🍭 7 AI Trends to Watch For 2026 🤖

Good morning. Bill Gates’ intern just admitted him to the nursing home.

But don’t worry, he says AI will be just fine… 🤔

Let’s dig in.👇

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• 7 AI Trends to Watch for 2026

• Gates: ‘It’s a bubble’

• Claude, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Everything Else

• ToolBox™: Research, Friends, and Beats

_ToolBox™
🧰 5 AI Tools to Research, Be Your Friend, and Make Beats.

💡 Scispace (Typeset)
→ Turn dense research papers into plain-English explainers with highlight-to-clarify, math breakdowns, and smarter search for relevant studies.

🎵 ACE Studio 2.0
→ An AI-first music workstation where one creator controls vocals, instruments, and full tracks like an entire studio team—without the one-click cheese.

📚 Browser Buddy
→ An AI buddy that builds you a feed of thoughtful quotes and essays so your information diet—and small talk—get way more interesting.

🧱 Marble
→ A super simple headless CMS with a clean UI, AI-assisted writing, and webhooks to keep your blog, media, and emails perfectly in sync.

💭 Murror
→ An encrypted AI companion that turns your journaling into emotional insights, patterns, and better ways to communicate with the people you actually care about.

Microsoft
🤖 They Predicts “Agents Everywhere”

The Bite: Microsoft dropped its “7 Trends to Watch in 2026,” and the headliner is clear:

AI agents will be everywhere, in your apps, your workflows, your coffee maker if it had Bluetooth.

It’s a glossy future where AI quietly handles everything while we… supervise?

But the vibe feels familiar:
Big promises, thin present-day receipts, and a whole lot of compute bills floating to the ceiling.

Snacks:

• Microsoft: Autonomous agents soon to run across apps. No human nudging

• Teams, Office, Azure, Windows all shifting toward “agent-first design”

• The company claims agents will boost productivity “across every industry”

• Compute demand is rising fast. Hyperscalers rethinking data center strat.

Why it Bites: AI agents everywhere sounds great until you realize most of today’s agents struggle to book a meeting without hallucinating your boss’s birthday.

Microsoft is selling a frictionless future while the present still feels like beta software duct-taped to a power grid.

Consumers want reliability;
Not another assistant that promises the moon and delivers a loading spinner.

Agents might be coming…

But only because the marketing team shipped them first.

🍭 Steal This Prompt 🍭
🧱 Claymation Magic

This prompt turns any photo into a dreamy stop-motion claymation still.

Think:
Wallace & Gromit meets Apple keynote.

Hand-crafted imperfections, soft edges, and that chunky, analog charm the internet can’t resist.

Workflow:

1. Click this link (Prompt)

2. Paste into Midjourney

3. Watchit recreate vintage pixar level magic.

   
   🍭 Try the prompt on Snack Prompt 🍭

_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

🇺🇸 US Clears Nvidia H200 Exports to China
→ The Department of Commerce will allow Nvidia to ship older H200 AI chips to vetted Chinese customers while taking a 25% cut of sales.

👗 Google’s Doppl Adds Shoppable AI Feed
→ Google is adding an AI-generated discovery feed to Doppl so users can virtually try on recommended outfits and click through to buy from merchants.

💻 Claude Code Hooks Directly Into Slack
→ Anthropic is bringing Claude Code into Slack, letting developers spin up coding sessions from chat threads that use recent messages as workflow context.

🛒 Instacart Groceries Now Buyable Inside ChatGPT
→ OpenAI and Instacart are launching a chat-based shopping flow where users can plan meals, build a cart, and check out without leaving ChatGPT.

🏢 OpenAI Trumpets Enterprise Usage Surge
→ OpenAI says ChatGPT enterprise message volume, custom GPT adoption, and use of reasoning tokens have all jumped as it fends off competition from Google and Anthropic.

_Bill
🪟 Gates: AI Is Inevitable, Your Favorite AI Stock Isn’t

The Bite: 
Bill Gates is basically saying:
‘AI is 100% real, your AI bag probably isn’t.'

He calls AI “deeply profound” and world-changing, while warning that a chunk of today’s high-fliers won’t be worth much later.

The trick now is separating the tech that actually helps people
from the pitch decks trying to ride the wave.

Snacks:

• Bubble-ish: AI is a “bubble” because not every sky-high valuation survives.

• Math vs Faith: Some AI names trade at 200x earnings. S&P sits nearer 25.

• Real Bets: He’s into AI doctors, language tools, and farm advisors.

• Follow the Money: $1.9B health pledge bakes AI into how it gets used.

• Seat at the Table: Warning not everyone wins. Easy for him to say…

Why it bites: 
Gates is drawing a line between
“AI will reshape everything”

and…

“this specific AI company deserves a wild multiple.”

If you’re building;
Focus on stuff that moves health, education, or productivity in the real world.

If you’re watching from the sidelines;
Stay skeptical of the loudest salesmen.