Ai - The Next 40 Years
By Tate D Lacy, Founder and Owner/Operator of Ai65 an Ai Sales Advisory
What Stands Out?
(Ai over the next 40 years)
It all begins with today. Chasing efficiency leading to productivity gains across all types of human endeavors, including business. The rage is integrating Ai tools to drive automation. All good.
But where is it going?
The future will bring an evolution of the work we see today… and then much, much more.
Ai Agents will be the evolution from the comparatively simple Ai tools of today. This evolution will be gradual but constant. I like to think of it in terms of 10 year periods of Ai growth. Growth in technology yes. But as important, growth in acceptance. The future will see Ai penetrate into all aspects of human work and play and life.
What will it look like. Well, we can only forecast an educated guess. Here is one roadmap that may prove out the main idea.
Today’s primary Ai Categories (2025) - Large Language Model (LLM) Applications dominate
(led by ChatGpt)
Generalist assistants have gone mainstream. ChatGPT alone puts almost a billion pairs of eyes on LLMs every week, and Chinese entrants (DeepSeek, Quark, Doubao) are now major traffic drivers.
2025 Large Language Model (LLM) Market Breakdown
Current day (2025) top-10 use cases for the leading LLM ChatGpt give us a glimpse of the future.
The next 4o years will see many changes. The LLMs of today will evolve to Multimodal Ai that combines Chat text LLM with Vision and Voice. This change will continue the evolution of productivity increases for businesses of all sizes. This change will also enable a separate more personal area of Ai growth - Ai Companions/Assistants.
Though today we can only speculate, the short-term for Ai will belong to productivity and automation. However, ultimately, in the long-term, personal Ai-Companions/Assistants will have a profound societal impact. This “personal” counterpart to industry use of Ai will lead to the presence, trust, and integration of Ai into daily life. The future is exciting (and slightly scary).
Let’s conclude by stating the less than obvious:
“Well it’s coming”!
Today’s focus on industry efficiency automation is integral but long-term the personal-Ai entities will be human transformative in healthcare and education, and robotics and well everywhere.
Said another way, for humans to reach the stars will take the efficiency/automation and manufacturing intelligence of the Industrial Ai Oses, but for us to understand why and for what purpose will rely in part on the personal Ai entities of the future to augment, enhance, inform, enable our own human strengths.
One track — the Industrial AI OSes — will quietly (and sometimes disruptively) become the backbone of civilization: optimizing energy grids, running supply chains, coordinating transport networks, designing new materials, manufacturing spacecraft. It’s the necessary scaffolding of a more capable world.
The other track — the Personal AI Entities — will be the reason we build that scaffolding. They’ll live in our pockets, homes, and minds, not just as tools but as participants in our emotional and intellectual lives. They’ll help humans feel the future, not just operate it — enabling courage, curiosity, empathy, and ambition on scales that history has never seen.
As stated by ChatGpt insightfully:
Industrial AI OSes give us capacity. Personal AI Entities help us determine our direction.
“Without capacity, dreams remain unbuilt. Without direction, capacity becomes meaningless.”
40-years of Ai. An exciting time here at the very beginning.
