On Your Head!

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Thursday 8th January 2026

Here are the next 7 big bandwagon topics that IT charlatans, grifters, LinkedIn thought leaders, and poser consultants will jump on, talk endlessly about, and pretend they’ve been experts in since 2012 (roughly ordered by how soon & how hard they’ll hit the hype cycle in 2026–2028):

1. Agentic AI
   Autonomous AI Agents. So this bloke at the conference goes, “My autonomous agent swarm closed $47 million in pipeline.” It happened while I slept. And I’m thinking: mate, you didn’t close anything. Your agents didn’t close anything. You just spent six months working and three hundred grand on a load of APIs. These APIs are basically if-this-then-that with a superiority complex. Some poor sod in procurement clicked “yes” at 3 a.m. just to shut it up. It’s the new “I built an MVP in three days with no-code”, isn’t it? Same sentence. Different nouns. Same lie. Same desperate need for everyone to believe you’re the future when you’re actually just the present with more tabs open.
2. AI Reasoning / o1-style chain-of-thought at scale
   So last year these clowns couldn’t prompt their way out of a wet paper bag. They’d type “make me rich” and the AI would reply “sorry, I’m not your mum.” Now suddenly they’re all “reasoning model whisperers”! They’ve gained proficiency, they’ve become skilled, they’ve excelled – overnight! They’re selling twelve-grand masterclasses called “System Prompt Architecture 2.0” to other idiots who still can’t spell “LLM” without autocorrect. It’s capitalism’s greatest trick. It takes someone who was useless yesterday and gives them a new buzzword today. Tomorrow, they’re charging you to teach you how to be useless with extra steps. Brilliant. I love it. Makes me proud to be alive.
3. Multimodal Everything plus “World Models”
   So this AI bloke at the conference says, “My reasoning model now understands your childhood trauma.” I thought: brilliant. Last week, it couldn’t spell “therapy”. Now it’s Freud with a graphics card. Next thing you know, it’ll charge me £400 an hour. It will tell me I hate my dad because I once asked it to write a CV. We’ve transitioned from saying, “Sorry, I’m not a doctor.” Now it’s “Lie on the couch, Dave, let’s unpack your repressed guilt about that unpaid parking ticket from 1998.” Capitalism’s greatest achievement: a computer that finally cares about your feelings more than you do. And it still can’t make a decent cup of tea.
4. Physical AI / Humanoid Robots as a Service
   Right, so now it’s “Physical AI” – humanoid robots as a service. Every VC tosser’s pitch deck’s got a $250,000 Optimus clone doin’ the robot dance like it’s 1983 and breakdancin’s still a thing. And then these consultants – these absolute wallopers in skinny jeans – are floggin’ “Humanoid Transformation Roadmaps” for £400,000! £400,000! To tell some poor bastard in a suit how to turn his factory into a disco for robots that’ll probably nick his job and then ask for a union. I mean, I’ve seen better moves on a drunk uncle at a weddin’. And they’re chargin’ more than my entire life’s worth to watch a tin man do the Macarena. Aye, brilliant. Capitalism’s gone full robot, and it’s still dancin’ like a numpty. Pass the bevvy. I’m off to dance with my hoover – it’s cheaper and it disnae want equity.
5. Decentralised AI is merging with Web3 and AI once again
   Crypto finally wins for a few reasons. It involves decentralized inference and tokenised GPU. Additionally, there are soulbound model weights. These are the same grifters, just a new narrative, in the 2027 edition.
6. Post-Quantum Cryptography as a Lifestyle Brand
   Suddenly, everyone is a “quantum-resilient architecture guru”. Expect $12k certifications and fear-mongering webinars: “Your current TLS 1.3 will be broken in 18 months!!!”
7. Synthetic Data Factories / Data-Centric AI 2.0
   The new data-is-the-new-oil pivot: “We don’t need real users anymore — we generate perfect synthetic datasets with watermarking and provenance NFTs”

Honourable mentions already bubbling (will probably explode mid-2027):

• Brain-computer interface APIs for enterprise productivity
• AI watermarking detection as a $B/€B market
• “Embodied AGI” (basically robots again but with more vibes)
• Quantum Machine Learning (still mostly vaporware but the slide decks look cool)

The pattern is always the same:
→ A big lab publishes one impressive paper/demo
→ 3 months later, every mid-level manager has it on their LinkedIn headline
→ 9 months later, bootcamps charging $4k 8k€
→ 18 months late,r “I was early in [hype term]” humblebrags from people who still can’t write a for-loop

Buckle up. 2026–2028 is going to be gloriously stupid.

Many thanks for reading.

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