, isn't it? It's shifting
incredibly fast. The data suggests that by 2028,
just two years from now, AI agents will handle
90 percent of business purchases. 90 percent.
We are talking about 15 trillion dollars in spending
that never even touches a human hand. Beat 15
trillion. So. Help me picture this. This isn't
just me asking my smart speaker to order more
paper towels. No, no, it's much deeper. Think
about the smart fridge scenario from the report.
Your fridge notices you're low on tomatoes and
chicken. It doesn't just send you a notification.
While you're asleep, it checks prices at local
stores, compares availability, places the order,
and schedules the delivery. So it's machines
selling to other machines. Exactly. One AI writes
the invoice, another AI reads it, checks it against
a budget, and then pays it. All that human friction
is just gone. Okay, but hang on. If my fridge
is doing the buying, what happens to advertising?
That's the fascinating question. I mean, you
can't run a Super Bowl ad to convince my refrigerator
to buy Coke instead of Pepsi. You can't. Marketing
completely shifts. It moves away from emotional
persuasion, you know, buy this and feel cool,
to pure data optimization. If you're a brand
and your data isn't easily readable by an AI
agent, you basically don't exist. You're invisible.
It feels, I don't know, efficient but sterile.
So if the AI does the shopping. What is the human
actually doing? We stop ordering. We start configuring
the settings and monitoring the savings. So we
become the manager. We're managing the shopper.
You're orchestrating the outcome. Orchestrate.
I feel like we're going to come back to that
word a lot today. And this doesn't stop at groceries.
The report says this intelligence is bleeding
into our homes. Right. Trend number two. The
smart home idea isn't new, but apparently the
way it works is fundamentally changing. Yeah.
The keyword isn't smart anymore. It's connected.
For a long time, a smart home just meant you
could turn on a light with your phone. Which
is really just a fancy remote control. Exactly.
Not intelligence. The market, which is hitting
almost $200 billion this year, is moving towards
systems where all the devices talk to each other.
There was that one example in the notes about
a smart scale and a fridge that, I'll be honest,
I kind of hated. The accountability loop. Yes.
Walk us through that. So the idea is this. Your
smart scale talks to your smart fridge. You tell
a scale, my goal is to lose 10 pounds. Later
that night, you try to order ice cream through
the fridge's interface, and the fridge basically
refuses. Or it suggests a healthier option because
it knows your goal. See, that's where I have
a problem with it. That feels like a loss of
my own agency. If I've had a bad day and I want
some ice cream, I don't want my appliances to
stage an intervention. It is a trade -off, for
sure. You're trading some of that autonomy for
discipline. But from a purely technical view,
it shows that these devices are no longer isolated.
They're sharing data. So what is the fundamental
shift in how these devices operate? They stop
being isolated gadgets and start functioning
as a unified, aware system. A unified system
that might bully you into eating a salad. Okay,
let's move to work. Everyone gets an AI assistant.
The report calls it a personal Jarvis. But we've
heard this promise for years, right? Siri, Alexa,
they were all supposed to be assistants and they've
all been, you know, pretty underwhelming. Why
is 2026 different? It's all about context and
integration. This is finally addressing what
they call admin overload. Right. The stats say
we spend something like 60 % of our work time
on admin, email, scheduling, updating project
management tools. And the trend for 2026 is that
we just stop doing that because the AI agents
can finally connect all those apps together and
do it for us. So this isn't just me typing a
prompt into a chat bot. No, this is an agent
that knows your voice. It knows your priorities.
The example they use is a morning routine. You
wake up. Your AI has already seen two of your
meetings conflict, so it rescheduled one. It's
drafted 15 emails, and it's already sent the
eight easy ones. And updated your Trello board.
And updated your Trello and Asana boards, all
before you've had your first cup of coffee. It
uses tools like N8n or Zapier as the... The plumbing.
Right, the digital plumbing. It connects the
email pipe to the calendar pipe. It feels like
magic, but it's just logic. Exactly. The busy
work just evaporates. So if the AI handles all
the admin, the scheduling, the follow -ups, how
does the definition of work actually change for
us? We shift from managing tasks to managing
outcomes and strategic thinking. Managing outcomes.
Okay. Let's look at the business side of this.
Trend four is no more waiting on hold. This is
really the end of business hours. The data from
IBM and Zendesk is pretty clear on this. AI can
now handle about 80 % of routine customer questions.
The example from the report was a gym, right?
Right. Say you want to book a class, but it's
6 a .m. or maybe 10 p .m. at night. The office
is closed. Historically, that's just a lost customer.
A lost lead. You move on. But now an AI answers,
handles your questions, and books you into the
class instantly. No bad hold music. Beyond just
the convenience for the customer, what does this
actually mean for a business owner? Leads don't
vanish just because the office is closed. Zero
missed opportunities. Zero missed opportunities.
That's a huge shift. But let's take this further.
Trend number five moves from AI answering the
phone to, well, to running the whole department.
This is where the corporate structure itself
starts to change. The old way to grow was to
just hire more people. The new way is to deploy
more agents. They mentioned a tool. Hello, Frank
AI. Acting is basically an entire finance department.
Yes. So instead of a team of people processing
invoices, you just have a software layer that
does it automatically. The estimate is that 30
% of all U .S. work hours could be automated
by 2030. I have to push back on this a little
bit. That sounds great for the company's bottom
line. But if I'm a junior accountant just starting
out, where do I start? If all the entry -level
work is gone, how do you even learn the ropes?
