Three Themes for the Next Five Years
I’m putting down some thoughts on three themes for the next five years. These are anchored in Aug 2026, while eating lunch for some business travel in Dallas.
Doing More with Less
The current business climate feels a lot like 2008 - 2009. There is a tension to be more efficient and do more with less. I was a systems integrator serving high-end residential at the time. In the prior years, we were so busy that we turned down projects and installed literal miles of wiring that was “just in case”.
At the start of 2009, we had a dramatic slowdown of new projects and equally brutal red-lining of existing project scope. Our installers had to re-layout how they would pull cable in order to reduce off-cuts. We went from 20,000 ft of wiring to 5,000 ft.
Going into 2010, we had to cut even further and went from 5,000 ft to nearly wireless everything. Wireless sensors and contacts, Sonos audio replaced audio racks, IP cameras instead of analog. The uptake of these technologies was primarily driven by the customers only wanting to pay for what they could touch.
Prediction: It will be common for job lines to blur as people become more generalists. There is no excuse to wait on someone else. You can embrace AI to help you do related tasks. You can make the first draft at that presentation, spreadsheet, or Gantt chart.
Metering
The huge investment in AI means that investors expect massive returns. We can already see this as the unlimited plans become replaced with pay-per-token. Similar to public clouds that offered unlimited storage, at some point, everything will be metered. The massive computation will be paid for in millions of tokens.
When this happens, expect the transition from “Can I do that with AI?” to turn into “Is the output of AI worth what it costs?”.
Replacing Slack with your own vibe-coded version is a fun hobby project, but when AI is no longer free and your team is trying to get their regular work done, is it still such a great idea?
Prediction: The employee/agent balance will shift several more times. I am betting it will end in favor of generalist employees who know when to use very expensive AI agents. The very top-end of expertise will still be humans but will be rarer. I think of it similar to an F1 team with a well-known driver getting to stand on the podium and engineers back at the factory doing all the work to make the winning car.
New Opportunities will Emerge
The drive for efficiencies didn’t just reduce the existing options; it drove a shift in the products we carried as an integrator. Crestron projects turned into Control4 projects. Custom HVAC interfaces on touchscreens were replaced with the Nest app.
Customers were open to trying something new, and this was a huge opportunity for those that embraced it.
Cloud computing displaced traditional sysadmins. It was scary for my friends, but because I was on the leading edge of the wave, it was always positive for me. That was such an exciting time. I got new server and infrastructure options that were previously out of reach.
Prediction: The technology is becoming less of a barrier for those that are customer-minded. You will have options that were previously impossible. Each year will introduce common capabilities that would have been completely magical 18 months before. People will still start video calls asking if others can hear them.
I would have been happy to keep doing the same projects I was doing, but this change forced me to adapt and dream a lot bigger. That led me to Eagle Eye Networks and is a story for another day.