Happy New Year, everyone! This is Lauly, sending warm wishes from Taipei. I hope you all had lovely Christmas and New Year holidays. I just came back from a vacation in Japan last week, where I took my 2-year-old son to Tokyo Disneyland, one of the happiest places in the world. It was not all smiles, however, as it was hailing when we arrived at the amusement park, and we were all freezing. Luckily the sun came out again around noon and we were able to enjoy the iconic parade outdoors.
When planning for the trip, I relied on AI tools like ChatGPT to help draft our daily schedules, including recommendations for hotels, restaurants and what to pack for a toddler, as well as backup plans for rainy days or in case the weather got too cold. The suggested plans worked well, apart from the unexpected hail, and relying on AI saved me and my husband, who is also a business reporter, a lot of time, as we were both busy handling different stories before the vacation. I also used the AI tools to generate season’s greetings images to send to my industry friends for Christmas and New Year’s. They sent me back their own AI-generated images, and it became a competition to see who was better at giving AI tools instructions. Through these trivial things, it struck me that AI really has blended into our daily lives almost without us noticing.
AI will continue to be the major theme this year, as all of my industry friends say, though many warn that the pace of growth might slow a bit, given the base for comparison is so high. An executive with a server component company that supplies Nvidia, AMD and Google told me that his company’s AI-related business grew more than 100 per cent in 2023, 2024 and 2025, but it is only forecasting an increase of around 20 per cent for 2026, as it is hard to keep up the previous pace.