Last month, Spotify announced “Prompted Playlist,” a new feature the company claimed let users “steer the algorithm.” This was a bold—if not vague—claim, to be sure, but it was backed by everyone’s favorite tech trend of the last three years: AI. The pitch was that Spotify would let subscribers use the company’s AI models to better control their listening experience, so long as they lived in the country of New Zealand. That’s a very small slice of Spotify’s very large user base.

Luckily for those of us in the United States and Canada, Prompted Playlist is expanding to our side of North America. Spotify announced the move today, Jan. 21: Now, Premium subscribers in any of these three countries can access the feature, if they want to hand over the playlist reigns to Spotify’s machine learning models.

What is Prompted Playlist?

Prompted Playlist is Spotify’s AI-powered tool that lets you use natural language to create custom playlists. The idea is, rather than look for songs to add to a playlist, you tell Spotify’s AI what you’re in the mood to listen to, and it adds songs automatically for you. That can include genres and existing songs, but also ideas, deeper descriptions, and, for lack of a better word, vibes.

To understand what I mean, here are some of the suggested prompts Spotify suggests you try:

• “Make me a playlist of songs I’ve saved to my Library (playlists or Liked Songs) that I either haven’t played yet or have only listened to once. The goal is to round up those songs I found, saved, and then totally forgot to revisit. Give me a chance to finally hear what I’ve been missing.”

• “What are the first tracks I ever listened to on Spotify? Order them by the very first track I ever streamed – with date and time – and keep going.”

• “Knowing what I listen to today, make me a playlist of songs from 2016 that match my current taste, mixing the biggest tracks from that year with songs that feel timeless now.”

• “Make me a playlist to help me learn Spanish, with clear vocals and easy-to-follow lyrics. Mix popular Spanish-language songs with slower tracks that make it easier to catch the words, and include music that reflects different Spanish-speaking cultures to keep it engaging.”

Spotify says that Prompted Playlist takes your existing listening history into account as well. While you and a friend might give Spotify’s AI the same prompt, in theory, you should each receive different playlists, since the AI will make adjustments based on the music you like and don’t like. You also don’t have to wonder why the AI put a specific song in the playlist: Each track starts with a “quick one-liner” that explains why Spotify chose it in the first place. I could see that being either insightful, or extremely annoying.

The thing is, Spotify has rolled out a feature like this before, appropriately dubbed “AI Playlist.” Lifehacker’s David Nield covered it in September of 2024, and catching up on that feature, it sounds pretty similar to Prompted Playlist. AI Playlist isn’t actually going away now that Prompted Playlist is here: Spotify tells me that these are two separate features, and that the major differences are that Prompted Playlist factors in your entire Spotify listening history, going back to your first song, as well as real-time information about “trends, charts, culture, and history” in the industry today. You can also schedule playlists if you like, so the mix refreshes every day or week, something you can’t do with AI Playlist.

From my seat, it also seems like Prompted Playlist is designed to handle more complex prompts, as well. While the company advertised AI Playlist as a way to build playlists from prompts like “upbeat pop music for my road trip,” the company’s suggested Prompted Playlist prompts are much more intricate, and include multiple levels of instruction for the AI. Perhaps part of that is the result of improvements in the technology over the past year and half.

How to try Spotify’s Prompted Playlist

Prompted Playlist is launching as a Premium-only feature, so if you don’t pay for Spotify, you unfortunately can’t access it. If you do have a Premium account, you’ll need to head to Spotify, tap “Create,” then choose “Prompted Playlist.”

As explained above, from here, you can describe what kind of playlist you want the tool to make. From here, you’ll be able to set how often it refreshes (if it refreshes at all). If you’re not happy with the results, you can choose “Edit Prompt” to adjust it. You can share the playlist with friends, but know that Spotify will adjust the playlist to match their listening histories instead.

1Password has a new tool designed to counteract the advantages AI has given to phishing scammers. A new feature for the company’s browser extension gives you a “second pair of eyes” to help you catch a bogus website before entering your login info.

Before AI, phishing attempts often included telltale signs like obvious typos or rudimentary graphic design. Now that AI makes it much easier to design and code convincingly, scams are on the rise. According to Fortune, 60 percent of companies reported an increase in fraud-related losses from 2024 to 2025. And the advent of AI browsers could make things even worse.

