The Next 5 Years, Accelerated
42 wild predictions about the next 5 years, because the future’s happening faster than you think.
Happy Easter!
While the world’s hunting eggs, here’s something else to hunt—clues about where AI is taking us.
Remember when smartphones felt futuristic?
Then, suddenly, they became boringly normal. That's where AI is right now. Hovering between the mind-blowing and the inevitable.
Greg just dropped a list predicting where we're headed in the next five years, and reading it feels like getting a sneak preview of the next iPhone launch, except the iPhone is now your life, job, and possibly even your town run entirely by AI agents.
This isn't your average future-tech hype.
It's a vivid map of an AI-shaped world where your personal AI negotiates your raise, entire startups are built and destroyed by agent decisions, and Amazon rents out celebrity voices like Prime Day deals.
The full list is below, copied just as Greg wrote it and here's the original post.
Where the world is HEADED over THE next 5 years...
anyone with a google sheet, zapier flow, X account and agent script is now a company-in-a-box.
your personal AI will attend meetings on your behalf, negotiate your raise to $140k, and decline 70% of your calendar invites using your communication style.
the internet will split in two: one for humans, one for AI agents.
Amazon will acquire exclusive rights to 50,000 human voices to create "voiceclones," allowing any text to be read in a specific celebrity's voice
1,000+ millionaires will be minted because SEO is being rewritten for agents. this is 2002 all over again. it’s happening again, just under a new interface.
someone will build a $100m business around agent error recovery alone: rollback, retries, mitigation, insurance.
the world chess championship 2028 will feature a human with an implanted AI chip competing against traditional players, sparking a global debate about what counts as human.
AI will make "good enough" content free. differentiation will come from distribution, speed, and originality.
MVPs will need to feel complete on day one because if it works, someone will clone it with AI in 15 minutes.
“what software do you use” will be replaced with “what agents run your life”.
goldman sachs will replace 25% of their investment banking analysts with AI systems that produce better deal memos/work 24/7. Others follow. Kinda like how when Elon laid off lots of Twitter. Others followed.
a startup will die because its product was misinterpreted by a dominant agent.
the new startup MVP is a prompt, a workflow, and a landing page.
hire an agent will become the default path for doing anything annoying or repetitive.
millions of small businesses will be valued based on agent-ability—how easy they are to automate.
"digital protectionism" will emerge as countries block foreign agents from accessing local markets and data.
an underground market for jailbroken gpt-9 will emerge, where users pay $50,000 for unrestricted models that can help create anything from designer drugs to autonomous weapons.
the new distribution hack is getting your product recommended inside high-traffic agent workflows.
the healthcare industry will face a reckoning when an AI diagnostician correctly identifies 97% of conditions from smartphone photos while the average doctor achieves only 62% accuracy.
a small town will become entirely agent-operated with AI systems managing all municipal services, reducing local taxes by 44% while improving satisfaction ratings by 71%.
the $100 million email will occur when an AI agent autonomously negotiates and closes a 9-figure business deal through 437 back-and-forth messages without human intervention.
creators will build businesses without employees by licensing their workflows as AI franchises.
"agent drift" will become a business risk category when your AI stops acting like you intended.
AI agents will generate so much decision data that a new class of analytics startups will emerge just to interpret it.
you'll buy software not because it looks great but because it plays nicely with your agent stack.
a new form of vertical media will emerge: content written for agents to train on, not humans to read.
business owners will outsource entire departments to agents before ever hiring a single person.
NPS is a satisfaction score for humans—there will be an aNPS (agent net promoter score) and brands will compete to earn it.
the new UX isn't chat, it's goals. grow my revenue will be the new interface.
financial agents will create a renaissance in SMB investing, anyone can own slices of niche cash cows.
roboadvisors finally become mainstream with AI. investing with them becomes default over human advisors in suits.
you'll tell your AI grow my podcast and it'll book guests, write scripts, edit clips, and run distribution while you sleep.
agency margins will collapse. productized service businesses powered by AI will take their place.
every software category will be rebuilt from scratch with AI as the core logic, not a feature bolted on.
the first AI-to-AI only language will emerge, removing human-readable elements to enable 40x faster agent communication in an ecosystem humans can’t monitor.
job titles like AI ops lead and workflow architect will become as common as growth lead.
an AI system analyzing SEC filings will identify a $1b accounting fraud that human auditors missed for five years, triggering regulatory overhaul.
we'll witness the middle-class founder renaissance when 100,000+ non-technical professionals with no savings launch profitable businesses using agent-powered toolsets.
LLMs will flaunt memory as a core feature. products will market remembers your context forever like it’s the new iPhone storage size. Memory will lock people into their daily driving LLMs
agents will enforce compliance by default. many humans won’t qualify to do their own taxes.
the most valuable data product of the next decade will be an agent reputation graph.
a new kpi emerges: h2a ratio—human-to-agent interaction mix.
AI agents will silently handle 70% of your digital interactions while you sleep, making inbox zero the new normal. the internet actually becomes calmer.
a breakout newsletter with millions of subscribers is for agents, not humans. raises a $50m series B round from a megafund.
every boring saas tool is now at risk of becoming an API endpoint for a better agent interface.
AI is making the internet feel new again, new behaviors, new primitives, new monopolies.
Of course, we can't say for sure which of these predictions will actually come true, but given how fast things are moving, thinking about these possibilities might be the smartest move we make today.
That’s it for this week.
Manoj
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