The Current - What will AI look like in 2026?

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Artificial Intelligence exploded in 2025. This year saw big promises -- that AI would usher in an age of unprecedented abundance, solve intractable problems, and touch every corner of our lives. At the same time, we saw growing anxiety around AI taking jobs, worries there's an AI bubble, and warnings around the dangers of AI. So, between the hype and the anxiety, what was AI's impact in 2025? And what can we expect from AI in 2026? Sinead Bovell, a Canadian futurist, and Jaxson Khan, CEO of Aperture AI and a former federal policy advisor, join us to help answer the big questions.

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This year saw big promises that AI would usher in an age of unprecedented abundance, solve intractable problems, and touch every corner of our lives. Time magazine recently made The Architects of AI, its 2025 person of the year. At the same time, we saw growing anxiety about AI taking jobs, mounting concerns about mental health and emotional attachment to AI chatbots, and big worries that there is an AI bubble brewing. So between the hype and the anxiety, what was AI's impact in 2025 and what can we expect from the technology in 2026? Today we're bringing together two people who spend their time thinking about all of this. Chenade Beauvel is a Canadian futurist and the founder

of the Tech Education Company Way. And Jackson Conn is the CEO of Aperture AI, a former federal policy advisor and a senior fellow at the Monk School of Global Affairs. Good morning to you both. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Great to be here with you. Shanaid, let's start with you. If you look back at the headlines at the beginning of this year, there was a lot of hype around AI. We'll talk about some of the specifics in a moment. But broadly, how much do you think the technology transformed our lives this year? Did it live up to the hype?

I think it did in ways that people don't realize. Over 800 million people use Chatsubit alone does just one AI model every single week. So it's showing just the pervasiveness of how AI is seeping into our world. the backdrop of our daily living without even recognizing it. So in terms of some of the hype, could it solve this problem or could it automate a workflow? No, it was probably disappointing to expectations there, but it is slowly becoming the backdrop of our lives and just a normal part of our day to day.

So I think in that regard, it did. Jackson, how about you? How pivotal was this year for the future of artificial intelligence? Will we look back on 2025 and think, you know, this is the year it really took off? I certainly agree with Chenate. I mean, listen, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle here. There is wide, widespread use and engagement

and investment in AI. I think where people are struggling, sometimes they're making these big investments and they're not seeing necessarily the return on that. So I think there's going to have to be a closing between the hype gap and reality. There'll be some correction there. But ultimately, listen, like this is not like,

you know, a new computer. This is more something like a new invisible technology that will just be a part a foundational layer of our lives, like electricity, right? That's how to really think about it, and I think we can dive into some specifics as well. Well, interesting that you say it's invisible, because it's really creeping in everywhere. I look at my phone, and suddenly it's offering me new options on, you know, getting a podcast on a Wikipedia site. I mean, but some of this stuff seems useless at first blush,

but how do you think, Jackson, this technology will improve in 2026? I think it's going to get better and more targeted right now. I mean, people are just trying to throw AI at everything. So you will see ads, and it's like the new pop-up banner, I suppose you could say, and in a different way. But I think where the real power is actually going to come is that invisible layer. You know, if you can get better translation, faster document review, a real partner you can work with when, you know, you're just going about your day-to-day.

Or, you know, your music recommendations are going to be better. Your child's education is going to be better. These are all things that people want. But, yeah, they probably don't necessarily want to see them all, you know, up in their face, in every single moment. And yeah, I think that will be the change that will actually be foundational and transformational. And I think for companies as well, a lot of workers are probably getting, you know, pressure from up top to use AI and everything they're doing. And part of that's probably pretty annoying and part of that's pretty cool.

And we'll have to figure out how do we get there, you know, as a nation as a world. Let's look more closely at a few sectors. What we're seeing already and what we could see in the future. I mean, we've seen headlines this year about AI linked layoffs. How much is AI already taking jobs? Yeah, so it's quite nuanced here. So it's not that AI has been actually automating entire workflows. It is not capable of that.

