According to Fast Company, the author’s 2025 predictions for AI in media had a solid 80% success rate, with four out of five coming true. Those correct forecasts included the spread of AI audio experiences, a major push for content licensing deals, more polished “legit” AI-generated content, and publishers building their own summarization tools and chatbots. The one miss was on AI agents, which failed to hit the mainstream due to data privacy concerns and sheer complexity. Looking ahead to 2026, the prediction game is even tougher as early trends mature and collide with unforeseen real-world barriers, like Cloudflare’s recent stance against uncompensated content scraping. The most impactful shifts will come from these messy intersections, not from neat, linear tech adoption.
The Agent Illusion
Let’s start with that big miss from last year: AI agents. Everyone was talking about them. I mean, everyone. It was the buzziest of buzzwords. But here’s the thing—predicting their rise was the easy, almost lazy bet. The hard part was seeing the roadblocks. Data privacy is a nightmare. Complexity is a user-experience killer. We all got swept up in the “what if” and totally ignored the “how the heck.” It’s a classic case of tech optimism slamming into practical reality. And it’s a good reminder that the shiniest object in the room is often the one furthest from actually working for normal people.
Collisions, Not Trends
This is the core of the analysis. The author nails it: the easy trends to spot are already in motion. AI in newsrooms? Check. More synthetic content? Obviously. But the real story for 2026 won’t be the trends themselves. It’ll be the collisions. Think about Cloudflare suddenly becoming a copyright enforcer. Who had that on their bingo card? These are the inflection points that change everything. It’s when a technology‘s growth hits a legal, ethical, or business wall that the true shape of the future gets molded. So, predicting the next smooth, upward adoption curve is pointless. We need to ask: where’s the wall? And what happens when we hit it?
The Licensing Battle Is The Real Game
All of this points to one undeniable, messy, and utterly critical arena for 2026: content licensing and the fights over value. The “greater emphasis” from last year is going to become an all-out war. Publishers now have a playbook and, more importantly, some leverage. Tech companies need the data, but they can’t just take it anymore. This sets up a year of brutal negotiations, maybe even more lawsuits, and some very strange bedfellows. The outcome of this battle won’t just affect media companies—it will dictate the quality, cost, and very legality of the next generation of AI models. Forget flashy new generative features for a second. The boring boardroom deals are where the power is shifting.
A Dose of Skepticism
So, should we trust any predictions? I’m skeptical. The track record cited is good, but it’s also a sample size of one. The landscape is accelerating. And let’s be honest, a lot of these “predictions” are simply observing a snowball that’s already rolling down the hill. The true test is calling the unexpected. Will there be a major regulatory crackdown? Will a key piece of AI infrastructure get legally challenged? Will audiences finally revolt against synthetic content in a meaningful way? Those are the hard questions. My take? The 2025 review shows we’re getting better at seeing the tech, but we’re still terrible at predicting the human, legal, and economic reactions to it. And that’s where all the drama—and the real future—will be made.