“Our new phishing feature adds an extra layer of protection,” 1Password says. Once the feature is activated, the extension actively watches for suspicious sign-ins. To be clear, even before this feature’s arrival, 1Password wouldn’t autofill saved credentials for a bogus website impersonating it. But that still left room for people to manually paste their login info, handing it over to those with the worst intentions.

That moment when you try to paste your login manually is where the new feature comes in. “The website you’re on isn’t linked to a login in 1Password,” the feature’s warning pop-up reads. “Make sure you trust this site before continuing.”

1Password says that’s the “breakthrough” moment that can help you avoid a major hassle. “That single moment of pause, that tiny bit of friction, is often all it takes to disrupt the attackers’ entire plan.”

The new feature is available today. You can enable it in the 1Password browser extension’s settings. Under the Notifications section, activate the setting for “Warn about pasted logins on non-linked websites.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/1password-adds-an-extra-layer-of-phishing-protection-140000293.html?src=rss

Scarlett Johannsson, R.E.M., Vince Gilligan and over 700 other artists are demanding that tech companies stop “stealing” their work in order to train AI models. A new campaign called “Stealing isn’t Innovation” demands that AI companies take “the responsible, ethical route” through licensing and partnerships, according to the website.

“America’s creative community is the envy of the world and creates jobs, economic growth and exports,” a statement on the website reads. “But rather than respect and protect this valuable asset, some of the biggest tech companies, many backed by private equity and other funders, are using American creators’ work to build AI platforms without authorization for copyright law.”

The group adds that the “illegal intellectual property grab” has resulted in an information ecosystem dominated by “misinformation, deepfakes and a vapid artificial avalanche of low-quality materials [‘AI slop’]… threatening America’s AI superiority and international competitiveness.”

OpenAI once argued that it’s “impossible” to train AI without copyrighted materials, since “copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression.” However, actors, musicians and authors take issue with that idea, particularly when they see their likenesses or work repurposed as slop or worse by large language models (LLMs).

Johansson, for one, previously threatened OpenAI with legal action in 2024 over a ChatGPT voice assistant that effectively cloned her voice. More recently, Elon Musk’s Grok has been accused of creating millions of sexualized images of real people in just days, according to a report today from The New York Times.

“Big Tech is trying to change the law so they can keep stealing American artistry to build their AI businesses — without authorization and without paying the people who did the work. That is wrong; it’s un-American, and it’s theft on a grand scale,” the group proclaimed.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/a-list-creatives-sign-up-to-fight-ai-say-it-enables-theft-at-a-grand-scale-140000475.html?src=rss

Ahead of its upcoming price hike, Spotify is rolling out a more advanced AI playlist feature in the US and Canada. Prompted Playlist, which the company trialed in New Zealand late last year, lets subscribers “control the Spotify algorithm,” as the company describes it. “You’re not just asking for music, you’re shaping how Spotify goes about discovering it for you.”

For example, you can guide it to make a playlist of songs you’ve saved to your Library but haven’t listened to yet. (It can tap into your entire Spotify history.) Or, you can tell it to round up songs from a specific television show or movie. (It uses real-time information about pop culture, charts, and history.)

The feature includes options to refresh the playlist over time (daily or weekly). You can edit each playlist’s prompt at any time. Each track will include a short note to explain why it was chosen.

Spotify

Spotify says beta testers have used Prompted Playlist to revisit songs tied to specific moments and filter out tracks they’ve overplayed lately. “Others are asking for long, lyric-free electronic playlists to power through a workday, or mixing in artists connected to current pop culture moments and viral trends,” the company wrote.

There’s room for some confusion here because Spotify already has an “AI Playlist” feature. That simpler type will stick around alongside the new “Prompted” variety, which allows for finer tuning and can sift through more data.

Prompted Playlist will be available to Spotify Premium subscribers in the US and Canada “by the end of the month.” Once you have access, you can try it by tapping Create, then selecting Prompted Playlist.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/spotifys-prompted-playlist-lets-you-describe-exactly-what-you-want-to-hear-140000153.html?src=rss

The new year was supposed to bring opportunities for beaten-down software stocks. Instead, the group is off to its worst start in years. From a report: The release of a new artificial intelligence tool from startup Anthropic on Jan. 12 rekindled fears about disruption that weighed on software makers in 2025.

