Chambers’ 2026 Outlook — an AI Roller Coaster

Consumer credit may be approaching its foundational AI moment — with buy now, pay later emerging as the first visible act. On this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Max Levchin, CEO and founder of Affirm and co-founder of PayPal, joins Bloomberg Intelligence global fintech and payments analyst Diksha Gera to discuss how machine learning is replacing static underwriting with real-time, transaction-level intelligence. They also explore why this shift could fundamentally reshape the economics of consumer lending over the next decade.

Now an annual tradition on the Bloomberg Intelligence Tech Disruptors podcast, John Chambers, former Cisco CEO and founder of JC2 Ventures, sits down with hardware analyst Woo Jin Ho to kick off 2026 with his latest predictions for the tech sector and the global economy. Chambers argues that AI is entering a phase of rapid adoption — driving enterprise productivity gains, reshaping capital allocation and compressing winner–loser cycles across industries. The conversation explores AI infrastructure investment, enterprise adoption, cybersecurity risks and the implications for labor markets, M&A, IPO activity and market volatility, with Chambers remaining bullish on AI’s long-term impact despite near-term disruption.

The private equity marketplace is increasingly competitive, making it difficult to win a seat at the table on hot deals. AT&T’s in-house private investment arm, AT&T Ventures, seeks to stand out by making strategic investments via a founder-friendly approach, targeting the companies that are helping to shape the future of communications, such as satellite providers, edge computing firms, AI-RAN developers, security companies and many more. AT&T Ventures Head Vikram Taneja joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior telecom analyst, John Butler, to discuss the company’s approach to investing, his thoughts on where communications technologies are headed and how his group aims to capitalize on current and future trends.

Webtoon pioneered the vertical scrolling format nearly 20 years ago, and has been expanding the genres of its content since. CFO David Lee joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Woo Jin Ho on this Tech Disruptors episode to explain how the company is building out its global-content platform using AI-driven creator tools, advanced data infrastructure and high-throughput content workflows. He discusses the economics of paid content, margin impacts from infrastructure modernization and how partnerships with Disney and Warner Bros. expand Webtoon’s IP engine. He offers a sharp look at where AI, platform scale, and digital media monetization converge.

Shopping is shifting from keyword-based search toward AI-driven, conversational guidance. Rajiv Mehta, Amazon.com’s vice president of Search and Conversational Shopping, joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Poonam Goyal on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant that integrates large language models with the company’s commerce data and personalization capabilities. Rufus helps customers identify suitable products using natural language, images and even handwritten lists. Mehta outlines how features such as price history, “help me decide,” image upload and agentic tools like price alerts and auto-buy are reshaping product discovery, conversion and customer loyalty on Amazon — and why he expects highly personalized, agent-supported shopping experiences to define the next phase of retail.

Drone technology has had a prolonged evolution, with companies exploring viable use cases for mainstream adoption. Adam Woodworth, CEO of Alphabet’s Wing subsidiary, talks to Bloomberg Intelligence tech analyst Mandeep Singh about drone delivery in the US and how he expects it to ramp up for consumer delivery of lighter packages and groceries. The discussion also covers form factor evolution for drones, regulatory framework, regulations and overlap with Waymo’s use of sensors for safety in the case of autonomous vehicles.

“…A successful agentic enterprise deployment means each of your departments are fundamentally different,” Salesforce’s SVP of Product Marketing for AI Sanjana Parulekar says, as she joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana to unpack what it really takes to scale Agentic AI beyond pilots: getting data AI-ready; adding context and governance; blending deterministic workflows with LLM reasoning via hybrid reasoning and monitoring cost and quality with observability tools. They also cover voice agents, cross-agent orchestration with MuleSoft Agent Fabric, model flexibility, change management, and real deployments.

“Open doesn’t mean a free for all, but open will win.” Workday CTO Peter Bailis joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana to explain how the people-and-money system of record is evolving into an open, AI-ready platform — combining zero-copy data access with strict governance and API-first design. He outlines how Sana, Illuminate, Flowise and Paradox fit together as a front door for work, embedded HR and finance agents, open-source agent building and streamlined recruiting.

Search is shifting to intelligent, context-rich answers from static links. You.com CEO Richard Socher joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior software analyst Sunil Rajgopal on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how You.com powers AI search for companies such as DuckDuckGo, while differentiating from enterprise peers like Glean and Exa through its web indexing, real-time accuracy and privacy-first design. “The biggest factor to get LLMs to give accurate, non-hallucinated answers is the search infrastructure layer,” Socher says. The discussion also covers the market opportunity, competitive landscape and future initiatives.

“We think that for every gigawatt, it’s about 25 exabytes of new flash creation,” says Greg Matson, SVP and head of products and marketing at Solidigm. Matson joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Jake Silverman on the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how Solidigm is powering AI’s growing data demands. The conversation explores the company’s evolution into a data-center-focused pure play, its innovations in high-capacity SSDs and how it’s positioning to lead in the next era of gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure.