Happy new year and welcome back to The AI Shift, our weekly newsletter about artificial intelligence’s impact on the labour market. This week: what can we expect from AI in 2026? Sarah and I have two predictions each. This time next year, we’ll mark each other’s homework and determine what we got right (and wrong!)

John writes

I’ll open with one that might be a bit too bold: 2026 will see a decline in the amount of time spent on the internet (excluding the use of LLMs). One of the most striking AI-related statistics I saw in 2025 was that the majority of content published on the internet last year was produced by generative AI. As this trend continues and the proliferation of LLM-generated material leads to the degradation of a growing portion of the web, I think there’s a decent chance that the amount of time people spend browsing an increasingly polluted internet will fall, as we appear to be seeing with social media usage.