What You Absolutely NEED to Know About AI in 2026

Welcome to another week in AI. And there's a lot of interesting things that have been announced here and that prompted me to create a special episode to really start the year by looking forward and looking at what you can expect. Usually on the show we look at everything that happened over the past seven days, all the features, all the releases, all the things that you can actually use. But with Christmas, New Year's and the beginning of January, we now had a bunch of announcements, but less actually usable things that just came out. So I want to use this time to look forward, but look forward in a way that is grounded in data and grounded in actual announcements and actual trends that I have spotted by covering this stuff week by week for the past. Well, I think the show is two years old now and on the channel we've been uploading regularly for over three years now. The main themes for 2026 in AI are going to be similar to some of the stories we'll be talking about here, like Amazon's Alexa plus physical device with its own AI model. Or this wild story where they used Claude Co code to grow tomatoes. Or maybe most relevantly, Google integrating Gemini into all sorts of products, including Gmail that's rolling out now. You might just have that in your account already. Spoiler alert. It looks incredibly capable. Okay, let's do it. Special edition to kick off 2026 AI news you can soon use. And I really gave this some thought and prepared some thoughts here. I want to structure all of the various stories and announcements and trends here in into three main categories that I expect to be massive throughout the year. And these are not just generic categories like, oh, there's going to be a lot of agents. You know, we were already having that conversation two years ago and look where we're at now. What are the agents that influence your everyday life? There's not many. There's products like Deep Research, but beyond that it starts getting really sparse. Like, tell me, what are the agents that non coders actually use on a regular. A year ago we thought they were going to take over the economy and all that hasn't happened yet. But. But the following categories, I'm extremely confident in them happening because they're already happening. They're all sort of related to this idea of an agent. But just stick with me, we'll explore these one by one with examples and actual stories backing them up. So first of all, it's going to be agentic capabilities within apps you already know and love. That's category one. Category two, it's going to be Brand new technology that individual users and explorers will be bastardizing to do things, things that it's not meant to do, like Claude code being used to grow tomatoes. More on that soon. And three, it's physical devices that are powered by AI can also include agentic capabilities, but this is really a wider category. But with CES happening this week, there's some interesting things to look at there. So let's start with the very first one because this is the one that all of us are kind of feeling already. It's AI capabilities and agentic capabilities being added into the apps that we already know. This has been a big theme throughout the past few months and is just, just getting started in a big way because yes, we got kind of a AI capability in every single app that you might know and use. But now with Google's onslaught of AI releases, it's becoming serious. Namely, I really want to highlight this. Gmail is entering the Gemini era announcement from Google and select users in the US already have access to this. And long story short, they're basically integrating AI straight into Gmail into its core. Up until now you kind of stick had this old interface that I have right here where you can kind of just click Gemini and then you can talk to a chatbot. But now in this new update that is shipping just now, there's a whole new tab called AI Inbox above all the other menu items, making it the primary way to navigate. Just like in Google Search, Google introduced AI Overview and a lot of times when you ask a question it just appears above the search results. Also here they finally put this into the most prominent place you could pick inside of Gmail. And what it does is it basically summarizes your entire inbox and gives you an overview of everything that has been happening. Now beyond that there's other functionalities like drafting responses or AI powered search where you ask something like who was the plumber that gave me a quote for the bathroom renovation last year? And it finds the exact email drafting responses sorting your inbox. All of those things will be AI powered from here on out. And let me tell you, being someone who's playing with these frontier capabilities and often kind of manually plugs things together and automates things together to try them. Like the email related automations are the ones that were actually sticky over time just because emails are text and AI is so good with text, this just makes sense. And my point here is that this is just part of a bigger trend of us seeing all of these capabilities that you could previously do within ChatGPT through Smart prompting and copy, pasting the right type of data and using the right features. Now they're being integrated and they're being made simple, which means that they'll be adopted by the masses, which also means that less and less people will actually go to apps like ChatGPT to write emails. They can just do it within the app. This obviously puts Google in a very unique position because, well, OpenAI just simply does not have Gmail as a part of their ecosystem. But that doesn't mean that OpenAI doesn't have any moves left, because they did a similar thing this week. But here it's more like they're integrating a specific type of data into ChatGPT rather than integrating their services and features into an app they have, particularly healthcare. And I think this goes along with that because it's sort of just adding features into apps that you already know and love. In the first case, it