That is the big question. It's like the ladder
is missing its bottom rungs. You see job titles
changing now, director of AI. Your job becomes
orchestrating the system, not managing people's
time. So if the AI runs the department, where
does the human value actually lie? Judgment,
relationships and handling the 10 to 20 percent
of cases that require nuance. The nuance, the
human age. It just feels like that's becoming
a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. OK, we're
back. We've been in the digital world agents,
software, customer service. But the report makes
a really big turn here into the physical world.
Trend number six is household AI robots. The
Butler. Yeah, this is the leap from that little
robot vacuum that gets stuck under your sofa
to a bipedal robot that can actually fold your
laundry. We're talking about Tesla's Optimus
Figure 3 Neo from OpenAI. And the market is projected
to hit $17 billion just this year. That seems...
Really fast for hardware. It is aggressive, but
the capabilities are closing that gap very quickly.
These robots, they learn by watching a human
do a task. They can pick up clutter. They can
load a dishwasher. It's adaptive behavior. It's
pretty amazing to think about. I mean, you go
over to a friend's house for dinner this year
and you just see a robot in the corner quietly
folding shirts. It feels, I don't know. Almost
normal, but also deeply strange. It really does.
It brings up a real sense of wonder. We've seen
this in cartoons like the Jetsons for our entire
lives. And now here it is walking around the
living room, seeing a machine do something so
human. It's surreal. It's a luxury for sure.
But these things are expensive. Yeah. So what
is the real currency being traded here when we
buy one of these robots? We are buying back time
time for health, family and creativity. Time.
The one thing you can't make more of. And that
leads perfectly into trend number seven, the
one we opened with, the robot in the Toyota.
AI robots will drive your car. This is such a
clever solution to a huge problem. Right. We
all thought we'd be buying new futuristic self
-driving cars. But retrofitting the entire world's
fleet of cars is just, it's impossible. It would
take decades. So you don't upgrade the car. You
upgrade the driver. Exactly. Tesla is planning
to build 50 ,000 Optimus robots in 2026. They
use the same FSD chips that are in the cars.
You just put the robot in the driver's seat of
your old Tacoma. It has cameras for eyes and
hands for the wheel. It just drives. It's such
a low -tech solution to a high -tech problem.
It's almost funny. But it bridges the gap. You
don't need a new $60 ,000 car to get full autonomy.
You just need the agent. The visual is wild,
but what problem does this solve for the average
person? It reclaims the one to two hours of lost
productivity spent driving every day. One to
two hours a day? That's life -changing for someone
with a long commute. Okay, moving on. Cred number
eight, AI -powered delivery. This is all about
solving the last mile problem. Getting a package
from the local warehouse to your front door is
the single most expensive part of shipping. And
now we're seeing drones and those little sidewalk
robots everywhere. They are, yeah. Amazon's goal
is to deliver 500 million packages a year by
drone by 2030. That ramp up is starting right
now. So instead of a delivery window from 9 to
5, it's just on demand. It's almost instant.
And because you're not paying a person for that
last mile, the cost goes way, way down. So how
does this change the consumer's relationship
with buying things? Speed and cost are no longer
tradeoffs. Delivery becomes instant and cheap.
Instant and cheap. Okay, finally, that brings
us to trend number nine. And this one kind of
wraps everything together. Knowing AI is the
biggest career advantage. This is the so what
of all of this for everyone listening. The gap
between people who use AI and people who ignore
it is getting wider fast. The report says having
AI skills can boost your salary by up to 56%.
That's huge. But I want to admit something here
for a second. Yeah, go for it. I do this show.
I'm immersed in this stuff. And I still feel
intimidated sometimes. I look at a tool like
N810 and it just looks like a mess of code to
me. Yeah. I think a lot of people feel that knowing
AI is only for developers. And that's the biggest
misconception. That's the vulnerability that
I think we all have to push past. The strategy
the report suggests is simple. Use AI to learn
AI. So you ask ChatGPT to teach you how to use
ChatGPT. Exactly. Ask it to teach you step by
step how to build a simple automation. Don't
wait to take a course. Just ask the tool to teach
you how to use the tool. Because if you don't,
the alternative isn't great. What is the harsh
reality for those who choose to ignore this shift?
They don't just fall behind. They get replaced.
The gap becomes permanent. Wow. The gap becomes
permanent. That is a sobering thought. It is,
but it's also an invitation. Okay, so let's zoom
out. We've talked about nine huge trends. Smart
fridges, robot butlers, robot chauffeurs. What's
the one big idea that connects all of this? I
think the big idea is a fundamental shift in
agency. We are moving from a world where we operate
tools, you know, a hammer, a keyboard, a steering
wheel, to a world where we orchestrate agents.
Orchestration. There's that word again. Yeah.
I mean, think about the progression. It starts
with the smart fridge ordering groceries, then
it's your office assistant handling your emails,
then a robot is folding your laundry, and it
ends with a robot driving your car. The common
thread is autonomy. The tools are doing the work
for us, not just with us. And 2026 is the year
that distinction becomes crystal clear. You have
to decide this year if you're going to be an
orchestrator of these new agents or if you're
going to keep doing the manual work that is very,
very quickly being automated away. That is the
fork in the road. The report ends with a pretty
blunt call to action. It says the next 18 months
are critical. And then it says beliefs that hurt
your future aren't worth keeping. I love that
line. So. For everyone listening, here's the
task. Commit to learning one new AI skill this
week. Not next month. This week. Start with a
better prompt. Move to a simple automation. Just
begin. The tools are there. You just have to
pick them up. See you in the future.