AI Slop, Smart Rings And Riding The S-curve: The Year In Tech And What’s Ahead The Business Of Tech podcast

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AI slop, smart rings and riding the S-curve: The year in tech and what’s ahead

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“Never a dull moment” is how Wellington-based veteran consumer tech reviewer and commentator Pat Pilcher describes the year in tech after relentless product launches, an “utterly insane” Black Friday sales season and the “enshitification” of the internet, thanks in large part to AI.

In our final episode of The Business of Tech for 2025, Pilcher joins the show to break down the biggest trends of 2025 and what’s coming in 2026, from AI agents and smart rings to humanoid robots and the debut of solid‑state batteries.

Apple, AI and the year of the fold

Pilcher starts with the elephant not in the room: Apple’s slow play on generative AI.

“Every tech player and their pet poodle had an AI offering except Apple,” he said. “This is just crazy. This is a company that sets the trends that everyone slavishly follows, and they missed the bus on the biggest AI trend probably of the decade.”

Yet he thinks there is method in the apparent madness, arguing that “stepping back… until they get a mature offering” may prove “quite sensible” in such a fast‑moving space.

That patience, he predicts, will collide with hardware in 2026. Pilcher is convinced 2026 is going to be the year of the iPhone fold, following in the wake of foldables leader Samsung.

AI slop, deepfakes and the S-curve of tech adoption

AI dominated 2025, working its way along the classic S‑curve of technology adoption. While an enthusiastic user of generative AI tools, Pilcher is blunt about the downsides, from “AI slop” filling Facebook, X and LinkedIn to academics “pulling their hair out” as students outsource learning to chatbot tools.

With hyper‑realistic video models like Sora3and an election year looming, Pilcher says “the general public needs to be a lot more critical, a lot more sceptical – and they’re not”.

Pilcher chooses Cory Doctorow’s famous term “enshittification” to sum up a key, regressive trend of 2025.

“You subscribe to a service, it sounds fantastic and it’s only $5 a month. Three months later, it’s $25 a month, does less, requires more of your information and they can’t guarantee your privacy and by the way, your password’s been stolen,” he said.

Pilcher sees this as evidence that the business model underpinning AI is dubious, with companies investing “billions and billions of dollars in massive data centres” in a period of “geopolitical instabilities and macroeconomic instabilities”.

Silicon became “the new global currency” in 2025, from Nvidia’s dominance to Google’s Tensor processing units (TPUs) and China’s push to go beyond 40nm (nanometers) under US export bans.

Smart glasses, smart rings and genuinely smart homes

If 2025 was AI’s year, Pilcher also thinks it was when home and wearable tech quietly levelled up. He rates Meta’s new Ray‑Ban smart glasses, which can describe what you’re looking at and translate signs on command. Future prototypes, he notes, combine wristbands that track “tendon movements” for hand‑gesture interfaces with augmented reality (AR) overlays that could do everything from lie detection in negotiations to live 3D navigation in unfamiliar cities.

Smart rings are another sleeper hit, with Pilcher praising rings for being “unobtrusive” and “tiny” while monitoring health stats well enough to “tell you proactively when you’re coming down with a cold or a flu a week before you start noticing symptoms”. In his own testing, backed by a blood‑pressure cuff and digital thermometer, a smart ring delivered accurate results.

On the home front, Pilcher says the long‑promised smart home is finally here, thanks to the Matter standard, which means new gadgets “will basically work regardless if you have an Alexa, Apple, Siri or… Google Home”.

EVs, robots and the 2026 futures

Pilcher also covers the post‑rebate slump in EV sales, the rise of value‑packed Chinese brands like BYD, and the misinformation around EV fire risks, pointing out how a petrol vehicle, not a battery, was to blame in a widely shared bus fire incident.

Putting his futurist hat on, Pilcher talks about smart contact lenses with built‑in displays and gesture‑tracking bracelets that could make smartphones “look as quaint as a Model T Ford”, always‑on access to AR shopping lists and navigation, and the first serious wave of humanoid robots.

With cheaper AI silicon and compact models, he “wouldn’t be surprised if in late 2026… humanoid robots become the next must‑have consumer electronics category for the well‑heeled”.

He also expects to see the debut of solid-state batteries as an alternative to Lithium-ion batteries that power everything from laptops to EVs, expecting new breakthrough technologies to offer longer battery life and durability.

Tune in to Episode 131 of The Business of Tech, powered by 2degrees Business, for the full conversation with tech guru Pat Pilcher, streaming on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

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