would be into Gmail. In the second case it's into ChatGPT itself, but they're adding a health feature. I thought this was interesting. Over 5% of the use cases in ChatGPT, over 5% of the messages sent are about healthcare, and they just open up a waitlist for this. We'll put a link in the description below if you want to sign up to this. But this is basically a custom connector that allows you to input your health data into ChatGPT. Sure, privacy concerns, I get it. I'd be concerned, too. But they do address it in their blog post. It's supposed to be secure and all that, but this idea of connecting your health records and giving it more data is really sound. And as I pointed out with these two stories, I also expect this to proliferate throughout the entire application ecosystem. Every app you have will have some sort of AI function where it either automatically brings in data or gives you the power of an LLM. If it makes sense in combination with emails, it makes a lot of sense. In combination with health data, it makes a lot of sense. And then another one that I want to highlight, and this is again, Google making moves, is they added capabilities for this to work, work within Google Sheets, their version of Excel. And now you can simply say equals AI. And then you can go in here and execute prompts right inside of Excel. And then if you're smart about it, you can even put variables in there. And it's a really easy way to work in bulk. And it's just right there. They integrated the good stuff that we used to do manually or through clunky automations right in Google sheets. And I expect a whole lot more of that to happen throughout this year, especially looking at you, Google. Okay, so that one is pretty obvious. But the second area that I always keep an eye out for is these bleeding edge tools that are sort of hard to use but that show exceptional capabilities. One of these would be Claude code. We talked about it on the channel before. If you're not familiar, this is a coding agent that runs inside of the command line. So inside of a terminal you simply say Claude when you install this. I have multiple tutorial videos on this on the channel if you want to learn it. But you can basically say Claude and then you run it in here. And this is generally used for development, but people have been abusing this for all sort of other activities. Some of them just use it as their daily driver instead of chatgpt. Some people use it to generate images and entire marketing campaigns. And yet again others get super creative with it and do things like this where they hook it up to various tools to give it the ability to turn on lights, turn on a heat mat, regulate the humidity and add water and then they let cloth coat that is built for development, grow a plant. And this is just one of many examples of really people using this for something that it's not intended for, but it's a solid agentic framework and they're sort of exploring this way now. I think we're in the prehistoric era of these agentic coding tools for non coding tasks, but people are doing it anyway. And this will be the year where these companies, you can be sure of it, are closely watching all of these use cases and trying some themselves. And the ones that will make the most sense will make it more all the way well into category one that I just introduced. They will make it into the apps that you already know and love. They will appear inside of ChatGPT, they will appear inside of the Google suite of products, or there will be startups made just around specific niche use cases. But because this last year was really the year of Claude code growing and people starting to experiment in this way, I mean, it was nowhere close to as capable as it is now six months ago. And Claude code literally came out end of February, so that's less than a year ago. So this is the type of thing that I'll be keeping an eye out for and reporting back to you in these videos because. Because everything that we see people do with cloud code manually will for sure make it into the applications. Most of the current features inside of ChatGPT are a testament to that. The image generation and editing capabilities is something that went viral in other platforms. That was done many times before, but they just commercialized it, made it easy and accessible. Same thing with the idea of building projects or GPTs. Before that we had chatbots and all of these other chat applications where you could group things into projects that now their features inside of chat. And don't even get me started on functions like Agent mode, because we have apps like Manus or Genspark that were attempting this for months before ChatGPT even launched their first version of this. And actually talking about Manus AI, there's an interesting story this week where Meta actually bought Manus AI. They built this massive team of top people that they overpaid and now they bought Manus AI, which is sort of a agentic tool that tried to do it all. I think nobody's really sure what like the big use case for that is. People were using it for coding, for research a lot. It's if you're familiar with sort of like one of these AI browsers that try to like automate your Internet browser usage, but it sort of just ran on its own. We featured it on the show a few times, but yeah, Meta bought it now and they'll try to integrate that all into one application and kind of play in this arena with the big boys along with Google, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and maybe Xai. So yeah, any new discovery, any new thing that people will start doing regularly will see integrated by these companies and they'll all be raising to be the first one who actually has the integration. So we'll definitely see a lot of that throughout the coming year. And then the last category of things that I'm confident on predicting for 2026 is actually all these physical devices. Now there's been a lot of talk about these over the past two years and they were like, oh yes, physical AI is coming, it's happening, it's happening. But also, we didn't really have that