Our Data Trends & Predictions for 2026 with DataCamp's CEO & COO, Jonathan Cornelissen & Martijn Theuwissen

Richie Cotton: Welcome back, Jonathan. Welcome back, Martin. It's been so long. 

Jo Cornelissen: Thanks for having us again, Richie. Thanks for having us. 

Richie Cotton: Wonderful. Yeah. Last time we did a review of last year's predictions and now let's dive straight into things for Martin, I think you wanted to go first.

You've got a careers angle. 

Martijn Theuwissen: Yeah. Yeah, indeed. My first prediction is actually that I think there's a lot of talk about this junior hiring crisis. Okay, people who just graduated can't find a job and that you're better off with or that companies will only need senior people. My perception is actually going to be that I think the junior hiring crisis is gonna get a lot better and that it's gonna be flipped and it's gonna be the people who are in the the middle of their career who are going to have a bit of a problem unless they substantially like re-skill them solve.

The reason is that it's gonna be more and more important that you can think in an AI native way. So rather than companies valuing years of experience, I think they're going to value the ability of someone to work with with ai. With AI agents have the ability to set up their own automated workflows using ai and.

Think that if you are a a junior person and okay, like basically from the get go at school, at university, like you are taught how to work with ai, that all is going to become a lot more native. And that's eventually going to make you a lot more valuable in the workforce. The mental model I have is okay, if if I compare like I grew up.

During the rise of the internet and if I see how I work with the internet versus like how my parents interact with the internet or the worldwide app it's clear that it comes still today a lot more native to me than it comes to my parents. And so I think we're going to see the same thing on the ai side.

Which brings me to okay, if you're in the middle of your career you're too young to retire, so you need to get the hang of this new world. You're gonna need to do some substantial reskilling to remain valuable. In short, like whatever your career stage, upskilling, reskilling with AI will be or should be one of your highest priorities.

So that's my 

Richie Cotton: first 

Martijn Theuwissen: prediction. 

Richie Cotton: I'm torn on this one because I'm very happy for the young people, but also I'm very much smack back in the middle of my career. I'm like, oh, really? I'm gonna go learn new skills again. Okay, bye. Jonathan, do you have anything to add to this? 

Jo Cornelissen: Yeah, I think this is one of the big open questions that I'm actually very curious.

In a few years we'll probably be able to analyze this. The rise of AI has coincided with a lot of tech companies getting fit and interest rates going up. So I think there's a natural dynamic in the last year or so where organizations are just hiring less and it's easier to just.

Not hire a bunch of junior people versus letting people go. But it's also easier to say, Hey, this is because of ai. We're doing so amazing in terms of AI adoption that we're not hiring junior people is a much easier message from company leaders. And so I'm a, I'm. Bit skeptical that like AI is the biggest driver for the fact that there's less junior hires in tech, but I think there's some truth to it in some areas for sure as well.

So I'm very curious how that's gonna play out. And I agree with Martin in the sense that I think a lot of organizations will wake up to the fact that. Things in every kind of department, in every team can be done much more efficiently, much more effectively with ai. And so they're gonna start looking for.

Not just ics, but also managers who really understand how to drive that AI transformation. And the reality is I think that a lot of the more junior people are faster in adopting AI in a lot of organizations. So I think directionally, I very much agree with prediction here. 

Richie Cotton: Okay. Yeah, I think just being AI native is the important thing.

And maybe junior people are gonna be better than doing that. 'cause, it's easy to learn stuff when you don't have the baggage. Alright. Before we vote on this, Martin, can we have an official prediction then that's gonna be something testable for next year. 

Martijn Theuwissen: The entry level positions that are open that like we see 

Richie Cotton: in a rise in dose.

Okay. A rise in number of entry level positions is gonna be around AI ord in general that, but with dimension of ai, like I would say. Martin, I presume you are voting for your own your own idea, but yeah. Jonathan, what's your prediction for or against this? Oh, I agree.

Jo Cornelissen: I agree. I don't know how many points I can, I, I can put to work here, but I agree with this production for sure. Okay. 

Richie Cotton: I like the idea, but since you sent it to me hard on, on mid-grade people I'm gonna vote against it. 

