If you Google “through of disillusionment” you’ll find a bunch of premature articles from 2024 and 2025 talking about how AI is in the low point of the current hype cycle.

Summer of 2026 will go down as the real trough, and January 2026 will be remembered as the peak. The tech didn’t get good enough until late 2025, and it took the holiday downtime for people to realize how powerful it had become.

Leaders spent Q1 trying to mandate agentic workflows, and by Q3 they realized that they blew through the year’s budget with little to show.

Come September, when everyone’s back from Summer, there’s a lot of sobering up to be done. Startups that raised on insane valuations will have to face the economic realities of their business. Established players will shift focus from agents back into their core line of business.

By early 2027, the industry will restructure around these realities, and sanity will return.