Will 2026 be the year AI gets boring? – Sysero
Sysero finally got into AI at the start of 2025 after a number of clients and prospects asked about our AI strategy so we decided we should investigate. Admittedly this was a little late to the party considering law firms have been buying AI-type systems since the early 2000’s. The running joke being that for many years I have been saying that Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron and it’s all just clever programming. AI’s roots lie in a theory developed by a Presbyterian minister from Tunbridge Wells in the 1750’s, just 30 miles from my home, so maybe I should have seen it coming. However, it wasn’t until Google released a research paper in 2017 that in turn lead to ChatGPT coming out of stealth in November 2023 when things really got interesting, so technically I was only a year o the start point of the current cycle of AI.
Over 2025 I have learnt that AI is really good at 2 things, programming and summarising. The former lead me to redesign the user interface of Sysero, primarily to increase the performance of our forms. It also helped me redesign our document indexing system to make it AI friendly and it made me realise I needed an AI engineer if we were going to make the most of this new technology.
The need for my company along with many of our clients to employ new sta as AI specialists, appears to be counter to the whole AI will kill jobs rhetoric as turns out AI specialists are still rare and expensive. AI is clearly going to change a lot of jobs but I remember reading a quote back in the 80’s that the total sum of jobs lost and jobs created from IT has been a nil sum gain and I expect the same will happen with AI.
Sysero now has its first new Gen Z employee in more than 5 years as you don’t get many 40-year-old AI specialists yet. Our young pup talks excitedly about models, vector databases and Agentic AI. We took him on to work with a client who needs to check the data in 10,000’s of scanned documents, another good use of AI, but has since got involved in conflict checking projects, adverse media scanning and yesterday told me he had a secret project that was going to blow me way but he would only show me when it was ready.
All of this is a long way away from the idea of an AI chatbot that you communicate any ideas to and it creates the perfect response. We’ve all heard stories of lawyers in hot water because of AI inventing cases as legal citations and the famous MIT study that says that 95% of all AI projects are failing. But on a more mundane level, try asking a chatbot to create a Share Purchase Agreement and see what you end up with.
Before the latest AI wave, Sysero were in the legal software business, an industry not known for embracing new technologies. Post AI we are “LawTech” and sit alongside software firms that are 3 years old and valuations in the $billions. So will the AI bubble burst or are millions of us going to be out of work, replaced by soleless robots?
Whilst I won’t try and directly answer my self-imposed question, I do think AI will become another tool for developers to use. It will increase the quality of software whilst not necessarily reducing the numbers of people it takes to create, market, sell, implement and support it. It will allow us to do things that were almost impossible before using the concept of fuzzy matching which we have been able to do for years but not at the current scale and accuracy. Even auto summarisation has been around since Microsoft release Word in the early 1990s, but now it’s available to anyone, anywhere and for anything.
My prediction for 2026 is AI will become BAU. The hype will fade away rather than go bang which will lead company’s selling a pure AI play looking a little vulnerable and those using it to improve the mundane and boring tasks will be the winners.