Martijn Theuwissen: You actually put something on the line. That's cool. 

Richie Cotton: Thanks Gretchen.

I'm gonna go with this one. My prediction is that I'm gonna have a personal shopper by the end of the year. So I feel like, we've already had bots for buying things like concert tickets. And the, there's a whole thing with sneakerhead who will use like bots to buy like the brand new sportswear shoes whenever they come out.

So this is something that Tom Tonga was talking about when he came on data Rain a couple of months ago. Bots are buying things for a while, but it seems like this is going mainstream in more general agents to buy things for you. So basically it's a personal shopper for everyone.

At the moment the three big plays in this it's the usual suspect, so it's open AI and Google are going built sort of building protocols for enabling shopping within the chatbots. Amazon's got a big push. It's got a feature called Buy for Me, where it's basically, spots buying things for you on Amazon.

So there's a huge push in this direction, like a lot of big players involved. And there was a report from McKinsey saying actually, first of all, like global e-commerce is predictably worth $trillion this year. A report from McKinsey saying they reckon that AI orchestrated us, retail it's gonna be like $trillion worth of retails are gonna be AI in hand.

So the actually like half of global commerce is gonna be AI orchestrated by That feels like a lot. I don't know that I believe that, but I can certainly see there's like a very big market for this on the ai, like the AI company side. It's okay, it sounds cool that you are like these bots buying stuff.

It's gonna have a big impact for retailers 'cause then retailers have to make sure that bots can buy things on your site. That means having better APIs for finding products and actually going through like the payment systems. It means that like all your data has to be intact because if bots otherwise bots will buy the wrong things.

And basically you just gotta make sure that all your websites are machine readable. So a lot of work to be done here. There's gonna be a lot of stuff around how do you stop bots doing fraud? Can you govern bots? So many different topics to, to explore, but it sounds like it's gonna be a big thing.

So I guess DI have your own opinions on whether we're gonna see ai, personal shoppers. 

Jo Cornelissen: Yes. I think the, I would partially agree. And actually I had a prediction that's somewhat adjacent, but slightly different. So it depends on that. What exactly you mean with a kind of an AI personal shopper? So I completely agree that it's unavoidable that there's gonna be a tight integration between.

E-commerce I would add travel to, to, to that as well, and ai. I think those worlds are starting to collide and it's not really happening yet, but it will be huge very soon. I think the consumer will want to be in control most of the time though. So I actually wanted to predict that kind of.

The OpenAI app store or I don't think Google has announced they're gonna do this, but it seems like the obvious step for Google to integrate apps into Gemini. I could see that kind of blow up and be huge. Where for example, like I was I live in the us I was traveling to Belgium. I wanna book a hotel.

I have certain criteria. I was asking Chad GBT to help me find something. I don't wanna leave the app and go somewhere else, and then I wanna book a restaurant and say, I don't wanna, I just wanna do that within kind of the Gemini or the opening AI interface. So I can totally see the integration, but I think most consumers, before they spend the money, they wanna make sure they approve what it's buying.

So like just a bot that goes off and goes shopping for you. I think there's people who will like that, but that's a very small market, so it depends on how you what you mean, Richie? 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. Okay. So that's a good point that there are very different scenarios. So if it's just do I ask my favorite chat bot for advice on what to buy?

That's already very easily doable, but having that complete thing of, okay, I give it a shopping list with some requirements. So it goes off and then finds the products. And I give it my credit card details to buy stuff so that it's that end-to-end experience with no human involved. That's a that's the kind of thing that's supposedly coming next.

But that's a very different play. 

Jo Cornelissen: I agree that's gonna be possible and some people are gonna use that. I just think the number of few cases where you are not ultimately approving feels like it's gonna be small. I could be wrong. Like maybe if you say, Hey, I want to cook this or that, and then it goes off and buys the ingredients.

But like in principle it could book your whole holiday, but do you really want that? I think you wanna approve if you're gonna spend thousands of dollars 

Richie Cotton: Yes. What you buy matters. So certainly vac a surprise vacation bought by an agent. That's it's a novel thing to do once, but I wouldn't necessarily wanna do that every year.

