📊 In the context of the AI lectures we watch together, Benedict Evans has updated his regular presentation "AI eats the world", with the spring 2026 version now available.
Evans is one of the top analysts in the industry, releasing a major presentation every six months about where the tech sector is heading. He loves to think in terms of platform shifts - mainframes, PCs, web, smartphones, and now generative AI. A strong idea: existing players usually retain their market, but the market itself gradually stops being the main focus. IBM didn’t lose mainframes, Microsoft didn’t lose PCs - these categories just shifted.
The two central questions this year are how the competition between foundation model companies will resolve, and how everything that isn’t just a chatbot (agents, advertising, agentic commerce, enterprise) reaches hundreds of millions of users.
One eye-catching figure: by 2026, the big four plan $700 billion in capex. The entire global telecoms sector spends about $300 billion, oil & gas - about a trillion. Money in AI is already at an industrial scale.
In the image - one of Evans' favorite graphs. The number of elevator operators in the USA over a century: by 1950 there were about 95,000, by 1990 - almost zero. The profession quietly disappeared over a couple of decades when elevators learned to operate without an operator.
Also, I recommend his newsletter - one of the best in the industry.
