Techstrong TV February 17, 2026

Hey everyone, welcome to Predict 2026 and to our keynote for this year's Predict. Couldn't think of a better person. I want to keynote predict this year because what a year, what a year it's been, but what a year it's gonna be.

Here's a man who has his thumb on the pulse of it all. You've probably seen him on, if you watch any of the financial TV shows or anything. Oh, you're hanging out at gyms.

You see some guy working out like Matt, my friend Daniel Newman, CEO, founder of the Futurum Group, Futurum Equities, just an all around great guy, Daniel. Man, thank you so much for doing this and welcome to Predict 2026. It's great to be back with you.

I predicted 25. Hopefully we, we should do a big rundown. How'd I do?

How'd I do? You know what I, I love now that you bring it up. We should have played as an intro to you last year's Predict 2025.

But, you know, overall, I think you were dead on. And what was funny is, I remember last year thinking my, he's so optimistic, uh, about things because, you know, we had just been coming off. It was a tough 2024 and, you know, I, a lot of us didn't have High Oaks for 2025, but certainly AI kind of changed that game.

It is our quote unquote person of the year here for Predict 2026. And it's the story probably beyond 2026. Daniel, you've been on, you've made the rounds of, uh, CNBC and Fox Business and Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance, and all the Schwabs and all the rest, and talked a lot about your predictions for 2026.

But if you don't mind, share with our audience. Let's start at the macro level and then we'll come down. What do you think's in store for the tech sector in 2026?

Yeah, this is a big year for realizing and getting back to how we make money with all this technology that we've been so excited about over the last few years. I mean, crazy as it is, it's been three plus years since that giant chat GPT inflection. Um, and it completely changed the world, no doubt.

But we saw this kind of gold rush that happened after the chat GVT came out and people kind of thought, oh my gosh, this thing will, will write my, uh, it'll write all my research for me. It'll, it'll automate every sales process that I ever had. And like, you know, truth is, after a couple years, it didn't do that much.

Yeah. It, it was still a little sloppy. There was still hallucinations.

Uh, we're still trying to figure out how to do this stuff affordably, how to connect it, you know, all the private data, you know, 95% of the world's data is behind a firewall, still not accessible to these AI systems that we use. Enterprises are trying to make this happen. So I call it the year of making AI real.

We have to get to ROI, it's exciting that we're spending a trillion dollars on data center buildups. It's really exciting. It's exciting to be constrained at every part of the supply chain because there's so much excitement and enthusiasm and demand to build these things out.

But if you're a company and you've been working either with your existing software vendors, security vendors, if you, uh, are looking at all the processes and workflows in your business, and you've tried to put AI to work, it's been a bit of a mixed bag, whether you've been able to do so, whether it's been successful, can you point to meaningful efficiency gains? Uh, have you changed your organization enough yet in terms of, 'cause there's a lot of human shifts that need to be done right now. So I feel like, you know, my predictions are, it's the Europe enterprise ai because like, the fact that the i that people kind of keep looking at Chachi PT subscriptions as the real AI opportunity.

It's nothing. It's, it's, it's a parlor trick. It's a sides show.

It's, it's the first usable example like getting, you know, your first access to a browser. But we are just getting started here. So this year is gonna be all about companies putting AI to work and starting to show the value and the returns to give confidence to the next wave of companies to do that.

The same thing. And I think that at the end of this year, we're gonna come out feeling a lot better about ai, enterprise, ai, ag agentic ai. That's what this year is really all about.

You know, Daniel, I I have a little bit of a contra opinion on this. Don't blame the tool. The AI works, it always worked.

It's the people and how we're using the tool that's not working well. We run into this at futurum, the futurum intelligence platform, and amazing, we look collectively our, as a company, we've invested huge amounts of resources and, and, and, uh, people hours in, into developing an amazing tool, a platform that, for those of you who don't know, it gathers all the publicly available information data from G two data, from all of the FU analysts, puts it all in there, combines it with the LLM of your choice, and you could pull up anything. Yeah, And by The way, let me, but most people don't know how to use it right yet.

