It’s been less than four years since late 2022, when Sam Altman introduced ChatGPT on Twitter with a single tweet.
In that short time, the world has changed dramatically, and at extraordinary speed. Now think about how far this one product has come, and imagine what could happen over the next four years.
Elon Musk has suggested that, in just three years, robotic surgeons could outnumber human surgeons worldwide. (He said it on Peter Diamandis’s Moonshots podcast in January 2026: “there will probably be more Optimus robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on Earth.”)
Why not now? Why three years? Because reaching the required level of precision takes time. Otherwise, it could happen even sooner.
Who the user is about to be
For those of us building products, this means we need to give much more thought to something:
The primary users of our products may soon be robots and AI agents, not humans.
Lately, I’ve been gathering information that requires digging through a lot of international websites. On many of them, when I need access, I’m essentially offered two different paths:
“If you’re a bot, use this. If you’re human, this one’s for you.”
The next markets we need to focus on aren’t markets built around human users. They’re markets built for AI agents.
That means thinking about what agents need and how they make decisions, especially when they’re looking for products or services created by us, or by robots working under human direction.
And who is growing up now
There’s another shift we need to think about: children born into the age of AI.
The way they grow up and think will be profoundly different from that of previous generations.
The same applies to young people whose teenage years coincide with AI’s rapid rise. They will develop capabilities very different from those of the generations before them.
Their lifestyles, the expertise they develop, and the educational paths they follow will look very different, too.