I think that the thing that I think it's gonna be coming first is gonna be BB buying where you have regular orders and it's okay, check, is the stock level low at this point? We always, once the stock level drops a certain amount, we always buy the same thing every time. So when you have repeat orders for similar things, that is very programmatic.

It's a small stretch from existing rule-based stuff to, I've got an agent that's a little bit more flexible about like where I'm buying from and things like that. So I think BB commerce is gonna be the initial thing on the BC side. It's gonna be small purchases. It's like I'm fine with it, buying toiletries, but yeah. Not quite the vacation yet. Alright to make a prediction then to make this official. In I'm say the AI shopping agents will directly execute $billion in global e-commerce. This is gonna be % of all global commerce values.

We're going big here. And that's like the full execution. I'm giving I'm giving the bot my credit card. 

Martijn Theuwissen: % I think is too high. Like I'm gonna say no, like I don't think one outta a hundred dollars spent is gonna go through an AI agent fully automated. Huh? To be clear, I don't think that's gonna happen.

You look very disappointed for those who are listening. Richie is a very disappointing face.

Richie Cotton: Shut down. You think, Hey, you think I went too high with this six, billion? I was like, billion. Sounds like a cool number. Let's go with that. Jonathan, what do you reckon? 

Jo Cornelissen: It depends on the fine print of how you define this.

I'll raise you that I think the amount purchased through aI apps or integrations, I think will be higher than whatever the direct bot purchases is. 'cause I think it's a much bigger market. So if you're a high, so just to be specific about what, there's apps in open ai now I'm guessing, I'm hoping this will come to Gemini and others as well, where you say, Hey, I wanna buy, I wanna book a hotel, I wanna book a restaurant.

You I wanna book a plane ticket. You kind of book it through the app interface or for the integration into open AI or Gemini. I think that will be bigger than bots going off and based on high level instructions doing the purchasing for you. 

Richie Cotton: Okay, so this is, human has final approval, but basically 

Jo Cornelissen: so it's integration within ai.

That would be my bet that the integration within AI is the big market rather than the AI agents going off to purchase. I think eventually that might actually be the bigger market but for the next months, I don't know a lot of humans who are okay with bots going off and purchasing stuff for them.

Okay. People have to get adjusted to that idea. 

Richie Cotton: We're keeping the human in the loop for this year then? I think so. O okay. Alright. I guess that's, that sounds like it's a no on the original premise of you. I'm not gonna cheat and and update my prediction for the sake of thing.

Alright. I, Ali I'll let you both say no on that one, but I do think, yeah, you have a good point there, but maybe human, the loop is gonna be necessary in the near term. 

Jo Cornelissen: Yeah. What do you guys think on that prediction? Should we immediately do the vote?

Martijn Theuwissen: Oh, you wanna make extra?

Okay, alright. Yeah, let's vote on this. So on that one, I think if the tools get good enough, yes. Because I was actually also thinking about for example, you have perplexity comet browser, and I tested it and it didn't really work yet, but I went to the website of the grocery chain that I buy all my groceries from.

I took a screenshot from like the grocery list that let lies around at home. I put it in there and it said Hey, go in. Order it. Sorry. Put it all in the basket and all get final approval if you get excited. Now, it didn't work to be clear. It got % there. Now if it gets a hundred percent there, then yes, like that type of use case where I finally say oh yes, everything is in the basket.

Let's pay. Yes. I think that's gonna be use case. It's gonna be huge. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. Alright. So if we're gonna vote on this, I think you need to put a number on it though. How big is it gonna be?

Jo Cornelissen: I heard six. I'm literally just going off of what you said. I heard billion sounds like a nice number and honestly, that, that seems very high to me.

But I think it will be significant and I think once it starts to work, it can go really fast. Like I would immediately use it for. A lot of things I'm purchasing personally, 

Richie Cotton: there are a lot of really bad shopping websites, which I would rather avoid having to Exactly. Yeah. I think that's a big message for retailers.

If you improve your website, that's how you keep people there. You know what? The bar has just been raised. Matt how are you voting? 

Martijn Theuwissen: I'll vote on the billion. But the caveat that's it works and it's like not necessarily a direct purchase by the bot. It's human in the loop.

Okay. 

