We have to be honest. If 2025 has taught us one thing, it is that expectations were far too high. We were promised an army of AI agents ready to revolutionise our lives, run our businesses and, why not, bring us coffee in bed. But instead? Instead we ended up with a ‘fistful of digital flies’. As brilliantly analysed in this video that you can also find here on this page, 2025 was by no means the year of autonomous agents. The reality turned out to be much more complicated than Silicon Valley’s wet dreams: corporate adoption was slow, the economics behind ‘agentic’ agents proved fragile and, let’s face it, the technology was not yet ready to replace human intuition. We spent the year figuring out what these agents were, rather than actually seeing them in action. A real disappointment for those of us who love speed and efficiency. But why? We found three fundamental points:
Lack of Contextual Evals: The main reason we did not see widespread use of agents in companies (“production usage”) is the lack of specific data to evaluate their performance;
Difficulties in Measurement: Companies need to be able to measure an agent’s capabilities within their specific workflows (niche workflows) very accurately. Currently, there is a lack of evaluation data (‘eval data’) needed to give companies the confidence to use these agents in production;
Lack of Investment: Companies have not yet invested sufficiently in the creation of these evaluation systems, which are essential to move from mere demos to reliable products
But fear not, for if software has left us high and dry,hardware is ready to turn heads. The real trend that is about to explode, the solid, concrete one that we will literally be able to touch, will come straight from CES 2026 in Las Vegas. Get ready, because robots are coming back and this time they mean business. LG has just announced that it will unveil its new domestic robot, LG CLOiD, embodying the vision of the‘Zero Labor Home‘. Imagine an assistant that doesn’t just live in your screen, but moves around your living room with the grace of a dancer (or almost).
This is not the usual hoover that bangs against the furniture. We are talking about a robot with two articulated arms, seven degrees of freedom per limb and hands with five individually actuated fingers. You heard right: real fingers for delicate and precise tasks. LG describes it as a step towards liberation from household chores, powered by what they call‘Affectionate Intelligence‘. Intelligence that not only performs, but ‘feels’ and adapts to you, just as a good assistant should. While software agents remain trapped in servers, machines like CLOiD promise to give us back the most precious resource of all: quality time.
The difference is abysmal. While in 2025 we were trying to get confused chatbots to talk to each other, 2026 opens with the promise of physical, tangible help. A mechanical body ready to take over the daily boredom, leaving us to enjoy life (and maybe a few more vices).
See you in Las Vegas, we will follow step by step from this first 2026 the evolutions of this new and certainly more tangible trend.
