Hot Consumer AI Takes for 2026 (Ting Edition)

Hey all,

It’s that time of year where if you’re not writing a “year ahead” post, then what are you even doing?

As a founder building in AI, you sit in a weirdly privileged spot for this kind of thing.

You’re building with AI daily, you’re meeting with developer advocate teams, you’re at events with other builders, you’re talking to VCs, and most importantly, you’re talking to customers (real people!).

All of these people have totally different vantage points.

And when you start unpacking those viewpoints, you get a pretty unique read on what’s coming...

If you’re also building in a similar space, I genuinely recommend throwing all of these perspectives against the wall and seeing the connections:

• AI builder: you know what’s possible now, soon, and in the mid-term. (In our case, having a former deep-learning researcher on the team gives us a good sense of “what’s next,” too.)

• Platforms: we’ve spent time with Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Microsoft in the last few weeks. Their roadmaps heavily influence the entire industry.

• Other builders & events: it’s amazing seeing what excites people. SF vs. London is hilariously different.

• VCs: they see thousands of pitches. Their pattern-recognition is a cheat code if you listen carefully.

• Customers: sometimes you have to ignore everything above and ground yourself in what the average, non-bubble, person is ready for despite what is technically possible.

These are all the angles I'm using for the predictions below and yes, they’re biased toward how we think about Meet-Ting.

It would be weird not to build Ting in the direction we think the world is going...

So here are my hot takes. Some of them are echoed elsewhere before, some are more specific to me, my media digest, and my more consumer-focused worldview.

• User Agency Gets Weird

This is the thing I find most interesting - your agency with AI.

With ChatGPT, you prompt, copy, paste, and edit. Agency is high.
With inbox AI tools, the emails are written for you. Agency drops.

As models accelerate, the question becomes:

Who’s really behind the wheel?

I do a healthy amount of editing and plenty of “explain this like I’m 12” prompts just to make sure I still understand what’s being sent on my behalf. But maintaining that level of control will get harder.

And what happens when someone asks you to explain your rationale?

This is already showing up in explainability frameworks: can an agent walk back its reasoning in a way humans understand?

I can easily imagine managers and execs asking agents to explain decisions in a meeting room.

Menlo Park Ventures captured this well: https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-generative-ai-in-the-enterprise/

• The “Mad Cow Disease” Problem

Borrowed from Dan Houser (ex-Rockstar) because I can’t stop thinking about it.

More of the web is AI-generated.
More social content is AI-generated.
LLMs are trained on that content.

So basically…
We’re feeding cows to the cows.

What happens when training data becomes synthetic on synthetic?
We end up with warped realities and synthetic truths.

This is why grounding models in real data - private, proprietary, non-internet - will become an enormous advantage. Ting uses messy email and text threads, which feels safe.

• ChatGPT & Gemini App Stores Will Reshape the Web

We spent time with OpenAI recently learning about ChatGPT apps, and it genuinely feels like the early iPhone App Store era.

But it’s different:

You’re not going to apps. Apps are coming to you.

You’ll evoke tools / websites inside the chat environment without leaving.
With ChatGPT’s 700M WAU, it feels inevitable. 

The implications:

• Your browser becomes a single interface.

• Agents negotiate with other agents on your behalf.
  Discovery centralises again.
  And for Ting - getting people together won’t be a booking link, it’ll be agent-to-agent over GPT.

The web collapses into one UI, but the utility explodes.

• Agents Become Brands

If we end up in an app-store-for-agents world, memorability matters more than ever.

The key question becomes:

Which agent do you invoke at the moment of need?

Just like Uber = rideshare, Booking = holidays, Google = search…

We’ll have agents for:

• Booking

• Finance

• Health

• Planning

• Admin

• Research

• Travel

Brand + clarity of purpose feels like it will be everything?

For Ting, the mission is simple:
Your agent for connecting with people through your calendar availability.

If you’re building, start thinking about your invocation moment.

• SaaS Subscriptions Are on Borrowed Time

As someone who has spent an unhealthy amount of time with VCs in the last month, this one is spicy.

I struggle to see a world where we keep paying SaaS subscriptions for everything.

Gemini is insanely good, and free.
Google will keep it low-cost or zero-cost because of their ads business

If AI is free for billions of people…

SaaS needs a new value model.

Either:

• Deep enterprise integration

• Hyper vertical focus beyond reach of LLM

We probably have a year or so left of the current subscription world before it starts to collapse. An ad-supported future feels more likely and that’s a good thing, you’re reading this article for free right now on a great platform because of it.

• Human + Agent Platforms Are the Future

Right now, you have:

• An email agent

• A calendar agent

• A research agent

• A holiday agent

• A sports agent

• A wellness agent

…all in different places.

It’s too much.

What’s coming is unified interfaces where humans and agents exist side by side.

Think of a WhatsApp or Slack where:

• Agents do tasks in the background

• You talk in the foreground

• Workflows and conversations blend naturally

I even vibe-coded my take on this here: https://ai.studio/apps/drive/17HOZzLJEQbGhGxLPZYAZRDR-uIbJrmHV (any builders want to take this on let me know!)

So that’s my hot take for 2026. A little biased, but in the best possible way...

What are your predictions?

And if you’ve read this far - wishing you a 2026 filled with:

• Health

• Happiness

• Good luck

• And agents doing the boring bits for you ;-)

Thank you for being here,

Dan + Team Ting