The AI bubble may pop. People’s use of AI for information won’t.

When it comes to AI, there is a growing murmur that we are in bubble territory and might be headed for a burst, perhaps as early as next year. A key reason commonly cited is the large chasm between AI computing infrastructure spending and AI revenue, as well as the lack of clear business models for some companies. If a bubble bursts — and this is far from a given — it’s not going to be pretty, neither for investors, states or some of the companies driving the developments of recent years. Expect some market consolidation, lots of handwringing, and some of the most annoying people online saying, “See, told you so!”

But this is where we hit a little snag, especially for the news. Even if we see such a market correction, the technology will not magically disappear, nor will many of the features and products built with it, or the fact that people are increasingly embracing these to make sense of the world around them.

First, not all AI companies providing direct consumer AI features are the same. OpenAI might struggle to make revenue to pay for its investments (and the debts of its partners) if the going gets tough. Getting to the needed 100s of millions of paying subscribers isn’t easy; the ad market is already fairly saturated, and enterprise integration is equally competitive. The headwinds are strong. But take Google for contrast. It has vast financial resources and leads in search. Its growing cloud business compensates for risks on the advertising front. It trains models on its own chips and has its own world-class research arm developing models leading the pack. As Melissa Heikkilä succinctly writes in the FT, “Google can combine its dominant positions in search, cloud infrastructure and smartphones to serve new AI capabilities to billions of existing users.” What she isn’t saying: This will likely continue to be the case, even if the larger AI ship starts pitching. Even in post-bubble land, some of the companies that have upended the news and information landscape will continue to shape our digital environments.

Second, despite the sometimes barely concealed vitriol poured out by some pundits over AI as information gateways, public AI adoption and attitudes paint a different picture. People generally seem to like having access to more and more diverse information. They also like convenience, speed, and specificity. AI systems frequently give them all three, not just where chatbots are concerned but also where AI is integrated into search and other digital products. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that 43% of people expected their experience of interacting with search engines to become better thanks to AI, versus 17% who said the opposite (for social media the split was 33%/15%, for news 26%/30%…).

Third, ever more people find AI — on its own or on said platforms — useful to help them navigate their complex lives, if not always in perfect ways. Our research found rapid growth in the use of a new set of AI systems and tools bound to impact the discovery of information, with getting information now the prime use case. The AI Security Institute in the UK found the same around political information during the 2024 UK election, while Pew Research shows for the US that using AI “for learning something new” is a growing use case. Likewise, Similarweb’s 2025 report shows that use for these and related purposes is up. None of this means people blindly trust these systems (they don’t) or don’t want them properly governed, but it’s a far cry from the lamentations we see from parts of the chattering classes.

So my prediction is this: In 2026, the use of AI as an information gateway will only rise further. The news media would be unwise to hope that an AI bubble bursting will put a stopper in that trend.

Instead, it will have to contend with the fact that the competition for attention, advertising, and the money that people and organisations are willing to spend will only increase, even where those systems and features do not directly compete with news.

For the news industry, this means that the difficult task of figuring out where it can fit in this strange new world will continue. Impossible or unsolvable this isn’t. At their best, news media have much to offer that people still value beyond just quenching a thirst for knowledge now also served by AI: depth, empathy, nuance, originality, surprise, a human touch. But the task of playing to those strengths is not going to get any easier in 2026, with or without the sonic-boom-level ‘Plop’ that will accompany any AI bubble explosion.