I think a lot of us see the mistakes it makes. It hallucinates. What is happening is that companies are preparing for the disruption AI is going to bring, whether that means economically they're transferring capital away from labor. So laying off some roles and towards AI investment. We're just knowing that they need. need to start behaving like a startup, especially some of the leading bigger companies because they recognize AI is also coming for their lunch, for their market. It's going to lead to

entirely new types of businesses, new types of industries, and they are slimming down and preparing to behave much more like a startup. So we saw this in some of the numbers, mass layoffs across multiple firms. What we didn't see as overtly was things like the slowing down of hiring and the mandates of coming back to work, these kind of subtle ways to slim down the workforce. But we have yet to even encounter the true impact of AI actually automating roles. It's not even there yet. And we've already seen it start to ripple throughout the workforce. So in terms of job impact, what do you predict for 2026? I think we're going to continue to hear more stories about mass layoffs. We're going to hear more stories about

slowing down of hiring, we will also probably start to see the emergence of new roles, maybe more in the form of independent contractors, people coming into companies to build things like AI agent workflows. So this wouldn't necessarily be a role that's widely marketed or hired for today. But I think we'll start to see pockets of those new types of AI first roles. But I think the workforce is an area I'm really concerned about, even though we talk about it, we don't talk as much about the plan for it. What does this structurally mean for how we're going to support workers transitioning through this time. I think the biggest example we have from history was the Industrial Revolution. And yes, over time, technology usually

creates more jobs. I mean, it's not a guarantee, but it usually does. What is the same plan to actually transition people in the industry or through this AI era that doesn't leave people scrambling without the skills to reach out for new jobs or without the economic support in those times of transition. So I'm hoping in 2026 we hear from leaders not just about sovereign AI, but about how they plan to support workers through whatever may be meeting them as a result of changes and changes in hiring and working contracts. Jackson, how are you seeing AI impact jobs in the tech sector? Well, the biggest difference, of course, is that AI is coming for white-collar jobs, which I think notionally hasn't always happened in previous technological transformations.

With tech, I mean, listen, there's no going back in certain areas. Computer science graduates, everyone used to say, okay, that's the clearest best way, you know, to get a job. We're looking for more STEM skills. But a lot of this transformation is actually, you know, AI is one of the AI's best use cases is for coders, right? And so this kind of educational pathway isn't necessarily a direct success for everyone. I think what we'll see is the best engineers, the best developers will get better and better. And then maybe be able to automate or, you know, more easily do a range of tasks. So that's interesting, I think, in the context of the tech sector,

I pick up on one thing that Cheney mentioned is I do really feel for a lot of folks who I think are living in this kind of period of uncertainty. You know, a lot of Canadians are, in particular, struggling with trust or concern about what AI is going to have, what kind of impact it's going to have on their workplace. There's areas that I think are, you know, basically haven't been found before to be of high exposure, which now are. So I think about public administration, right, in government jobs. That's actually one of the highest areas of exposure of impact.

So things like benefits administration, right, immigration applications. These are areas where AI could actually be quite useful because, you know, you're using a model or an algorithm to score them over time, help flag them, move them up the chain. At the same time, you're not entirely removing humans from the workflow. You always want to have a human in the loop there. And so these are some of the opportunities, but also the challenges of AI. I think one thing that I'm really hoping that we do start to see is, again, to pick up on something in Chen said, is some sort of national workforce transformation plan or a transition fund. Canada is actually one of the only nations that doesn't have a national K-12 education program for AI. And so, you know, I'm actually – my wife and I had a – we have a young daughter, young baby we just had in the past year.

I'm really hoping that, you know, in our country, we start to take action here to make sure that the next generation is really prepped to understand these skills from a native perspective. The PWHL is back for the third season of heart-stopping women's hockey. And this season, there are two new teams looking to make their mark on the first. the ice, the Seattle Torrent, and Vancouver Golden Eyes. When the world's best women's hockey players face off, anything can happen. Will the Minnesota Frost achieve a three-beat? Will a new team take home the trophy? There's only one way to find out. Watch the PWH for free on CBCJM. And how about those who are really, you know, living it in that they're in their early stage of their career, struggling to get a foot in the door? I mean, what should they realistically

expect from the job market in the next year or two? You know, it's really hard. I actually just started teaching at the university, and it's blowing away how many top smart young grads I've had reaching out or struggling to get that first job. I think the truth is that the competition is higher than ever. I also think it's become harder to distinguish oneself because lots of people are using artificial intelligence to help write their resumes,

help write those job submission applications. And so if everything kind of sounds the same, how our review is supposed to distinguish, and you've also kind of heard, you know, from the recruiting and the hiring side, that sometimes people actually, you know, let's say you're, you reach out to an employer, they're looking for a specific role. They might actually ghost you or never even really get back to you in the process.

