Author: Sarah williams
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The most interesting technology story of 2026 is not that computers suddenly became intelligent. It is that companies became less impressed. A few years ago, an AI demo could draw an astronaut or produce code, and everyone gathered around. Now a manager asks a less romantic question: how many hours will this save next month?…
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A small business owner I know ignored AI for nearly two years. He had watched demos and received webinar invitations. Several vendors had promised to “transform” his company, which made him suspicious. Then one employee left. Suddenly he was answering customer emails, updating product descriptions, preparing quotes and chasing unpaid invoices in the same week.…
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An AI assistant can write a polished project update in seconds. Then you ask which project, what changed this week and who is waiting for the update. Suddenly the intelligence looks less useful. The information exists: a deadline in the calendar, numbers in a spreadsheet, a decision in Slack and a complaint in a support…
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A normal chatbot is easy to understand. You ask for a summary. It writes one. You ask for a better subject line. It gives you six, including at least one that sounds strangely excited. Then it waits. An AI agent is different because it tries to continue toward a goal. Ask it to prepare a…
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A man I worked with entered software through an Excel sheet. Tired of copying weekly numbers, he learned formulas, then SQL, and later built a basic dashboard. Nobody announced that he had entered the technology industry. The work simply became more technical until another company hired him as a data analyst. He had no computer…
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A software team wants to test customer-support software. The obvious option is copying production data into a test environment. It is also the sort of idea that makes a security person stop chewing. Real customer data contains names, addresses, account details, conversations and all the strange combinations that make testing useful. It also brings privacy…
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A photo of a passport lives in an alarming number of people’s phones. It sits in the camera roll between lunch and a screenshot of a boarding pass. Someone needed identification for a hotel, rental, form or account, so taking a photo felt easier than finding a scanner. Digital identity wallets are supposed to make…
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Airport arrival halls used to have a very specific ritual. Collect the bag. Find an ATM. Look for a mobile-network counter. Compare several badly explained prepaid plans while tired, then accept a tiny plastic SIM card that immediately feels important enough to lose. That ritual is fading. An eSIM lets a compatible phone download a…
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I searched for a laptop setting and noticed something strange about my behaviour. The answer was already sitting at the top of the search page. I read it, changed the setting and closed the tab. I never visited the website that supplied the information. This is becoming normal. Search engines are moving from lists of…