Well, Let me, let me comment on that. I mean, every technological inflection comes with a huge human inflection. And so what we are experiencing right now is a transformation at breakneck base.

You know, I said the, uh, you know, I I said the other day, like, it, it is eye water how fast things are changing, but it, we are in absolutely in exponential times. We are living in a moment. This is like, we are in like the first couple years of a multi-decade supercycle.

And so there is kind of this feeling of being late, like, Ooh, we haven't done it yet. And then there's kind of a, should be a hope and optimism to the fact that like, look, we are just getting started with what's potential here. But the human inflection is very real.

I mean, people are looking at things and look, the work we do, let's just use ourselves as an example, okay? A lot of work is video. You do articles, you, we, we own a lot of great properties on Techron group.

Um, we help customers and advise them. We consult, we write long form papers, we evaluate technology companies. And in the past it was like you had a gaggle of people.

You'd have to have everyone running around to pull all the data together or all the teams to pull production together. You know, anything that we do took a lot of human resources to do. And by the way, it took a lot of people to do something that wasn't even always the best work.

It just took a lot of effort. You, you'd end up shipping a market report that was a Word document or a PDF, that was the outcome. Mm-hmm.

And now you have the ability to say, look, go aggregate all this data and now make it organized for me and then put it into a visual, and then let me as the human add something magical to this. Let's add that last 10% that makes this really digestible at scale. But yeah, look, 80% of what we do by the end of this year, I believe we can do with ai.

And my idea is that last 20% becomes the most important high value human augmented, uh, you know, content or output. And so human plus machine, I wrote a book called Human Machine back in 2019. We are in the human machine era, Alan and humans are gonna have to get on board.

And this breakneck pace of change is uncomfortable for people. Every transition has been uncomfortable. This one's even more uncomfortable because it's moving that fast.

Everybody keeps saying, is it a bubble? And I know, Alan, you think there's a financial reckoning coming, and I will agree with you, there are some bad companies that are overvalued because of ai. But having said that, the speed of which we're able to build and implement and, and, and create with AI is different than any technological transformation we've had in the past.

In the past, it was like 7% of the dark fiber that was laid at this point in the cycle was being utilized. Okay? So when you think about the internet error, if you wanna compare this to the internet error, it was like 7% at this point in the cycle.

Yeah, we are using 175% of all the compute available. You know, when you hear Elon Musk and say, alman going, my GPUs are melting, even in these sort of odd, not fully monetizable use cases for language and little cute cat videos, we're using all the compute power we can create now. Just wait until agents start helping every enterprise on the planet with that 95% of data I mentioned with 99% not yet touching ai.

When all that starts to happen, and they're trying to now say, look, I want a sales process. I want an operation supply chain process to be end-to-end supported with token ai, how much compute that is going to demand. These aren't processes that are 10 years into the future.

These are things that people are going to do. Right now, the best companies are doing it already. The next wave of companies are coming up.

It's being democratized more and more the pace of which this innovation can be done. So there's a reason that this is different, but it doesn't mean that that human pulling along isn't the same, that human pulling along is happening because we don't change as fast as technology changes. And so that discomfort is something that people are gonna have to get really comfortable with if they're gonna wanna be successful in this AI era.

And that's what you're finding people that are, that are super pliable and malleable to change are gonna do really well here, Alan. But I just wanted to point that out, is like the humans are dragging our platform can do everything that our analysts did in the past, or that our media team did in the past. I mean, look, my content is better, and whether it's originated by me or supported by ai, I can do more of it.

I can do it faster, I can create more flavors of it, and it's going to be more, um, accurate than I could do on my own. Just like autonomous vehicles, we are creating the autonomous roadway for knowledge and intelligence work. And Absolutely, It drives better than How you do.

I think it's the people. I, I think the average person, even tech worker, even people at Futurum and, and other companies, they're not, they're not asking the right questions. They're not telling it the right thing they want done, right?

