AI Is Coming For These 3 Industries In 2026 (a16z Big Ideas)

Welcome to part two of our 2026 Big Ideas. Ryan Macintosh explores the rise of what he calls the electro-industrial stack, a new foundation for how we build and power America's industrial future. Angela Strange identifies a critical turning point in financial services and insurance where decades old systems are finally ready for reinvention.

And Sarah Wang reveals how a dynamic agent layer is emerging to overtake traditional systems of record fundamentally changing how enterprise software operates. These aren't just forecasts. their firsthand perspectives from investors driving change across American dynamism, financial services, and enterprise technology.

My name is Ryan McIntosh. I'm an investing partner on the American Dynamism team. My big idea for 2026 is that the electro-industrial stack will move the world.

The next industrial evolution won't just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them. This is the rise of the electroindustrial stack. Combined tech that powers electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and all of modern manufacturing.

I I think there are common uh tropes people report on. People talk about China's so far ahead uh we can't catch up. And actually, you know, you go back a couple years ago and people were saying, you know, China's very far behind and America's incredibly fast.

So, we've seen sort of like a whiplash and now it's the opposite. I think the reality is that uh you know, the technology that China has, America can do. Uh we're very good at uh engineering.

We're very good at doing specific things. And in fact even like the you know recent stuff around rare earth for example rare earth separation and processing we know how to do this we can do this we can do it incredibly fast. The real challenge is building the ecosystem to do this industrially at scale and doing it at a low cost.