Richie Cotton: We're 

Martijn Theuwissen: keeping the human 

Richie Cotton: in there. 

Martijn Theuwissen: Alright. 

Richie Cotton: Okay next one. Joe, he had one on 

Jo Cornelissen: education, admittedly. The next one is a bit self-serving. The prediction is that everyone's gonna get their personal tutor. And I think. Everyone knows that one-on-one tutoring has always been the gold standards in education.

And the issue was the cost and the fact that there's just not enough exceptional tutors in the world to teach everyone. But technology is now at a tipping point where. AI driven teaching is ultimately gonna get better than the best teachers in the world. We're not quite there yet. That's something DataCamp has been working on.

For those who follow the news, we acquired a company called Optima. In late we've launched our first AI native courses where the course is essentially delivered by an AI tutor, and everything adapts to the learner. So it's truly personalized. It adapts the pace, it adapts to the context of the learner, and the early results are really positive.

Even though this is a completely new experience, it's already better. In terms of. Engagement in terms of retention. And I would argue if you analyze the sessions with learners it's also just better from a tactical point of view. And so I think there's tremendous potential here.

Just like in other areas, there's protections around having your personal shopper, for example. I think the area where it's gonna have a very positive impact on the world is everyone ultimately having their personal tutor. That knows them really well, that adapts to them that is not just a teacher, but also a coach to helps them be accountable, helps them clarify their goals.

I'm super bullish on this and that's exactly what we're pursuing with data camp. So it's a bit self-serving but yeah, that's the prediction. Everybody gets their own tutor maybe to make it something tangible that I can be held accountable for. In a year. I think one way to phrase it is, I would say half or close to half of engagement on data cam shifts towards the AI native experience by of year.

That's not an insignificant amount we have about in the last year, I think we'll have a lot around million hours of learning on the platforms. It has quite a lot of learning. That would happen through ai. 

Richie Cotton: Okay. Yeah. I think I'm okay with self-serving this case because it's such a huge societal shift, having a personal tutor for everyone that actually works.

And yeah, this is how we make education better for the world. Yeah. I'm okay with that. I also love that. Yeah. Like publicly stating your OK. R as a bold move. I hope I don't have to do that in future. Okay. Martin, did you want to add anything on AI education? 

Martijn Theuwissen: No I'm fully supportive of this prediction.

Like anecdotally, like I'm a heavy taker of data camp's new new course format, like thanks to the Optima acquisition, like. Big fan of them. Like they're really a lot of fun to do. I feel myself a lot more engaged, like what George tells about personalization, ization, like it's definitely true.

So yeah, very bullish on this one. 

Richie Cotton: Absolutely. Yeah. No disagreement from me here. So I'm fully in favor of this. It does sound like a big target you've given yourself there.

Jo Cornelissen: As Richie we like ambitious goals. This is not gonna be a walk in the park. And to be honest, I think the, maybe to take a step back here, already today I think more than half of students prefers the AI native experience. The real kind of question is data Camp has courses. Can we bring the new experience to enough content to really shift the engagements to the new formats? But we're very optimistic.

By the end of this year, we'll be in a great place there. 

Richie Cotton: Next prediction? This one's from you, Martin. 

Martijn Theuwissen: Yeah. I predict that we're gonna have a new GPT Dream moment. To, to frame that a little bit. I think there was a big leap when we ran from GPT two to G PT three.

G PT three was when it, like AI really got known to the more general public. It was probably like deep. Biggest step forward in the last four or five years. LMS went from a research project to something that was actually useful mass consumed and so on. And I think that in we're gonna have a very similar moment.

And let me explain why. This year Gemini tree came out. There was a lot to do about Gemini Tree. Okay, very big model update, upgrade Google Stock went through the roof. Thanks to that. Basically what Gemini Tree showed was that the scaling laws still matter. So basically pushing in more data will lead to better models.

Now if you take that into account and then there's a second big thing coming or there's a big thing coming next year and that it's Nvidia will start shipping. Its new chips. They're called the Blackwell Cheap use. And so it's gonna start shipping them to their clients. And I was listening to some.