And, and then, and they tell it once and they don't ask it again to make it better and better yet again, right? They don't iterate and reiterate. So You mentioned, I make one comment, can I make one comment?

Go, Go People. This is the human condition. We are using chat GPT, the way we used Google.

So you're inputting it the same way and you're like, oh, but now I can ask it like more of a question, more, more of a, you know, I can do it more contextually. Whereas in the past it was more, you know, structural because it was like, how do you ask Google a question? And now you're like, well, I just ask it the way I ask like human language.

But the thing is, is like when you see people who build the most, like most capable prompts, our signal report, the market evaluation for the entire cybersecurity market that we can do all prompt driven, they can evaluate the most important companies in the world, score them, rate them, heat, map them, and give contextual, then that isn't a sentence long prompt like creator reports about cyber companies. These prompts can be two or three pages long. There is an art and a science to building a prompt.

But even as the daily user, if, you know, if you're out there and you're using AI and you're like, I don't get a lot of value, I don't think the answers are great, because it'd be like talking to your, you know, going at the, at the Thanksgiving table and me saying, Alan, what do you think about, you know, the macro economy this year? And you come back to me with a kind of high level view. And if I said, well, my next question is, well, what about specifically in New York with the mayoral change and da da da.

And then you're like, what about with that change? And then based against, you know, against new tax laws there. And what I'm saying is, is you keep adding questions and questions and questions and questions, all of a sudden this thing gets really, really good.

And so most people never get past question one. And so those are like people going into a networking event and saying, Hey, how are you? What do you do?

That's about how far you're getting into your AI experience and there's 75 more layers of what it will create for you is absolutely magical. Um, absolutely. Like I said, exponential times.

These are so excited. Such your first lesson here on Predict Guys, if you're watching this right, don't be satisfied with your first question. Get better prompts.

Daniel, you mentioned two other things I want to jump in on. One was you said enterprise ai. You know, there's a lot of people out here watching saying, I don't work for an enterprise, or I, I'm, I'm a small, you know, medium sized business.

Is AI gonna become a big boys game? Or you can't, you can't harness this tremendous globe changing technology. It's only for the big guys.

Yeah. People won't believe that you and I didn't, uh, didn't conspire on this question, but we didn't, we Did no prep on this, to tell you the truth. I said Daniel, be Daniel, Alan and I have the kind of rapport that we can just get on and wrap.

But the, the, the bottom line is, is when a, when when Sam Altman said, you know, there will be one person billion dollar companies because of ai, this is democratizing capitalism, in my opinion, the ability to build something. We talked about what we built. We built a software platform that the world's largest company's eyes water when they see what we can do.

Because the capabilities of ai, ai, whether it's code generation, whether it's the ability to analyze and use ML for data, whether it's the ability to use language to, to, and, and, and, and image generation for creation, like this is like, you wanna build an app that says, Hey, I wanna be a day trader. I wanna assess every day the news that's that's important in the morning. And I wanted you to help make a recommendation for me.

If stocks based on you could build an app that literally will feed you based on your risk profile, the parameters, the markets you're interested in, the economic data, you ask it to digest. And you can of course have it optimized more and more. And you could build something like this, anybody can do it.

But if you're a, you know, a restaurant and you wanna understand, you know, how to properly, uh, send out marketing materials in your community or how to optimize your work on meta or Instagram to get better ads, you can use AI to create all kinds of a ground of groundswell of, of marketing and demand. Like this is, these are absolutely some of the most opportunistic moments of history for small businesses to act like big companies. So I think enterprise AI is, is the buzzword, it's the market architecture.

But I think the real thing is with the capabilities of ai, every enterprise, every company has a chance to be an enterprise now because they can act like an enterprise. You can, you can do what enterprises could only do before, but now you're not rate limited by, well we don't have a thousand employees. It doesn't matter.

You can have a thousand agents working for you, helping you build the next thing. And you can do this. Right now it's, it's, I couldn't be more excited about This.

It's an exciting time. I, I agree with you. Bubble or no bubble, I agree with with you others.