TurboTax owner Intuit tumbled 16% last week, its worst since 2022, while Adobe and Salesforce, which makes customer relationship management software, both sank more than 11%. All told, a group of software-as-a-service stocks tracked by Morgan Stanley is down 15% so far this year, following a drop of 11% in 2025. It’s the worst start to a year since 2022, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

While unproven, the tool represents just the type of capabilities that investors have been fearing, and reinforces bearish positions that are looking increasingly entrenched, according to Jordan Klein, a tech-sector specialist at Mizuho Securities. “Many buysiders see no reasons to own software no matter how cheap or beaten down the stocks get,” Klein wrote in a Jan. 14 note to clients. “They assume zero catalysts for a re-rate exist right now,” he said, referring to the potential for higher valuation multiples.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Bose Ultra Open Earbuds don’t block out the world—they sit just outside your ears and let everything in. Traffic noise, conversations, the doorbell—all of it stays audible while your music plays alongside it. That makes these earbuds a better match for people who move around outdoors or just don’t like feeling sealed off. Right now, a certified refurbished pair in White Smoke is $125.99 on Woot. That’s a noticeable drop from the roughly $179 (refurbished) price on Amazon, where a brand-new pair still lists for $299. Bose handles the refurbishment directly, includes all original accessories, and backs the earbuds with a one-year manufacturer’s warranty. Shipping is free for Prime members, with a $6 fee for everyone else, and the deal runs for nine days or until it sells out.

Bose Ultra Open Earbuds

$125.99
at Woot

$299.00
Save $173.01

$125.99
at Woot

$299.00
Save $173.01

Each earbud clips onto your ear using a flexible silicone band instead of resting inside your ear canal. Once you find the right fit (which may take a few tries), you should find them surprisingly stable. Runners and walkers will appreciate that they stay put without squeezing or irritating the ears, and with IPX4 water resistance, they can handle sweat and light rain, which is enough for most daily use. The earbuds support Bluetooth 5.3 with AptX Adaptive, so Android users get a small audio edge over iPhone users, but connection quality is solid across the board. Battery life averages about 7.5 hours per charge and stretches to roughly 27 hours with the case.

Sound quality is better than most open-style earbuds manage. Vocals come through cleanly, highs stay sharp, and the midrange has enough body to keep music from sounding hollow. Deep bass is where you feel the compromise. It’s there, but it doesn’t hit hard, which is most noticeable with bass-heavy genres. For podcasts, calls, and casual listening, though, the tuning feels balanced and easygoing. According to this PCMag review, the earbuds sound best around 70 percent volume, where detail stays intact without distortion. If you want high-quality, open-ear audio and don’t mind a little trial-and-error with the fit, this is one of the better ways to try Bose’s latest without paying full price.

If you’re thinking about upgrading to a new graphics card this year, your window for doing so at MSRP has closed. When I first reported on this at the start of December, things were looking bleak but you could still find GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA at close to their recommended prices. That changed last week when YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed reported that ASUS had stopped producing the RTX 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti 16GB due to ongoing memory shortages. 

After Engadget published the news, NVIDIA disputed the report. “Demand for GeForce RTX GPUs is strong, and memory supply is constrained. We continue to ship all GeForce SKUs and are working closely with our suppliers to maximize memory availability,” a company spokesperson told us. 

The next day, ASUS walked back its previous statements. After “explicitly” telling Hardware Unboxed it had placed the 5060 Ti 16GB and 5070 Ti into “end-of-life status,” the company said “certain media may have received incomplete information from an ASUS PR representative regarding these products,” adding it had “no plans to stop selling these models.”  

Whether or not the 5060 Ti 16GB and 5070 Ti remain in production, one thing is certain: the AI boom has created a great deal of uncertainty in the GPU market. After the news, panic buying sent the price of the 5070 Ti through the roof. Right now, it’s impossible to find that model priced at its MSRP of $749. As of the writing of this article, the most affordable version of the 5070 Ti I could find on Newegg was $1,199. 

The bigger problem is that the 5070 Ti isn’t the only GPU selling for far more than MSRP. Tom’s Hardware has been tracking GPU prices for months, and there’s not a single model you can buy at either AMD or NVIDIA’s recommended price. That puts PC builders in a tough spot. What do you do if you want to upgrade to a new graphics card this year? 