Some other podcast and the way that somebody described it as okay, so today there's the hopper, GPU, and that's like an F like that airplane. And Blackwell will be like an F So like the latest, the best, like whatever. So there's a massive difference. In here. And so what's gonna happen in is that we're gonna get new models coming out and they're gonna be trained on this much better infrastructure.

So they're gonna be trained using blackwells rather than hoppers. So they're gonna be trained on the F not the F And so if scaling loss still holds that means that these models will be much, much better. And we're gonna all observe as consumers like that stepwise increase, just like we've observed it when we went from GPT two to GPT tree.

I even want to go a little bit more specific. I think it's gonna be gro from X ai. Who's going to come up? Or come out with the very first big big leap there. The reason is okay, Blackwell will come out, like rumor is that x ai, El Musk will get the first ones. And okay, he has proven that he can set up gigantic data centers very quickly.

So I think his models will hit the market the fastest. And yeah, therefore I think it's actually we're gonna get this new GPT tree moment driven by, gr. So maybe to put that in an official prediction okay, I think GRE or so go new GK model grok model coming out of after the black wall deployment will take the top of the charts.

Richie Cotton: There, the infrastructure is now gonna be the important thing that sort of, produced latency and high performance is gonna be the differentiator in these models. It's slightly different to what we were talking about in the review of the last year's predictions about the prediction that there're gonna be AI products that take more than an hour to respond.

And that's a different, to okay, we're letting something AI run for hours, versus we really care about the infrastructure. We've gotta get fast responses. We've got a high throughput 

Martijn Theuwissen: That's about inference. And I think this is really my statement is really about the training of the models.

So my prediction is really on, on like a new model will be trained using this new infrastructure. Thanks to NVIDIA's new GPU and that will lead to a stepwise improvement in in the model like we've seen with G PT three. 

Richie Cotton: Okay. So it's about continuing to scale the training side of things.

Do we get these bigger models? Alright. Okay. Jonathan, do you have a take on this? 

Jo Cornelissen: I would tend to agree and I would feel nervous about betting against Elon Musk. There's a lot of people who've lost a lot of money. Doing that. So it seems like a bad idea. Talking from the educational perspective, the in the last year we've seen a transition from the models getting so good.

They could, you could essentially have an AI tutor deliver contents in a very effective way. And while being able to trust that the quality is very high. I, our bet for this year is that the models will get so good that you can really accelerate content creation for that format to the point where it allows data cam to not only teach data and AI skills, but really go beyond that because to some extent we're downstream from this.

And our bet is the models will continue to get better and that as a result, not only will we have an effective AI tutor and AI coach, but we're gonna be able to scale our content. While maintaining a very high level of quality. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. So this is interesting I think for a lot of sort of simple use cases the large language ones have reached point where they're just good enough.

But for things like the tutoring use case where people are asking technical questions about the science, about ai, and then you need to, the AI needs to come up with a of coherent and correct response. That is understandable for user, it's really hard problem. And so we do need models to keep getting better in order to get the, those sort of high level tutors.

So yeah we need scaling to happen in some sense. Martin what's, what you gonna predict to make sure that this is measurable and testable for next year? 

Martijn Theuwissen: Yeah, that, that's harder because it's hard to capture a moment. So I think the closest I can get to is okay, crock will be at the top of the.

The leaderboard. 

Richie Cotton: Okay. We're back in the chat bot arena leaderboards then. 

Martijn Theuwissen: Yeah. If we need to put it in a factual metric. Yes. 

Richie Cotton: Okay. Alright. So yeah, this is interesting. But the 

Martijn Theuwissen: prediction is like it's gonna be this new. Stepwise improvement? 

Richie Cotton: A stepwise improvement? Yeah. I feel there's enough money being thrown into AI research that we should be guaranteed or it's close to guaranteed so some decent improvements over the next year.

But yeah having gr at the top of the leaderboard is always in number two position at the moment. The latest rock model. Yeah. Only a short step to number one. I'm not super convinced though that it is gonna be gr at the top. I feel like go, Google's going. Guns are blazing at the moment.

And they're certainly gonna be able to get access to the a latest Nvidia chips. I. I suspect it's gonna be Google number one next year. 

Jo Cornelissen: Just to avoid a discussion. We'll have a year from now. Are we saying at some point grok in the next year, grok will top the leaderboards and then maybe it falls off?

