Sameer Singh, 2026
“This is not another platform shift. It is the end of the entire computing cycle — and the beginning of a new one built on robotics, edge AI, and distributed manufacturing. It starts between now and the next eighteen months.”
Value migrates from software abstraction to atoms. The network effects and moats that organized fifty years of computing stop compounding; the next generation of platform giants is built on machines that act in the physical world. Software written by AI becomes an input everywhere and a moat almost nowhere.
- Robotics and edge-AI companies take a record share of early-stage venture funding
- First at-scale deployment of general-purpose robots in commercial use
- Software incumbents’ margins visibly compressing as AI commoditizes their product
Software companies built on top of commoditized AI keep producing the era’s biggest value creation through 2028 — fast-growing, high-margin, and defensible — while the atoms economy stays a promise.
Open. The eighteen-month clock set by the author runs to early 2028.