This you no bubble, bubble bubble. There's no bubble. Let me let you mentioned another word, agentic AI or AI agents.

So for me, Daniel, and maybe it's my fault, I blame myself. It was a disappointment for me in 2025. I tried using agents, I tried creating my own agents, I downloaded, I don't know how many different apps and paid so many different subscription fees and then had to cancel them because these agents, they just didn't work.

They weren't, they weren't what they advertised. Or maybe it was, I'm not smart enough to use 'em, I don't know. But I've spoken to other people and the consensus was a lot of these agents suck.

What's gonna change in 2026 to make 'em not or suck less, right? Or, or actually work. Well, first of all, part of the problem is we're still, you kind of the human factor is we're still thinking about a lot of processes in the way in using histrionics.

You know, like how did we do this before? And where can an agent, remember when we did digital transformation of paper to to online? Mm-hmm.

And it was like, can I basically upload the, the paper onto my computer and then move it? Like, so instead of putting it in a mail, I put it in an email. Like we're in that point now where I think a lot of the ways people are looking at using agents is still like, well this is the process today.

Use an agent to do the exact same process today. And we kind of have to be thinking about how to reinvent a workflow. Like we aren't rate limited anymore by the fact that a human can only pack 20 envelopes an hour or whatever, you know?

Mm-hmm. We are now like we have these 24 7, 365 workers to assist the humans. And you can take a workflow and say like, we wanted to do something around opportunity creation for our customers to understand the most important opportunities that we should be offering our services to our customers on.

And you know, in the past if I said, well, let's get a team together, one person might be able to say, look, I'm gonna look at the news today. I'm gonna look at the stock market today. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna look at, uh, some SWOT analysises of these companies that are in the news today.

Say, oh, maybe we could help them write a, a, a research paper and do a webinar. Right? That's our business.

That's what we do with agents. I could look at 50,000 companies and then I could prioritize of all 50,000 who had the most important news today. And then I could look at them and say, which ones had the worst reactions in the market?

Best reactions from the market? What's our analysis using our platform of all those companies based on all the research and stuff that we've written signals in the reports, the data we pull out of, uh, G two or out of our, our, um, decision maker data. What's five things we could do to help those clients?

And then could you put those into an organization, prioritizing those things and then send them to the appropriate analyst for a final review? And then could you package up a, an email that we could send off to those customers with these ideas? I mean, we can do at such a magnificent and significant scale, what used to be like we could have maybe come up with three or four things a day.

If you had one part people dedicated to it, we can come up with thousands of ideas filtered down to the best 20 that we can then package up and send. So like agents should be thought about like is what kind of, what kind of new scale, what kind of work can they do pervasively? How can they assist?

And then where do we have that high level human in intervention to basically do things in a completely new way? And so we have to think that way. And then of course, like while it is magic, it's not magical.

And what do I mean by that is like, you do need skilled people. You still need skilled people. Like we have some of the best technologists on the planet on our product and technology team that are looking at how to build this stuff.

Now, of course, you and I are power users. We've learned how to use it to create content and how to pro how to prompt things when you're talking about building workflows and applications. The code generation technologies from Grok and from Claude are amazing, but it's still not right to the point where like, guys like you and me will build amazing applications in a few hours.

You need talented people that understand how this stuff works to then look at your business. I sent something yesterday, you know, to our team. And effectively, you know, in a very simple way, it's like every company this year needs to have a few people that are dedicated.

They're AI people and their job is to look at all the businesses processes, all the businesses workflows and go, where could AI make these things better? And most companies just aren't doing that. Or they have a a fancy title.

It's not a chief AI officer. You literally need someone that's used to be a, an operational excellence person that understands what AI can do. It says, this is how you do billing.

Here's a better way to do it with ai. This is how you do, uh, revenue better way to do it with ai. This is how you do product, uh, marketing.

How do you add AI to it? And like literally looks at everything you do from the things you do the most to the things you do the least and says, where does AI make all these things better? And I just think people are shotgunning this and they're just like, oh, we're AIing it.

