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NIA 2026 Trends, Revisited at the Half-Year
Strategy & Economics Active 2 posts

NIA 2026 Trends, Revisited at the Half-Year

Reading NIA's year-end '2026 Top 12 AI & Digital Trends' one trend at a time, six months on. How far does a once-a-year snapshot hold up against a field that moves in weeks?

About this series

Every December, trend reports pour out. NIA's (National Information Society Agency) '2026 Top 12 AI & Digital Trends' was one of them, published December 31, 2025. The catch: the report captures a once-a-year snapshot, while AI moves in weeks.

This series revisits that report at the half-year mark, one trend at a time. Not institution versus individual, but a look at how far the annual-cadence format holds up against today's pace.

Part 0 reads what the report predicted and how it was built. Later parts hold each trend against six months of what actually happened. The scoring isn't to knock the report down, but to see the limits of the snapshot form with our own eyes.

2 episodes

  1. 00

    Re-reading a One-Year AI Forecast at the Half-Year Mark - NIA's 2026 Trend Report

    Reads NIA's 2026 Top 12 trends report on its own terms - identity, structure, derivation method - and flags the backward-looking nature of text-network analysis. Series entry post.

  2. 01

    AI Infrastructure Hegemony Wasn't Decided at the Chip - NIA Trend 1, Revisited at the Half-Year

    Holding NIA's 'AI infrastructure hegemony' prediction against six months of reality. Compute alliances and bloc formation landed as forecast (🔵), semiconductor diversification was only directionally right (🟢), and the real deciders - HBM/power/serving-software bottlenecks and the capex bubble - were outside the forecast.