The Boldest Ideas of 2025 — And What’s in Store for 2026

0:28Searching for a home? It feels as we're coming out of the year that there's big concerns that maybe the AI boom is going to turn into an AI bubble. What do you think? I think that financially we are cooked. Buckle up.

0:51Here we are at the end of the first calendar year of bold names. We're going to do something a little different today instead of talking to one of those big, bold names, one of those big, juicy names you're so accustomed to hearing from, from us at least. We're going to talk to each other. We're going to talk about bold ideas, what we thought was big in 2025 and what we think is going to be big in 2026. Yeah, we've got some great clips for you. We're going to discuss them from the year that was. We're also going to make some predictions for 2026, and then we're going to answer some reader questions.

1:23That's right. But first, let's take a look at the year in review. From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Tim Higgins. And I'm Christopher Mims. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold name companies featured in the Wall Street Journal. That's right. But first, let's take a look at the year in review.

1:46Okay, as we look back at 2025, there was one topic that really dominated the headlines, and that is, of course, artificial intelligence, AI. It was inescapable in all of my years covering tech for The Wall Street Journal and other publications. I've never seen anything as all-consuming as AI was in 2025. Yeah, I think so many of these conversations have really centered around the existential question of what this technology means, means for business, but also our daily lives. How is AI going to change the way we do things? Yeah, it really consumed the newsroom, everything from jobs, as you mentioned, to, of course, the financial aspects of it, how we fund this, to how it's changing the nature of work.

2:35Right, and also had a great element of inter-company fighting or a race to become a new winner. If you look back at the past generation of tech companies, we've got some dominant players out there, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta. It's really hard to see how you could overcome these companies if you're a startup. But this AI technology holds the promise that maybe some new players can emerge and maybe even become bigger than what we're accustomed to. I think the central question became, how much are these new startups going to disrupt the old big tech companies? And by far, one of the most fascinating interviews we had of 2025 addressing this and other topics was with Mustafa Suleiman, who is, of course, head of AI at Microsoft.

3:21The reason I started off in technology and what I'm passionate about is solving hard social problems. I care about healthcare. I care about energy. I care about food systems. I care about education. And these tools are going to transform those industries and genuinely deliver a world of abundance. He comes from a place of being part of an upstart. He was a co-founder of DeepMind. And of course, now he's in charge of bringing that lightning in a bottle to Microsoft and making sure that they don't fall behind. The goal isn't superintelligence for its own sake. Superintelligence is framed as the moment when an AI is as good as all humans at all tasks.

4:03Not just one human at one task, but all of us collectively put together. controlling and containing something as powerful as that you know just seems like unfathomably complex and aligning it to our interests and making it really want to care about us enough not to step on us and you know squish us and then this idea that it would recursively self-improve it would it would then deploy its own intelligence on its own code to try and you know get better and better. We also talked about how the future is going to be personalized AI. Think of it as every single one of us having a customized assistant tailored to our individual needs.

4:47Your AI companion is going to become an interface between you and the digital world, helping you book things, buy things, plan, learn, act, connect with everybody else. And naturally, because technologies are so powerful now, they allow this very personalized, adaptive experience. I mean, just as we don't really watch TV anymore that broadcast the same TV channels to everyone sitting in the living room, we have this personalized feed of content in TikTok or Instagram or elsewhere, your AI is going to feel very personalized as well. And so it's as much a prediction about where technology is naturally likely to head as it is a design intent.

5:29I love the vision here. And, you know, Personally, I would love to have help with everything you just mentioned, right? Like my everyday life, I'd love for an AI assistant to really know me to that level. But if we eliminate all the things that we sort of are already responsible for, what does that leave for us as humans, right? Does it just leave the really hard stuff? Because we've taken away all of the, you know, as programmers call it, yak shaving. But of course, some of us enjoy that. I have to say, I don't even know what that is. What is yak shaping? It's the little stuff. Like when a developer's like, I'm going to refactor this unit test instead of actually architecting the program I'm supposed to be building right now.

6:16That's yak shaping. The boring mundane chores of life, right, are working. I see. Look, I don't really see technology working like that. I think technology mostly creates more opportunities to do more things in greater variety. And yes, some of those things fall away, but actually very few of them. I mean, we still run calculations on Excel, even though we don't use a calculator anymore. I'm sure you guys are writing even more now that, you know, you have your iPad to work on the plane or, you know, you're able to dictate, you know, when you're walking or driving in the car. It's additive rather than reductive.

7:01Another big topic in 2025 was tariffs in the trade war. Generated a lot of headlines, a lot of worry, a lot of guessing about where the world was going as President Trump increased tariffs on other countries and other countries retaliated. Yeah. I mean, this touched every story that we did this year, I feel like, because every company has inputs that were potentially being taxed. And then they were, of course, trying to ship finished goods overseas in many cases. And that was not going great when it was unclear what the taxes they were going to pay on that were going to be. Yeah, it's really challenging to get ready.