What does that even mean? So the agents work, you said this earlier, the technology works. Is it perfect?

No, but people aren't perfect either. It's very efficient, it's very, very effective. But it also requires some effort, some skill and some focus.

Daniel, I wanted to jump back on a macro level for a second. One of the most coveted positions we're seeing in the market is the race to be the, the vendor who is gonna manage these fleet of agents for you. We're all gonna have multiple agents, whether we have a dozen, several dozen or a hundred, whether they're ephemeral, whether they're persistent, everybody wants to be the agent manager of choice, whether it's Salesforce or ServiceNow or IBM or Oracle.

I mean, everybody's making a play to be the, the agent Orchestrator, the agent manager. How do you see that playing out in 2026? I think we're gonna have some consolidation.

I think these companies will win workloads. It's not cut and dry and it's not a winner. Takes all as much as I think we, we remember in the beginning of the cloud era, it was like everyone's going to the cloud and every workload would go to the cloud.

And then of course the biggest one at the time was AWS. And, and for a long time AWS was under the belief that not only was there not a hybrid cloud, there was not a multi-cloud either. It was like everything was gonna be done in public cloud and quickly realized that that's just not how enterprises look.

And so enterprises are going to use agents in many of their existing software, uh, workflows. And it's because partially this will be an easy way to apply AI to some of their business workflows quickly versus trying to reinvent their workflows entirely. I think there is a certain amount of interest in maybe reworking workflows entirely and maybe switching to like a, Hey, can we build an app with cloud code that just does all the things that we may had a CRM do or we had an ERP system do that's complicated.

But if I can add a bunch of agents that can talk between my E-R-P-C-R-M, uh, human resources management tools, supply chain tools. So you'll see those kinds of layers, but we really look at it as kind of three different layers where this could happen. You've got a agented platform companies, which are going to be the future.

You mentioned a few of them. I think ServiceNow, Salesforce and IBM will all become these things. They will open up, uh, uh, the doors and they will, you know, support, uh, APIs and connectivity across platforms.

They're gonna have to do that. You also have the hyperscalers, they're all offering tons of tools and capabilities to do this at an infrastructure level. So it'll happen at the IAS level.

It'll happen at platform level and it will happen at the SaaS level. We think SaaS is the fastest deployment, meaning just adding some age agent flavors to your existing software suites. But we think that's probably gonna be the least flexible version of it.

The most flexible version of it's gonna be starting at an infrastructure level. You know, maybe it's AWS if Fed Rock cloud code looking at every workflow in your company and developing new tools that are gonna be age agent centric. Um, but we think it'll be a mix.

And m and you know, we saw how long it's taken for cloud. It's not gonna be as long as the cloud era. Everything's faster now, orders of magnitude, but it's not gonna be in a year.

Everybody's gonna be off their SAS platforms entirely. I will make a prediction though. I do think about half of SaaS companies, um, will end up going away.

They will become future really. Um, I don't think the biggest ones, I think companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow are deeply embedded in enterprises and they will evolve and they will innovate Adobe others. But I do think they'll have to make big changes.

I think a lot of smaller SaaS products, things that were just specialized maybe in revenue management, project management suites, I think a lot of those will be tools that will be either acquired into these big companies or they will be tools that uh, companies will go out and build themselves as coding, uh, assistance become more and more capable. Excellent. Daniel, I got one more subject 'cause I know pressed on time, I wanna bring it home to everyone watching this out here, right?

Because at the end of the day, we're all still people unless there are some ais watching and transcribing, I don't know. But you know, we're all people and we all, we all worry about our own li livelihood. We all worry about our own wellbeing and whether they wanna admit it or not, they all either worry or at least think about how is this gonna affect me?

How's this gonna affect my job, my career, my ability to support a family, et cetera. What advice do you have for the people out here, Daniel? What could they do in 2026 to maximize their own individual worth?

Could be investing in the market because you don't think there's a mother looking, but no, make, make themselves better, right? How do they prepare for the future? Yeah, and look, you know, everybody's on their own journey and some people want life and work balance.