moment. But I want to start this third and last category by really talking about the OpenAI wearable. It was a launch trailer with Jony I've and Sam Altman earlier, like in the middle of the last year, remember that? And it's announced for 2026, so this year get an OpenAI wearable. But beyond that, we also got announcements out of Amazon's Alexa, rolling out their own chatbot. And I think this device is supposed to ship very soon where you'll literally have a little home device that is AI powered that has control over your blinds, your lights, whatever else might be connected and smart. Maybe your dishwasher, if you bought one of those smart dishwashers. Point being, physical AI is just happening. And if you look at cs, there's some great examples of this. I don't know if I should be saying great examples and then showing you this, because. Whatever. Let me just show you. This is called Project Ava, and it's your AI Desk companion. It's basically AI girlfriend in a can that you're supposed to put on your desk and then, I don't know, be woken up by it, I guess. There's also male version, but then this is how they're advertising it. I mean, if you're not familiar, Razer is a gaming hardware company, and then, yeah, they put this little cat ear Golf avatar into a little can that can hang out on your desk. This is weird as hell. And I kind of want one just for science, of course, Just to try it so I can report back how this feels and how weird it actually is. Seriously, I'm curious Now, these characters are actually powered by X AI. And you might remember in an episode last year, we looked at the XI characters, and they were freakishly good. I remember the top comment on that video being something like, oh, my God, the character made Igor blush. And, yeah, like, I can tell you're someone who dives deep into whatever catches your spark. And that's super hot. Oh, God, she's good. Kira kind of, I don't know, had a grasp on me right there. And now they're gonna try to bring them into the real world. So this would also fall into the physical AI category. But beyond that, there's more. This is sort of a fun, playful one, but also, AI computers are happening. UGreen announced these AI NAS servers with a bunch of RAM that can run local models and have a ton of storage, too. And AMD presented their version of a AI mini computer, something that we've seen announced and shipped out of Nvidia in 2020, 26. And now the competition is doing it too. So that's also in the physical category. But I found one more story out of CES that I thought was really interesting. I wanted to share here. It's AI Pet Companions. Now, this is interesting because usually when you say AI companion, you immediately think of a. Or at least I think of, like, a goth girl with cat ears that is trying to be your girlfriend. But this is taking a different direction, and I think I like it because it's less trying to replace a human and it's sort of just a companion look. For example, I personally love animals, particularly dogs. I would love to have a little whippet or Italian greyhound, but I just travel too much. It's not feasible. It wouldn't be fair to the animal. There's gonna be a season in my life where I can get one of those and actually take care of them. It's just not right now. But this idea is actually kind of cute. I don't think it's gonna replace a real dog, obviously, but I like the idea of these AI companions being in pet form rather than in human form. Does that make sense? We see more and more of these and I don't think that's gonna stop voice AI got so good over the past two years, that's basically indistinguishable from real human voices. So I'm going to keep my eye on these physical products and see if any one of these hits. But ultimately, as all of these apps and features and physical products become more advanced and more functional and more and more people adapt them. If the default way to send an email is to have Gmail drafted for you and you just make edits, and the default way to read emails is just looking at your daily summary rather than actually reading the email, I think something gets lost and I think that something is actually important. It's the humanity in all of it. Why have a girlfriend if you can have AI girlfriend, why write the email to your friend if you can have AI write it. Sure, it's really easy to poke holes into those points that I kind of just summarized there. But at the end of the day, if you look at the world and if you look at the history of technology making things more efficient, people like saving energy and if there's a more efficient solution to something, they will go towards that, even if the humanity gets lost in the way. And that's why I think there's going to be a counter movement and that's going to be one of authenticity. And I think especially on platforms like YouTube, on which you're watching this video right now, it's more about this, me and you actually having a little conversation, a little chit chat about what matters, about my opinions, you hopefully leave yours in the comments. I always read them. But this is so much more real than any TikTok can ever be. Sure, it's not quite the interaction, but it is more authentic. And I think this direction of content will become more and more popular because at the end of the day, we are just human and we want to relate to others, and I don't think any AI pet or girlfriend will make up for that, no matter how much they try. So that's everything I have for today. I hope you enjoyed this different angle on the same subject matter today. I really wanted to make an episode and some of these announcements were super interesting, but there's just nothing really worth sharing that you could be using this week. But as all people and companies get out of this Christmas New Year's type of mode, I expect a whole lot more over the course of the next week. I mean, honestly, I want to get my hands on all of these Google AI features, thoroughly test them, and I'll get back to you on what really works in next week's episode. Until then, my name is Igor and I hope you have a wonderful day.