7:39If you think about it, like all of the parts that go into something, they come from someplace and just tracking all that can be very confusing. That's why one of the interviews that really stuck with me that we did was with Evan Smith. He's the co-founder and CEO of Altana, one of the few companies out there that has visibility into all of that murkiness tracking the world's supply chain. And Altana is a unique company. They have access to what's essentially private data, and they use AI to then share sort of a distillation of that data with all their customers. And it shows what's happening to goods, starting at raw materials all the way through finished products and how all of those are being affected by tariffs.

8:23I had one board member of a Fortune 50 company tell me that this is economic Pearl Harbor and the world will never be the same. And later in that same conversation, Evan explained what he thinks will drive the next big rupture in global trade. We're seeing in the rise of AI the other very big once in generations dislocation. Could be the biggest one of all, right? The commanding heights of the 21st century is artificial intelligence, it's robotics, and then it's the supply chains that support those and enable it. And if we're not playing to win that space, we're destined to lose. And I'll say that China is certainly playing to win.

9:07China was really one of the through lines on a lot of these stories this year. It's rising power, its place on the global stage, concerns about competition with this real new giant. China was a big topic of conversation when we interviewed former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. We talked with her about why the U.S. cannot ignore advances in Chinese technology. I'll just give you a very vivid view. When DeepSeek came out, There was not a single national security person who wasn't stunned by that. There was not a single computer scientist who didn't see it coming. It's not hard to think about this new tension as something of a second Cold War between the U.S.

9:58and China. But Secretary Rice took issue with that. One of the difficulties in dealing with China is that after 20 plus years of integration, you're finding that it's actually pretty hard to do something about rare earth minerals because they own the supply chain and they can withhold very important magnets. So the Soviet Union would never have been able to do that. So I don't like the analogy because I think we like the analogy because we won the Cold War. But I don't like it because I think it really does obfuscate this very real difference in what the challenge from China looks like. There is a military element, but there's a huge economic and technological element as well.

10:42And finally, we talked about what might be the next technological frontier, quantum computing. And one of the companies making a huge bet on that, IBM. Yeah, we spoke with the CEO of IBM, Arvind Krishna, about IBM's decades-long efforts to actually be in the lead on quantum computing, why he thinks it might be the next big thing after AI. I think the reason we are so excited about quantum is its ability to solve problems that normal computers cannot, and actually, I'll make a stronger statement, will not solve. As an example, could we design a molecule that's better for carbon sequestration? Could we come up with a way to fix nitrogen so that we can increase food production and quality in the world?

11:30Because that's fertilizers, to make it simple. Could we come up with a coating to reduce corrosion in underwater pipes so oil and gas don't ever leak into the ocean? Those are the kinds of problems that I'm super excited about. Coming up, we've talked with a lot of big players in AI. But as we look to the year ahead, a big question is, what happens if the hype bubble bursts? To be clear, I think AI is going to be as big as the steam engine. I just think that, you know, as with the railroads, as with the internet before them, often there are financial manias that go hand in hand with these profound new technological developments.

12:14And, you know, 2026 is going to tell us a lot about whether we're in one of those. Stay with us.

12:33Okay, Mims, we focused a lot on 2025. What are going to be those big, bold ideas for 2026? Yeah, I mean, clearly, we're still going to be talking about AI a lot in 2026. Yeah, it feels as we're coming out of the year that there's big concerns that maybe the AI boom is going to turn into an AI bubble. What do you think? I think that financially, we are cooked. Buckle up.

13:07i mean have you seen these junk bonds tim well there's concerns about the i think what you're getting at is there's concerns about some of these interconnected deals among some of the big tech players worries about what happens if those predictions for sales don't occur so much of the stock valuation is based upon the potential right is it over is it overhyped yeah i mean i think 2026 is going to be one for the history books in ways both good and bad and i can safely say that as a tech journalist i've never had to learn so much about finance so quickly because the structure of a lot of the deals funding a lot of the data centers the stuff that actually comprises ai they're very complicated and it feels like if the money spigot gets turned off because investors lose faith or because no more debt can be issued to build these new AI data centers, it's going to mean trouble for the whole industry.

14:10It's going to have big implications also for us as consumers because the subsidy of all of these AI goodies that we are getting at a loss from companies like OpenAI could end. Yeah. Now, the flip side of that is there are people in the industry who feel like maybe we're not spending enough given the changes that could be coming because of this technology, that entire industries could be essentially rewritten, the way of life could be made new, that more money should be invested because the potential windfalls are so great. And that's kind of the fun part or the challenge and exciting part of going into 2026 for this storyline.