If you’re sitting on an older GPU, the best advice I can give is to stick with your current hardware. If you’re fine with the performance of your video card right now, it’s best to wait a year or two for the market to settle down.

On the other hand, if your current GPU is not up to the task of running the games you want to play, try to buy a card with at least 12GB of VRAM — preferably 16GB if your budget allows for it. Unless you plan to play mostly older games on a 1080p monitor, it’s not worth considering a model with 8GB of VRAM — it won’t last you long enough to warrant the purchase price. 

For the most part, the recommendations in Engadget’s recent GPU guide are still as relevant today as they were a few months ago. The recommendations I provide here are pulled from that guide and are grouped from most affordable to most expensive. Where possible, I’ve tried to find options from both Newegg and Amazon. As you go about looking for a new GPU, your best friend is a website like PCPartPicker where you can track pricing across multiple retailers.  

Recommendations

AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

Unfortunately if you’re on a tight budget, there aren’t many great options under $400. For that reason, I would steer you to the Radeon RX 9060 XT as the best “entry-level” option. AMD offers two different versions of this GPU: one with 8GB of VRAM and the other with 16GB. Of the two, the latter is the better purchase, but if it’s outside your budget, the more affordable model is probably the best 8GB GPU on the market right now.

While I couldn’t find the 16GB variant at its recommended price of $350, I did find a few models that weren’t far off. Newegg has options from ASRock and Sapphire priced at $400 and $450. At Amazon, meanwhile, you can find models from PowerColor for $400 and $430.     

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

I’m somewhat hesitant to recommend the RTX 5070. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent enough card, but with only 12GB of VRAM, you may end up replacing it sooner than you think. That said, it’s one of the few NVIDIA GPUs that hasn’t shot up massively in price, and I suspect that’s because people have been passing it over in favor of other 50-series models. If you value NVIDIA’s feature set over raw frames, then the 5070 is about the only GPU that makes sense to buy from the company right now.    

On Newegg, I found a 5070 model from Gigabyte for $650. The retailer also has a handful of different MSI variants priced at $630. Amazon has fewer options, but it does have one 5070 from Gigabyte for $585, which is the closest to the card’s $549 MSRP.    

AMD Radeon RX 9070 

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

For a card that offers better price-to-performance than the 5070, the Radeon RX 9070 is your best bet. AMD’s take on NVIDIA features like DLSS aren’t as polished, but the RX 9070 offers more VRAM and excellent performance across the latest AAA games. 

It’s unlikely you’ll find one at its MSRP of $550, which was always more of an aspirational price, but I found a few models priced between $590 and $640. Both Newegg and Amazon have a PowerColor model for $590. The two also have a Gigabyte model priced at $600 after $40 rebate with coupon.      

AMD Radeon RX 9070XT

For those with more to spend, the RX 9070 XT is probably where I would cap things. Beyond that, you’re looking at GPUs like the 5080 that cost far more than MSRP. On Newegg, I found a model from ASRock selling for $730. Amazon, meanwhile, has options from Gigabyte and ASUS for $720. None of those are great deals, but that’s to be expected with a card that’s at the top of the stack.    

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/how-to-find-an-affordable-gpu-during-the-great-ramageddon-of-2026-130000654.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Just 32 companies accounted for over half of global fossil carbon emissions in 2024, according to a report published Wednesday by the U.K.-based think tank InfluenceMap. That is down from 36 companies responsible for half the global CO2 emissions in 2023, and 38 companies five years ago. The analysis is the latest update to the Carbon Majors database, which tracks the world’s largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers and uses production data to calculate the carbon emissions from each entity’s production. The database, first developed by researcher Richard Heede and now hosted by InfluenceMap, quantifies current and historical emissions attributable to nearly 180 companies and provides annual updates. It is the only database of its kind tracking corporate-generated carbon emissions dating back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, research that’s being used in efforts to hold major polluters accountable for climate harms.