So that can feel really impersonal, can feel really dehumanizing. You know, I don't have a perfect silver bullet here. What I would say is to young grads is keep trying to improve on your skills. There are a ton of free resources out there, including from the big tech companies, but also actually from Canadian-based institutions. I always think of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute has a really, really good AI curriculum. Those are all opportunities that, you know, you can take to continue to improve your skills. The second thing I would say is don't use AI sometimes, right?

I feel like this is maybe just sounds really cliche or counterintuitive, but I think it's so easy as a more trained eye to just detect when AI has been used heavily in, let's say, an application or, you know, an essay to get a role. And sometimes you've really just got to show, like, what is it that you uniquely can provide and what's that creativity that you're bringing to the project or, you know, to the application? We're kind of seeing, you know, YouTube and all sorts of online content explode with AI, slop and, you know, this kind of low quality content that just expands and expands. I mean, if everybody's producing that kind of stuff, I mean, how are we going to know who's,

who has actually got the skills or not right? So that's what I encourage for young grads. You've each mentioned, you know, white collar jobs, administrative roles, coders at being particular risk. I'd like to talk about creative work a little. Chenade, this year, Open AI released the AI video app SORA, which Disney partnered with, allowing its characters onto the platform. from AI-generated music, top the music charts. How much risk is there for creative workers? I think similar to the white-collar roles,

they are highly exposed to artificial intelligence and really throughout the pipeline. On the one hand, we are seeing that lower-resourced creative workers or new types of creators are starting to appear. So somebody who doesn't have a big budget to make some form of movie production, It can be streamlined using artificial intelligence, so we're starting to see that, the rise of different types of musicians.

But in terms of what this means for creative roles, highly exposed, very highly exposed, and especially on the back end, we didn't really settle any of the copyright challenges with artificial intelligence. If you look to America, it seems like that won't be resolved. President Trump has already commented that that's not a part of the American agenda anymore. So I think from a creative standpoint, it is quite concerning. And there are subtle ways that creative roles also get impacted, right? So if you see the rise of AI fashion models,

and we started to see some even in Vogue magazine. What does that mean for makeup artists, for producers, executive directors on these sets? So this ripple throughout the entire workflow or throughout the entire pipeline of the creative industries we're starting to see. But again, creatives will probably see some of them adapt in these unforeseen ways,

the rise of new types of creatives. But we're in that strange in-between time, across the workforce where we don't yet have the shape of new roles, new industries, new ways to apply the technology. So it does in the moment feel quite zero sum. Well, I want to talk about the positives, but first I want to finish on some of the warnings around AI. They are pretty dire.

Canadian computer scientist Jeffrey Hinton is known as the godfather of AI. He won the Nobel Prize for his work at the University of Toronto. He now spends a lot of time warning about the dangers of the technology he helped to create. I want you to hear something earlier this year. He had this to say on the podcast, Diary of a CEO. I'm okay. I'm 77. I'm going to be out of here soon. But for my children and my younger friends, I just don't like to think about what could happen.

Because it could be awful. Well, if I ever decided you to take over, I mean, it would need people for a while until it desired. better analog machines to run the power stations. There's so many ways it could get rid of people, all of which would, of course, be very nasty. Jackson, Jeffrey Hinton has said that there's a 10 to 20 percent chance that AI destroys humanity, and he's not alone in this fear. Other AI researchers say that human extinction is a plausible outcome of AI.

How do you make sense of that kind of prediction? No, Pham, thanks so much for the question. I've had the chance to hear Mr. Hinton, as well as another famous Canadian AI researcher Joshua Benjillo speak about these scenarios in the past. I mean, listen, I don't want to scare folks on the line or, you know, go too far in hypotheticals. But what I will say is if we think there's possibilities that these technologies could be more dangerous, why would we not try and prepare for them and just build more safeguards in, right? And I do think we're seeing some engagement on that.

