What will tech look like in 2026 and are we heading for an AI bubble, or a boom? To gaze into the crystal ball for the year ahead, Katie and Danny speak to VCs Hannah Seal from Index Ventures and Jon Callaghan of True Ventures in Silicon Valley, and get them to make their predictions for the year ahead and the innovations to watch out for – AI solving healthcare? Robots replacing brickies?

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In the biggest, most shameless holiday name-drop of the year, Katie and Danny bring you – in no particular order – insights from Sam Altman of OpenAI, AMD’s Lisa Su, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Satya Nadella from Microsoft, Matthew Prince of Cloudflare, Arthur Mensch of Mistral AI, Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Marc Benioff from Salesforce, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.

A whole smattering of billionaires, with a Nobel laureate mixed in too. So, what have they all told us about the AI rollout and what it really means? This is the first of a two-part Christmas extravaganza, where we look back at the world of AI covered on the pod with more than a year's worth of big-tech leaders returning to help us distinguish the potential of AI from the reality. (Just don’t mention the B-word!)

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What is Artificial General Intelligence? How close are we to achieving it? And who exactly is building it? Danny and Katie look at the global race for artificial general intelligence and speak with Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen, whose company uses human experts to train frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. He believes only human expertise will get AI to the next level.

Image credit: Surge AI

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What does AI truly mean for productivity, growth, and innovation? Tech giants IBM are well placed to assess the impact of AI and what it takes for an organisation to transform to being AI-first. In this bonus episode - made in partnership with IBM - two of its leading strategists, Leon Butler, Chief Executive, IBM UK and Ireland, and Dr. Juan Bernabe Moreno, Director IBM Research in Europe, sat down with Katie to talk about what businesses are making of the opportunities and the challenges of AI.

This bonus episode of The Times Tech Podcast is made in partnership with IBM.

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The British Chancellor, Rachel Reeves has delivered her now annual Budget Statement - a sort of economic State of the United Kingdom address to parliament. And in it she promised to work with founders and investors to make the UK an "even more attractive place" to grow their business - "if you build here, Britain will back you!" So is Danny likely to join entrepreneurs in San Francisco and Dubai for the flight back to London? To help them decide, Katie brought in special guest, Alex Depledge, a serial tech entrepreneur and the first Entrepreneurship Advisor to the Treasury, who has worked closely with Rachel Reeves.

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Nvidia says AI demand is “off the charts”, and Jeff Bezos has launched a new $6.2 billion AI start-up, but Google’s Sundar Pichai is warning that no company will be safe if the bubble bursts. So what’s really going on? Bubble or no bubble? Danny and Katie dig into the numbers and speak to venture capitalist Suranga Chandratillake from Balderton Capital about how to spot the real bets from the hype and where the next frontier lies.

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Could today’s teenagers be the last to sit a driving test? Danny Fortson and Katie Prescott look at the rise of self-driving cars, from Waymo’s cars in San Francisco to new UK laws on autonomous vehicles. They also hear from Lyft CEO David Risher who explain why your kids may never need to drive and what that means for cities, carmakers and the rest of us.

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