Read the deck

Wed, 20 May 2026 08:02:02 +1000

Benedict Evans just dropped the Spring 2026 edition of his annual AI presentation and it is, as usual, the clearest thinking on the subject you’ll find in a single sitting.

The deck is 79 slides. It is not a TED talk. It does not tell you AI will save humanity or that the robots are coming for your job by Thursday. What it does is something rarer: it maps what we actually know, what we can reasonably infer and where the honest answer is still “we don’t know yet.” That last category gets more space than most analysts give it.

Evans has been doing this for over a decade. His AI eats the world series is the one to seek out every 6 months.

Here’s why.

History is the frame

Every platform shift feels unprecedented to the people living through it. Evans is bracingly unsentimental about this. He opens the historical argument with the Microsoft chart - a clean red line showing OS share of global computer unit sales from 1980 to today.

Microsoft owned 75-80% of the computing world. Then smartphones arrived and made that dominance beside the point. The curve falls off a cliff and flatlines near zero. No dramatic collapse, no hostile takeover - just irrelevance as the platform moved under them.

The point is not that Microsoft lost. It is that the rules change when the substrate changes. Every decade or so, the entire industry reshuffles and the cards go to whoever built for the new surface.

AI is the new surface. The reshuffle is already underway.

The size of the bet

Before you decide how much of this is hype, look at the capital commitment.

$700 billion planned in 2026 for Meta, AWS, Alphabet and Microsoft combined. For context - and Evans is precise about this - global telecoms spends around $300 billion a year. Oil and gas, around $1 trillion. The hyperscalers are now in that league. This is not venture capital optimism. This is the largest capital deployment in the history of the software industry.

You can argue about whether the returns will justify it. You cannot argue that the people sinking those funds think this is a passing moment.

Memo to 25-year-olds

Some of us have seen it before. Many haven’t.

Five S-curves. Mainframes. PCs. The web. Smartphones. Generative AI. Each one looked extraordinary from the inside. Each one was described as unprecedented, as category-destroying, as unlike anything before. Each one was right - and each one became the new normal within a decade.

The memo Evans is writing is not dismissive. It is calibrating. The people who built the most interesting things on each of those curves were not the ones who decided it was overhyped - they were the ones who took the disruption seriously while staying clear-eyed about the time it would take. The dotted red line on the right of the chart is not a warning. It’s an invitation.

What will actually change?

Here is where Evans earns his reputation. He does not pretend to know.

Sometimes software eats the world. Sometimes it only nibbles. He puts two charts side by side: New York taxis versus Uber, and US hotels versus Airbnb. Uber replaced taxis. Airbnb barely dented hotel room revenue - the hotel industry kept growing through the whole period. Same wave of platform disruption. Completely different outcomes.

The implication for AI is direct: some industries will be transformed and some will be largely untouched and we should be honest that we mostly cannot tell which is which yet. Anyone claiming certainty is selling something.

The full deck is free at ben-evans.com/presentations. It will take you 20-30 minutes to move through properly. If you have any interest in the transition we’re currently in - not the hype cycle, the actual structural shift - that is 20 minutes well spent.

Evans does not make predictions he cannot defend. He does not reach for optimism or pessimism when uncertainty is the honest answer. In a field drowning in confident takes, that is a real service.

Read the deck.

Sources:

AI eats the world - Spring 2026 (ben-evans.com/presentations)

Rambling Rows

Read the deck

History is the frame

The size of the bet

Memo to 25-year-olds

What will actually change?