2025 was the year of agents, what's coming in 2026?

Welcome to the Practical AI podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work, and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, x, or Blue Sky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind the scenes content, and AI insights. You can learn more at practicalai.fm. Now onto the show. Welcome to a new year of Practical AI and an episode with just Chris and I where, we try to keep you fully connected with everything that's happening in the AI world, which is a lot these days, both last year and this year. But, I'm Daniel Whitnack. I I am CEO at Prediction Guard, and I'm joined as always by my cohost, Chris Benson, who is a principal AI research engineer at Lockheed Martin. Happy New Year, Chris. Hey. Happy New Year, Daniel. It's, 2026, probably the fastest moving AI year ever coming up here. First well, every every new year, I guess, has been the fastest AI movie. Well, I guess since we started the podcast, you know, whatever, eight years ago It was a safe thing for me to say. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Safe thing for you to say. I mean, granted, these last few years have been a little bit frantic, in relation to the years prior to that with the podcast, which felt, you know, in retrospect, seem a little bit chill. Yeah. But Yeah. It, it definitely seems like 2025 was a big year. 2026 will be a big year. And so as we're coming into the new year for our listeners, usually, we try to do some type of, we don't have a strict format here because we're pretty casual, but some type of discussion of things that happened in 2026, you know, themes looking for or things that happened in 2025. I'm already a year ahead, I guess. Things that happened in 2025 and things that may or may not happen in 2026. Usually, our predictions are wrong as are all predictions. I'm okay with that. All models are wrong, but hopefully this hopefully this podcast will be useful. Yeah. So, interesting interesting times, Chris. Interesting dynamics in our world in all sorts of ways. But if we if we hone in on AI, I think at the at the beginning of last year, if I'm remembering correctly, there were a couple things we talked about. One of those things or or certainly at least an, theme that we've talked about a lot this year, which if we were to categorize the year 2025, I don't know if you would agree, Chris, but it does seem like the year that we transitioned to talk about AI agents. It was sort …