Or are we saying exactly December st, it's at the top of the leaderboard? What? What are we saying? 

Martijn Theuwissen: So I'm saying like, grok will hit the top of the leaderboard and it will be due, and that's how it's gonna be communicated due to the fact that they're using this new GPU. By nvi. Okay. 

Jo Cornelissen: Yeah. Then I agree.

Richie Cotton: Rocket hitting number one at some point during the year, I think that's that's likely to happen. They just seem like the leader swaps regularly. Whoever releases the latest model gets number one spot. It's gonna be hardest track, finding a did they hit number one at some point, John, on the year?

Yeah I think that's a, an easy yes then, but I think by the end of the year we're gonna see. Someone other than Crock being the overall leader next tions from me, and that's the AI app builders are gonna be the next hot tool that everyone needs to learn about. So I feel like over the last year almost every software development tool has now got an agent involved, but the.

Biggest wins of last year? It was cursor and the other sort of AI native, IDE. So the idea is that basically you have agents built into your coding interface, but that sort of the sheet of code is still like the standard thing that you are interacting with Now.

I suspect that, it's gonna flip a bit to the AI app builders. This is tools like lovable like rep like bolt. These do, you just say, this is the thing I want to create. And the agents are in the background and create what you want, but you care less about the sort of the code.

So it's another layer of abstraction. We also have tools like Sigma's doing a similar thing in the BI space. It's basically creating it's AI agents that will create you. Apps for you. It's a subtle shift in how you create thing how you do software development. But I think yeah.

is gonna be the year of the AI app builders. I don't know whether either have a take on this. 

Jo Cornelissen: I believe in the category, I believe in the fact that there's a whole new group of people that's gonna build apps. Where I'm unclear is like we, we've heard all the numbers on Ate and lovable.

But I'm a data person, so I always look at, okay, what's their, what's the evolution of their traffic over the last. Six months nine months, and both repli and lovable are essentially flat. So there's not no growth. There was some initial growth and obviously there's been a tremendous amount of revenue growth.

And so what that singles to me is that what's really happening is you have a group of people that get a tremendous amount of value from these products, and they're spending probably really large numbers of money. Unlovable and replicate. And so on the one hand that means it works. On the other hand, the fact that their traffic remains flattish over the last six to nine months, it does single hey, or it raises a question on like why is that the case?

It's very rare to have a company where, like the number of users in the user inflow seems flat, but revenue is going x. That's a new thing, and I don't really, it gives me a level of skepticism around the growth model. That doesn't mean I'm not bullish on the whole category and the idea.

But like for example, is cloud code getting so good and people just skip it and just go straight to clock code? I don't know the space well enough. I'm just, I'm a bit skeptical that if this is the next big thing in you would see both revenue as well as users grow. And unless SimilarWeb is like vastly off, like there's no traffic growth.

So I'm a bit confused about that. 

Richie Cotton: Yes. A very odd data signal. 'cause you would expect that, these companies have been ting the software engineering group and then the current gradually moving towards the sort of more, oh less technical people. The. Record in particular has been pushing hard on the idea of vibe coding.

So it's yeah, you don't need to understand too much about the underlying code. You just want to be able to describe what you wanna build and things just magically happen. So yeah, you would expect that at some point it's gonna switch and it's gonna go mainstream. You're gonna see. A large amount of traffic growth.

Martin, I dunno whether this is something you've looked into 

Martijn Theuwissen: a bit of a similar take. Like Joe said if the prediction is like, Hey, their revenue will grow and will continue to grow rapidly, like probably yes. Maybe going to the cloud code point. Like I actually think there's also a world where the cursors and the cloud codes and so on actually move into the space of wrapup, lovable and bolt.

And you actually see like more and more users switching to those. Tools, which would actually make the total addressable market of a cursor or cloud code like a lot bigger. So maybe Richie, like going back asking you like, okay what's the official prediction here? 

Richie Cotton: I was going on the valuation.

So currently, cursor. Last month was valued at billion. And then the two biggest players in the AI app building space. It's lovable. That's valued at billion, replicates valued at billion. So I wanna say the either lovable or replicable overtake cursor as the highest valued AI assisted software startup.

