TRO | The Meliora Company Top 3 AI predictions for 2026

Your Meliora briefing on how GenAI and Creativity are unlocking a brighter, smarter future.

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Meliora Company
December 22, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Subscribe | 22nd December, 2025

In this fast-moving GenAI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our top 3 technology and AI predictions for 2026.

#1: Vertical AI products will outperform General AI features from LLM’s

We predict that the biggest AI gains in 2026 won’t come from models that try to know everything.

Rather, they’ll come from systems that know one domain deeply and can act with confidence inside it. Vertical AI is built around a specific job, audience or workflow, not broad intelligence.

These tools are already outperforming general models in areas like voice, video and design because they’re trained, tuned and constrained for a single purpose rather than endless possibility - some of our favourite examples include ElevenLabs, Cuttable and Harvey - all setting out to solve a specific problem.

Here’s why this matters: As cost pressure, regulation and trust move from theoretical concerns to board-level realities, TMT businesses will favour AI that is performant, compliant and easy to embed into existing workflows.

The winners won’t be the biggest, fastest and most general LLM models. They’ll be the vertical category leaders whose AI disappears into the product and simply makes work better.

By 2026, the most valuable AI companies will look less like AI companies, and more like businesses solving specific, real-world challenges that just happen to be powered by AI.

#2: FairTrained AI to become baseline expectation

In 2026, AI governance will move beyond policy documents and into operational reality. Leaders will be expected to understand not just what AI they’re using, but how it was trained, what data it learned from, who owns that data and how outputs are governed over time.

Our Meliora concept of FairTrained AI, models built on transparent, licensed and ethically sourced data, will become a baseline expectation rather than a niche stance.

Alongside this, AI security and content provenance will harden into standard practice, with clear disclosure of whether creative, media or editorial outputs were AI-assisted or AI-generated.

Here’s why this matters: Regulation will no longer focus only on misuse, but on origin, accountability and disclosure.

Organisations will be held responsible for the training lineage of the AI they deploy, not just the outcomes it produces. As regulators enforce provenance labelling and creative disclosure, trust will become a competitive advantage rather than a compliance chore.

Leaders who treat governance as a strategic capability, embedding transparency, security and ethical training standards into their AI stack, will move faster with confidence. Those who don’t will face friction, reputational risk and forced remediation at exactly the moment they’re trying to scale.

#3: Time spent with Gen AI will eclipse Books & eBooks for 18-44s each day.

By the end of 2026, we predict daily time spent with Gen AI will eclipse time spent reading books and eBooks for 18–44 year olds in the US.

This cohort is already shifting from lean-back consumption to active creation, using generative tools to write, learn, design, summarise and think in real time. Where books and eBooks represent the most linear form of media, Gen AI is interactive, responsive and embedded directly into work, study and everyday life.

It’s not something you sit down with for an hour. It’s something you use dozens of times a day.

Here’s why this matters: For centuries, books have been the primary way humans consume and transmit knowledge. They are linear, fixed and one-directional. GenAI inverts that model. People are now spending more time generating ideas, drafts and decisions than passively consuming finished content. Intellectual effort is shifting from reading what’s been written to actively shaping what comes next. This doesn’t signal the end of books, but it does mark the end of their dominance as the default interface for thinking.

As creation overtakes consumption, the value moves to tools, platforms and brands that help people generate, test and evolve ideas in real time. Our view is that the next generation of influence won’t be built on who publishes the most pages, but on who enables the most thinking.

Still Curious?

Our Pursuit Of Better

This week it was announced that Thriday, the small business accounting platform that collapses what has traditionally been a fragmented SME stack into a single, coherent workflow, has been acquired by ASX listed Tyro. Meliora Managing Partner Clive Dickens was an early investor in Thriday via Cardinia Ventures, and this acquisition is yet another example of vertical AI business leading innovation - much less about AI and more about solving real-world problems.

In the last six months, the Meliora team have shared our ‘State of the Gen AI Economy’ presentation in over 50 boardrooms across the world. Now, we’ve made this presentation available via our website for those who are interested in learning more about the scale and speed of Gen AI disruption, and how innovation is emerging in the application layer. View it in full here.

This week we have been learning about AU based start-up Collabra.ai - a vertical AI solution that transforms unstructured documents into reliable, validated, production-ready data that drives fully autonomous workflows. Tools like Collabra are designed to help automate the backbone of businesses and free people up to focus on creative and high-value work.

The Story of the Race that Nearly Broke the Internet

A bold idea was about to become a reality - for the first time, Australia’s most iconic sporting event, The Melbourne Cup, would be live streamed to devices across the country.

What had led up to this moment is a story of courage, curiosity and creativity. Of overcoming the odds to deliver, in just 100 days, something that had never been done before.

With thanks to our Strategic Partner 18Sixty, this week we bring you The Story of the Race that Nearly Broke the Internet.

Strategic Partner Spotlight

Danny and the team at Galvanized Inc. work with producers, filmmakers, game developers, and experience designers to create content across diverse immersive platforms- pushing the boundaries of new media to deliver unforgettable experiences that connect fans to the moments they love most.

Goldilocks are specialists in crafting business stories that stand out through workshops, coaching, keynotes and consultancy. With decades working across some of the UK’s leading media brands, Goldilocks Ltd helps people, teams and businesses tell their stories in a compelling way - whatever the format.

The Pursuit of Better, Together

If this week’s newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a colleague. The best conversations often start with “You’ve got to read this”.