MicroScope+ Premium Content/MicroScope

If you polled people for the two words that best summarised 2025, the vast majority would be very likely to reply, “Trump” and “AI”. It’s hard to believe anything else would come anywhere close to those two, and judging by the first couple of months of 2026, it might prove very difficult for anything else to dislodge them in the next 12 months. In the tech industry, artificial intelligence (AI) has subsumed everything else. No wonder, given the eye-watering sums being pledged to AI investment. Gartner recently forecast that worldwide spending on AI would hit $1.5tn by the end of 2025 and surpass $2tn in 2026. Nevertheless, the consensus seems to be that while AI will continue to dominate, there may be a change in emphasis in 2026. According to Christian Nagele, chief strategy officer at Inforcer, the channel “has a very different mindset” going into 2026 compared with 2025, which was “dominated by noise and hype, particularly around AI, and while there is still certainly excitement, the tone has already shifted”. He notes that ...