Despite dire warnings from scientists about the consequences of accelerating climate change, fossil fuel production is continuing apace. Last year, fossil fuel CO2 emissions reached a record high, topping 38 billion metric tons. In 2024 these emissions were 37.4 billion metric tons — up 0.8 percent from 2023 — and traceable to 166 oil, gas, coal and cement producers, according to the report. Much of the global carbon emissions in 2024 came from state-owned entities, which represented 16 of the top 20 emitters. The five largest emitters overall — Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, Coal India, China’s CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil Co. and Russia’s Gazprom — were all state-controlled, and accounted for 18 percent of the total fossil CO2 emissions in 2024.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP — the top five emitting investor-owned companies — together were responsible for 5.5 percent of the total emissions in that year. Historically, ExxonMobil and Chevron rank in the top five for fossil carbon emissions generated from 1854 through 2024, accounting for 2.79 percent and 3.08 percent of overall carbon pollution, respectively. According to the analysis, the 178 entities in the database have generated 70 percent of fossil CO2 emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and just 22 entities are responsible for one-third of these emissions. “Each year, global emissions become increasingly concentrated among a shrinking group of high-emitting producers, while overall production continues to grow. Simultaneously, these heavy emitters continue to use lobbying to obstruct a transition that the scientific community has known for decades is essential,” said Emmett Connaire, senior analyst at InfluenceMap. The findings of the new analysis, he added, “underscore the growing importance of this kind of rigorous evidence in efforts to determine accountability for climate-related losses.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As we move through 2026, the narrative surrounding Artificial Intelligence has shifted from the breathless hype of “what if” to the cold, hard reality of execution. For the technology industry, 2026 is becoming a year of reckoning. We are seeing a massive bifurcation between the promise of “Agentic AI” and the fragmented, often frustrating experience of the “AI-PC.” While data centers continue to inhale silicon and power, the devices on our desks and in our pockets are struggling to define their new identity.

The AI-PC Identity Crisis: Fragmentation and Friction

The “AI-PC” was supposed to be the Great PC Renaissance. Instead, it has hit a significant wall characterized by a lack of local application support and a jarring lack of consistency between hardware OEMs. While Microsoft has pushed its Copilot+ standards, the actual user experience varies wildly depending on whether you are running an Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm-based system.

The most significant friction point remains the battle over the Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Microsoft’s vision for the AI-PC is centered on the NPU—a low-power engine designed for always-on background tasks like eye contact correction and local data indexing. However, NVIDIA, the undisputed king of AI hardware, has largely refused to play by Microsoft’s NPU rules. NVIDIA argues, quite effectively, that their RTX GPUs offer significantly more TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second) than any integrated NPU, making the dedicated NPU redundant for high-end users.

This creates a “split-brain” problem for developers. Do they code for the low-power NPU to ensure battery efficiency, or do they target the massive power of the NVIDIA GPU? Because there is no unified execution layer, we are entering 2026 with a dearth of “killer” local AI apps. Most users are still just using their “AI-PC” to access cloud-based tools, which defeats the purpose of the expensive hardware sitting under the hood.

Generative AI: The Survival of the Smartest

In the realm of Generative AI, the landscape in 2026 is dominated by a few “God-models.” GPT-5 and Claude 4 have moved beyond simple text generation into complex “chain-of-thought” reasoning. These platforms are no longer just predicting the next word; they are simulating outcomes before they present them.

Google’s Gemini 3 is currently performing exceptionally well due to its deep integration into the Android ecosystem and Google Workspace, making it the most “convenient” AI for the average user. However, the shift in 2026 is moving away from these monolithic chat interfaces toward specialized, multimodal models. We are seeing a rise in “Sovereign AI,” where companies and even nations are training smaller, high-quality models on proprietary data rather than relying on the “strip-mined” public internet data that fueled the early versions of GPT.

The Rise of Agentic AI: From Tools to Teammates

If 2024 was the year of the Chatbot, 2026 is the year of the Agent. We are moving from “Prompt-based AI” to “Goal-based AI.” An agentic platform doesn’t wait for you to tell it what to do every step of the way; you give it a goal (e.g., “Organize a marketing campaign for the new Jaguar club newsletter”), and it coordinates with other agents to execute the task.

Microsoft’s AutoDev and Palantir’s AIP are currently the frontrunners in this space, providing robust frameworks for multi-agent orchestration. On the flip side, we are seeing “Agentic Bloat” in the consumer sector, where poorly designed agents from smaller startups are failing due to “jagged intelligence”—the tendency for an AI to solve a complex coding problem but fail at basic scheduling. In 2026, the best-performing agentic systems are those that treat AI as a “microservice,” where specialized agents handle discrete tasks under a central controller.

