Generative AI Is Fading. Here Are 4 Bets on What’s Next in Tech

The thing about AI is you have to be at the forefront of it for a lot of the AI noise to make sense. Like, it’s not that you have to believe in AGI, artificial general intelligence, computers that think. I don’t. You just have to ask yourself what the people who believe in AGI are betting on next. TL;DR: Robots! Finally! Hope they’re not the killer kind! Let’s take a semi-serious look at where AI is heading as we tire of the generative AI phase and settle comfortably into the data-as-moat phase. What comes next? This is what I’m seeing and hearing. One Robot to Rule Them All This was always gonna end in killer robots overthrowing us humans, right? From my college days, I loved robots. The closest I could get to robots was industrial engineering — simulation, robotics, manufacturing lines — really boring robot stuff, but I loved robots the way some kids love trucks and other kids love accounting. What, you think your accountant doesn’t get psyched over a good 1120-S? I keep telling my daughter at Arizona State she needs to kidnap one of those food-delivering Starships and reprogram it to trek all the way across the country to our home, and then do my bidding. But she never does this, she just studies and stuff. What the robot revolution really means is the abstraction of language models into their own layer to do the human interpreting and talking, while the physical or world model takes inputs from its environment and does the spatial thinking. As this gets more mainstream, expect more AI in our physical world. That’s what they’re saying. But let’s read between the lines here. Killer overlord robots are a couple of months away, maybe a year. AI Shopping Finds Somewhere to Land, and Then Shop Agentic commerce is at a crossroads as the next big AI bet, and it has been sitting at that crossroads for some time, at least a couple of years. It needs to figure out what it’s going to be, and a lot of smart people, including several friends of mine, are taking bets. Consumer agentic commerce is a … mess. I wrote a long time ago that the ideal customer profile (ICP) for agentic commerce on the consumer side is the exact person who gets more benefit out of the act of shopping than the spoils that the shopping produces. Seriously, like 79 people read that post and it was damn funny. But I don’t think I’m taking a huge psychological leap here either. That was back when agentic commerce had its first run at the public during the holiday season of 2025. What’s coming next is the revised, newer, better Agentic Commerce 2: Electric Boogaloo. After the fart-in-church of the initial agentic commerce rollout, the major players stopped trying to be the Amazon of agentic commerce (except Amazon, of course), and they’re working on standards and protocols to underpin the experience and make it less scary and chaotic. They’re expecting agentic commerce to not only be a reality, but an expectation, over the next 12 months. So like I said, protect those credit cards, kids. One of the main reasons I believe agentic commerce v1 ate itself like Chris Knight’s laser sample was because none of us were ready to tell the internet to buy whatever it thought we wanted. I feel like we’re all getting more comfortable with that. Except for those habitual shoppers, but tech finds a way to beat down even the hardest of hardcore skeptics. I mean everyone was on Facebook for a minute there, right? The Intelligence Moat Replaces the Data Moat This is probably the bet I’m most interested in, because it’s a direct callback to what we were doing with generative AI back in 2010 with small language models and very tight structured data sets that allowed us to slather unstructured data on top like barbecue sauce. I had, like, five different jokes to put right here but none of them worked. Three of them included the word sticky. And this is also the bet that most directly follows the data-as-moat phase, because data is all ones and zeros, it’s what you do with that data that matters. As LLMs continue to try to be all things to all people and get bigger and stronger, we’re already seeing way too much fluff coming out of their general use. Context matters. It really matters when it comes to data, so a lot more individual work is going to go into the intelligence layer before the first interaction between user and agent (or more likely agent and agent) happens. In other words, it won’t be enough of a moat to just have a beautiful data lake. Once the data is wrangled, the enterprise context engine will need to be built on top of it, before it hits an AI model, large language or otherwise. Governance, Wrangling Agents, and a Bubble Pops Obviously, governance is going to become a bigger factor and get more formalized as more people adopt and integrate more AI. When I was doing governance projects last year and earlier this year, the people I was talking to about the need for governance were all like, “Whaaaaa?” and got glazed-over looks in their eyes. I ended up explaining it like this: “You don’t want those robots to actually kill anybody or accidentally put five-figure charges on someone’s credit card, right?” “Of course not.” “Well, with AI and automation, you have to do something about that preemptively.” With more governance and guardrails comes the wrangling of AI agents. Especially in the near term. We’re already way beyond what humans can successfully orchestrate with agents and, to get a little buffoon technical, even the orchestration layers are getting too complex. We’re moving into “systems of agents” for software models, and my read on this is that agent orchestration will be run by agents, up and up levels to the human at a top level. I think. And then one last word of doom. I’ve been talking about the overspend on AI capex for over a year. If a handful of the BigCos (Amazon, Meta, Google, etc.) are spending over a trillion dollars on infrastructure, and we keep getting pushback on data centers, and we don’t control the materials that make the chips which we’re dangerously short on, well, that ROI bubble is gonna pop at some point. But we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, I’d encourage you to always be thinking ahead on this AI stuff. You don’t have to be a first mover in any of it, but know where the crazy money is heading, and try to figure out what’s real and what’s not. I’ll be here making fun of all of it if you need a break. EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM @JPROCO