Even in the U.S. government, again, you have a more aggressive approach under President Trump, but there's still, you know, the U.S. national AI safety testing pieces that they have very much with the top companies, including Open AI and Anthropic. We also have a Canadian AI Safety Institute. It's partnered with the UK. There is an international network of these organizations which are looking to test the most advanced models. The second is we are unfortunately living in a more challenging,

more securitized time. You know, where there's multiple wars happening around the world. And so I do think we also want to make sure that we are preparing for defense of possible AI-powered solutions that we could face in those fronts, those areas of combat. It could be drones, right? It could be AI-powered missiles. So when I think about those more specific uses of AI towards violence or cybersecurity breaches at scale,

I mean, those are the things that they probably make a bit more sense to prepare for because they're more in the near-term horizon. But this kind of long-term AI superintelligence or AI general intelligence that's going to extinguish humanity, I think that's a tough thing for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. And I would just continue to invest government dollars in the time of some of our smartest researchers to do pre-deployment testing and invest in the most. the most advanced models in before they were released. In terms of investment, I mean, there's a lot of talk about an AI bubble.

Chenade, trillion dollar valuations, is this a bubble and what happens if it bursts? I think nobody can say for sure. I think it's important to ensure that people recognize this technology is real. We've heard, you know, terms like electricity today. It will be that persuasive or that pervasive where it is just everywhere. and we rebuild our world on top of it. But what happens between now and AI becoming the foundation of the world? It is possible that a bubble does burst.

I mean, there's a lot of investment that has gotten ahead out of the capabilities of the technology and how it's actually showing up. So there could be some correction. Nobody can actually predict, but we saw it briefly with DeepSeek last year when the Chinese AI model came on the scene. American companies weren't prepared

and investors weren't prepared for how close China is behind America in this tech race and it wiped out a trillion dollars off the stock market over the course of a couple days. We could see something again like that as a result of a breakthrough that's in a different company or in a different area of the world or as a result of companies starting to get spooked and investors getting spooked that this technology is going to take longer than the financial cycle they had been expecting because there are two cycles happening. There's the technological cycle. This technology is going to move on a general purpose timeline, and this can take years,

if not decades, to make its full impact. And then there's the reality that investors expect returns. Those two seem to be diverging, and the result of that could be some form of a correction in the next couple years. We've spent a lot of time talking about the doom and gloom, but in the few minutes we have left, let's talk about some of the positives and the promise of AI. Jackson, what are some of the sectors where AI could drive real progress? Oh, there's so many.

This is the part I'm most excited about, right? I mean, think about scientific discovery of new drugs that can cure rare diseases. Again, think about programming and building new applications. I would also think about automating some of the parts that, you know, people find maybe more tedious in their life, like reviewing documents or contracts, especially if you're a small business owner. These are areas where AI can excel. I also think that AI can be useful in certainly for creative industries. Sheenade had mentioned this before. You know, when I was in government, I had the chance to meet with a lot of concerned screenwriters and actually.

and folks worry about how this is going to impact their livelihoods. There are a lot of opportunities to create with AI, and I'm hopeful that if future copyright changes or regulations are not passed, that creators kind of come together in collectives and actually get ahead of this technology and learn how to capture the value for themselves because there are a lot of opportunities in image generation or video generation, new creative development.

So those are big opportunities. One thing I would say as well is Canada is trying to figure out how do we survive in the midst of a trade war. there are lots of opportunities to use AI in the context of advanced manufacturing in natural resources like areas like mining, geological surveying. I also get really excited about the applications of artificial intelligence and space. Those are huge areas, I think, to watch in Canada where we actually have a lot of the right ingredients, too, to be more advanced in our economies.

But overall, I think there's these revolutionary applications in science. And also, I think that there's these very, very useful applications for people's day-to-day. So those are the things that I get excited about. I want to thank you both. We are out of time. Sheneid Beauvel, Jackson, Con, thank you. Thanks much, having me. A very interesting discussion, keen to find out what AI has in store in 2026. Chenade Bovel is a Canadian futurist and the founder of the tech education company Way.

Jackson Conn is the CEO of Aperture AI, a former federal policy advisor, and a senior fellow at the Monk School of Global Affairs. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.