The AGI Mirage: Is 2026 the Turning Point?

The debate over Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has reached a fever pitch. While Elon Musk and some tech optimists have predicted AGI could appear in 2026, the consensus among researchers is more tempered.

We are seeing “sparks” of AGI, particularly in the way models can now transfer knowledge between completely unrelated domains. However, the “scaling wall” is real. We are running out of high-quality human data to train on, and synthetic data is creating “model collapse” in some instances. While 2026 may be remembered as the year AI became “useful enough” to replace many white-collar functions, a true, self-aware, or fully autonomous AGI remains just out of reach for most.

The Memory Shortage: A Logistics War

The AI explosion has created a catastrophic shortage of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and DDR5. AI servers are consuming the world’s supply of DRAM, driving up costs for PCs and smartphones. This is where the “logistics advantage” becomes the primary competitive differentiator.

Lenovo is currently in the best position to weather this storm. Their massive, vertically integrated supply chain and deep relationships with memory suppliers in Asia have allowed them to stockpile components while others are forced to cut production or raise prices. In 2026, the “best” PC will often be the one that is actually available and affordable, giving Lenovo a significant edge in the enterprise market.

AI Security: The New Arms Race

As AI agents become more autonomous, the attack surface for corporations has exploded. “Prompt injection” has evolved into “Agent hijacking,” where a malicious actor can trick an AI agent into exfiltrating data or bypassing security protocols.

Companies like HP are positioning themselves as the “safe” harbor in this storm. HP’s Wolf Security has pivoted to address AI-specific threats, focusing on hardware-level isolation. By using “Privileged Access Workstations” and strong application isolation, they are aiming to contain AI-assisted attacks that traditional antivirus software simply cannot catch. In 2026, security is no longer about detecting the threat; it’s about isolating the AI so that even if it is compromised, it cannot touch the core enterprise data.

Hardware Roadmaps: Smartphones vs. PCs vs. The New Class

Smartphones continue to eclipse PCs in the AI race because they are “always-on” and “always-with-you.” The Pixel 10 and iPhone 17 (expected later this year) are becoming the primary interfaces for personal AI agents.

However, we are seeing the emergence of a new class of AI-centric hardware—wearables like refined AI glasses and “neck-worn” compute units—that threaten to make both the smartphone and the PC obsolete. These devices prioritize voice and visual “intent” over keyboards and touchscreens. If these devices gain enough traction in late 2026, the PC may be relegated to a specialized tool for “heavy lifting,” much like the mainframe became a back-end tool for the PC.

Transportation: The Level 4 Inflection Point

2026 is the year autonomous vehicles (AVs) move from “beta” to “baseline” in major urban centers. Companies like Waymo and Zoox are expanding rapidly, but the real story is the integration of AI into personal vehicles.

We are seeing Level 3 (L3) autonomy—where the car drives itself but the driver must be ready to take over—becoming a standard option in high-end models from BMW and Mercedes. Meanwhile, the partnership between Lucid and Nuro is pushing the boundaries of “personal robocars.” The AI in these vehicles is no longer just following rules; it is using “World Models” to predict the behavior of pedestrians and other drivers with uncanny accuracy.

Preparing for the AI-Driven 2026

For individuals and companies to survive this transition, the priorities must shift:

1. Redesign Work, Don’t Just Automate: Follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of the value comes from redesigning workflows so agents can handle the routine, allowing humans to focus on strategy.
2. Fix the Data Foundation: AI is only as good as the data it accesses. Companies must prioritize “data hygiene” to ensure their agents aren’t making decisions based on “garbage” data.
3. Invest in “AI-Forward” Talent: The most valuable employees in 2026 are not those who can “prompt” an AI, but those who can orchestrate multiple AI systems.

Wrapping Up

The AI landscape of 2026 is one of incredible power but deep fragmentation. The AI-PC is struggling to find its footing due to hardware-software friction and a lack of local apps, while the cloud-based “Agentic AI” revolution is moving at light speed. Companies like Lenovo and HP are leveraging logistics and security to maintain their dominance, even as new classes of hardware threaten the traditional PC model. Whether or not we reach AGI this year is almost secondary to the fact that AI is now a permanent, autonomous “partner” in the global economy. The winners of 2026 won’t be those with the fastest chips, but those who can most effectively manage the “Supersonic Tsunami” of intelligent automation.