14:49Yeah, to be clear, I think AI is going to be as big as the steam engine. I just think that, you know, as with the railroads, as with the internet, Often there are financial manias that go hand in hand with these profound new technological developments. And, you know, 2026 is going to tell us a lot about whether we're in one of those. It becomes a timing issue, right? Getting the timing right is what's complicated. Is it going to happen when people think it's going to happen? Is it going to happen the way they think it's going to happen in that timeline? Another topic we touched on last year was humanoid robots.

15:24Now, this is something I think you and I are both expecting to hear a lot more about in the year to come. Yeah, absolutely. Elon Musk has a lot of incentives, almost$1 trillion of incentives to make sure that he turns the world full of humanoid robots. That's part of it. Right, the pay package he gets if he delivers enough of these. Yeah, absolutely. And he's looking at 2026 as time to start producing these things in mass scale. So that's going to be an interesting challenge. I mean, do you think that we're going to really get there? Or do you think humanoid robots are going to enter the trough of disillusionment on the famous Gartner hype cycle in 2026?

16:08Well, you know, it's interesting. We're kind of hitting this moment where there's a lot of excitement about it because of what we've talked about earlier in the show. And that's AI, the ability for finally there to be kind of the robot brain to help it navigate the world, do the things in the world that it would need to do to make it useful. Right. Meeting up with the manufacturing end of making the robots. The challenges are immense, though. You and I have talked to several people who have warned that we're not quite there yet. Yeah, it seems like maybe we're not going to get humanoid robots doing our dishes in the next 12 months.

16:48But 10 years from now, who knows? I mean, they could be raising our kids. Or at least walking our dogs. I think one of the other things going on here, just to tie it back to that earlier conversation we had about China, China is this kind of thing that's hanging out there over the robot world, over all of these technological worlds. There's this concern in the U.S. that China is going to outpace us, outdevelop us in these worlds. It's an economic issue, but for some it's a national security issue. Yeah, I wonder whether in 2026 there's going to be some kind of Sputnik moment with China where China demonstrates some new technology in, you know, AI or weapons or space exploration where, you know, places like The Wall Street Journal and others are trumpeting headlines about how we've fallen behind yet again.

17:48so that's what we're going to be looking out for in 2026 but next let's hear from you we had some great questions from y 'all about so many of the businesses and industries we cover here on bold names and some more about topics we haven't covered like what are we supposed to do with all these pennies now that they're discontinued that's next

18:25We asked you all for questions, and here are some of the highlights. First one here is from Michelle. Quote, why, when we know LLM technology is based on plausibility, probability, and not accuracy, are so many industries that depend on precision finance medicine law keep hurtling toward it? It seems kind of dumb. Yeah, this is a great question because this is the main barrier to AI adoption in so-called AI agents, which is just an AI that we give some power to do something. And the short answer to this question is that there are ways to combine these AI systems with a lot of traditional software.

19:12right developers call it scaffolding um and you just give these ais guardrails you shrink the tasks that you're asking them to do you make them as small and as definable as possible and then when you have to you make sure that there's a human in the loop and so the answer to this question is that the future of ai it's going to be less like these machine gods that we were promised and more like Steve Jobs' original vision for the PC, right? It's a bicycle for the mind. And what he meant was this is something that enhances humans in their day-to-day work. It advantages experts in what they do because they're the ones who know what the output should look like and how to correct the system when it goes astray.

19:58Okay, you asked the next one, I think. Oh, right. Tim, so we got another question from a reader named Tim. no relation. All Tim's are related I think. I'm not going to read the whole thing. Basically he's like what's up with pennies? What do I do with the pennies in my life? What are you going to do with the pennies in your life now that we've stamped the last one Tim? Well I guess I'm going to collect them. Sit on them. Fun fact, if you just melt them down copper has just been listed as a critical mineral so I think that might be an option for you if you want to find a second life for those pennies.

20:38Okay, Mims, thanks for putting up with me for another year. And thank you, listeners. I am really excited to put up with you for another year, Tim, and also to bring to our listeners a bunch more bold names. I've seen our editorial calendar for 2026, and there are a lot of exciting interviews coming. And that's bold names for this week. Our producers are Alexis green and danny lewis our video producer is kasha brusalian and our fact checker is the parna nathan jessica fenton is our technical manager jessica and michael laval our sound designers jessica also wrote our theme music our supervising producer is katie ferguson our development producer is aisha al-muslim chris sinsley is the deputy editor and falana patterson is the wall street Journal's head of news audio.

21:30For even more, check out our columns on wsj.com. We've linked them in the show notes. I'm Tim Higgins. And I'm Christopher Mims. Thanks for listening.