Some people want to, you know, own the world and you have to understand where you're at. And I can't speak to anybody else for that. But one of the things I will say that's been extremely valuable to me has been this, uh, intellectual curiosity is what I call it.

Like I never wanted to code just to be clear, but guess what I do? I play in claw code. Um, and by the way, before that I learned to web develop websites and, and you know, I couldn't ever do it just through terminal 'cause it never made a lot of sense to me.

But in the era of sort of vibe coding and of UI based coding, and then of course in reverse engineering where I would look at code and look at what it would create, I learned to do it. And you know, in the AI era, like even semiconductors, like at this point I've become one of the most sought semiconductor analysts. You know, for my opinion, I do all the TV and I'm quoted in the New York Times and all these plays all the time, right?

And I speak at events about this. I taught myself semiconductors. So I have a college degree, I have a graduate degree.

I taught grad school, I wrote seven books. But I didn't come outta semiconductor industry. I didn't study that in college.

I was deeply curious about the industry. And when I built this firm, I spent a ton of time in front of as many, uh, people from Intel and Nvidia and a MD just learning. And so we're in this era where like you thought the YouTube and search era was fascinating.

Like look how quick you quickly you can learn. Recently, um, you know, we did a study on nuclear fusion. Uh, you know, when the Trump Media group bought that TAE company, which was a one of the most interesting fusion companies on the planet and a complete rebrand of what Trump media is, um, politics aside, right?

Um, we were able to learn fusion, nuclear fusion in a month. And I learned that industry in one month with the support of ai, a few very smart people. The way I learned semis, it took me half a decade to learn semiconductors.

I have, you know, I had the same baseline of knowledge about this industry in one month because I was just deeply intellectually curious about the business, the industry. And I used the tools. I used Gemini and GPT.

And by the way, same thing with my biohacker. I am deeply curious about how to build and create longevity and wellness and live my best life. And so transferring this back to work is like be curious, like be curious and use these tools.

Like what do you want to learn? And by the way, don't have it. Learn for you.

Learn with it. Because that's the biggest concern I have these days is people, you know, my kids are in college. I see how they're doing their homework, they're copying out of GPT pay.

You're not learning. You want the opportunity to learn, to become deeply knowledgeable about something. Degrees won't matter.

Like they used to matter in a few years. The entire educational construct will not matter the way it once mattered because we now have the opportunity every day to pick what's interesting to us. And it's been democratized.

The world's information. You can learn about physics, you can learn about, you know, aerospace engineering, you can learn about baseball, you can learn about the stock market. So anything you wanna learn to become great at, but if you are not curious, committed and individually willing to put in the work, this will absolutely leave you behind.

And it's moving so incredibly fast that that's my biggest concern, is that people are busy worrying instead of busy getting curious, get curious, figure out how to do jobs better. And by the way, be inventive. Like you and I, you you're president of of Techstrong, I'm, I I run Future.

I'm like, I love people that try to do things like come to me and say, look Dan, I know you love to tweet all day. Here's a way you could come up with 20 better tweets that are gonna get more eyeballs on them. And I help build you a little application with, uh, with Grok that can do this for like, be inventive.

Like I think too many people are sitting back waiting for something to happen to them. Yeah, go make it happen. Like there's Experiment Your disposal.

So I'm, I'm, you know, I think the, I'll leave it at that. Like, be curious, use these tools. It's exponential times and this stuff is available.

It's if you've got a phone, you've got the world at your fingertips. You know, I'm glad you said that 'cause I was just going to say that it used to be a marketing for the world at your fingertips, but has it ever been more true than it is right now? And, and I agree with you man.

We're gonna leave you with that. Daniel, thank you for coming here on, uh, predict 2026. We've got so much.

Well, we've got the entire Futurum analyst team presenting here today, so stay tuned. You can see the next session and the session after that session. After that, they're on demand too.

Daniel Newman, president, CEO, founder of uh, Futurum Group here on Predict. Thanks Daniel. We'll be in touch.