Martijn Theuwissen: Oh, that's a hard one. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. Going on valuation. Yeah, basically Chris has got like a. Five x lead over lovable mode, x lead over rep. But I think it's gonna switch in this year. 

Jo Cornelissen: Oh, that's very tricky, to be honest. 'cause I would be bullish on all of them. Although I do think the valuations are.

If it's true that traffic is actually now growing, the valuations are very high. 'cause it, they, they assume a revenue growth rate that is hard to sustain with traffic being flat. 

Martijn Theuwissen: I'm going to say you're wrong, Richie. And I think what's going to, the way it's going to play out is okay, e lovable or red or both are gonna get at some point a higher valuation than cursor.

But then before the end of the year, cursor actually raises again. Over the billion valuation that there are now, and that will turn your prediction to be false. We're guessing a little bit VC behavior here, which is really hard. But like that, it's that's outside of like gateway rating.

These tools are really cool. And will it be used a more next year? Probably, yes. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah, so certainly there's a lot of excite to like whatever format you're using, so yeah, it's three big companies and yeah. All exciting stuff happening, but you're saying no. Okay. W was that Joe, was that also a no from you or you had a skeptical face?

Jo Cornelissen: I'm on the fence, so I'm just gonna strategically vote. No, 

Richie Cotton: I predicted. That's been both nos from both of you on both of these occasions. Alright. Go on. Next one. Joe you had another software engineering related prediction. 

Jo Cornelissen: Yeah. So the next prediction I have, I would I would summarize as the quality is the new differentiator.

'Cause I guess, I think in a lot of spaces we're just talking about kind of AI assisted coding or coding agents. There's not several players that are doing this reasonably well. And so I think in that space. The ultimate quality of the product is really gonna start to matter.

If you think about the education space that we're in there's gonna be more and more companies that claim to have a kind of an AI learning engine, an AI tutor. But already today, there's vast differences in what that actually means and what the quality is. And I think there's gonna be an evolution in.

How important the kind of outputs and the quality of the output of the AI models in kind of the application layer is. And so there's gonna be much more rigor around the product managements around creating specs having really good evals and having that iterative loop, I think will become super, super important.

Whereas I think up to this points. In a lot of cases there was a bit of a wild west kind of, if the demo works, it's good enough, let's launch it. Attitude people want it to be first to market. I think will be the year where quality is the differentiator where people are now really looking at ROI and really gonna evaluate whether something actually works and is actually better.

Maybe this is wishful thinking to some extent, but I'm still gonna make the prediction. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. Maybe wishful think we are gonna avoid drowning in the tide of ai slop. But I say over the last few months I've been running a lot of data frame episodes with trust in the title. 'cause I really want the to be a sense that you can use AI to create high quality things and yeah.

Anyone can do anything cheaply now. So the big. Differentiator is gonna be, can you create something great. Yeah doing that well is good. So yeah I'm in favor of this. 

Martijn Theuwissen: Yeah I'm as well actually. And so agree with the prediction. Maybe. Small plug we have on DataCamp and AI assisted coding for developers.

We also are soon coming up with an AI engineer engineering curriculum fully in our new AI native learning experience. It has a large section on. Quality both from a prompting perspective as from an evals perspective. One yes, I think this is going to play out as Joe predicted.

Two, if you on prepare, be prepared for this. Go to data camp, check out some of these new courses that will be become, because like we're going to heavily dive into this subject as well. 

Richie Cotton: Both these last predictions has been about how software development has just changed so much and building things have changed so much that yeah, it's gonna be a big focus for the data camp curriculum team over the next.

Few months. So I guess you start off, you take the vibe coding with rapid course, and then you figure out how to go from, I've vibe coded something to do to doing something tested and high quality at the end of it actually. How are we judging this one? I'm not sure. Any suggestions?

The point is about it's gonna be a workflow change for software developers. This it's the idea that you've got spec driven development and you can have some kind of evaluation thing. So it's the idea of this sort of behavior driven development workflow is gonna be, let's like the dominant sort of thing.

I don't know how we quantify that, but may maybe we'll do a vibe space evaluation next year. Let's do that. Okay. But yeah I think if we talking about like the workflow change, then.