In January of 2023, I wrote that ChatGPT was this era’s Netscape.
At the time, that was not a throwaway analogy or an attempt to ride the hype cycle. It was pattern recognition. We had seen this movie before. When Netscape arrived in the mid-1990s, it did not invent the internet. The protocols were already there. The infrastructure existed. What Netscape did was make the Internet usable. It made it visible. It forced the world to pay attention.
ChatGPT did the same thing for AI.
If you go back and read that piece, “Why ChatGPT Is the Era’s Netscape,” you will see the thesis clearly laid out.
The argument was simple. ChatGPT was the access layer. It was the browser moment for artificial intelligence. It took something that had been largely confined to research labs, APIs, and developer communities, and put it directly into the hands of the public. Suddenly, everyone could see it. More importantly, everyone could use it.
But here is what has become clear since that post. The Netscape Moment was not the climax.
It was the starting point.
2022: The Public Awakening
When ChatGPT entered mainstream consciousness, AI crossed a psychological threshold. It stopped being theoretical. It stopped being future tense. It became something you could open in a browser and interact with in real time. Technically, those early models were still fragile. They hallucinated. They made arithmetic mistakes. They delivered confident answers even when they were wrong. In hindsight, they were incomplete.
But that did not matter.
Early browsers crashed. Pages rendered inconsistently. Security was questionable. Yet none of that stopped the web from igniting. What mattered was accessibility. ChatGPT gave the world a usable interface to AI. It triggered curiosity, experimentation, fear, excitement, and ultimately, investment.
That is exactly what Netscape did for the web.
2023: From Novelty to Credibility
Within months, the narrative began to shift. Frontier models were passing professional exams, including the bar. They were scoring competitively on standardized tests designed for trained professionals.
That was more than a headline. It marked a perception change. AI was no longer just clever autocomplete. It was no longer just a drafting assistant. It began to look like professional infrastructure.
This was the equivalent of the moment businesses realized the browser was not just for publishing information. It was for commerce. It was for transactions. It was for running a business.
The seriousness increased. Boards began asking about AI strategy. Operators began testing workflow integration. Investors accelerated funding into the space.
The experimentation phase was giving way to the integration phase.
2024: The Build Phase
By 2024, the acceleration became tangible.
Leading models were no longer just answering questions. They were writing working software. They were debugging code. They were explaining graduate-level science in ways that held up under scrutiny.
Open and proprietary models alike were improving at a pace that felt compressed compared to prior technology cycles. Engineers began quietly changing their workflows. The question shifted from “Should I use AI?” to “How much of this can I hand off?”
This is where the analogy evolves.
If 2022 was the browser release, 2024 was the web application phase. We were no longer browsing static information. We were building systems.
And the systems were beginning to build with us.
Late 2024 to 2025: The Agent Era
Then came the reasoning models and long-horizon agents.
Instead of generating a single response, models began allocating more compute at inference time. They could reason step by step. They could iterate internally. They could improve their answers by thinking longer.
At the same time, coding agents emerged that could plan, execute, self-correct, and persist across tasks. They were not operating for seconds. They were operating for hours.
By late 2025, estimates suggested that a significant percentage of new code in many environments was AI-generated. Engineers increasingly became orchestrators and system designers. The AI handled implementation, refactoring, testing, and sometimes deployment.
That is not a feature enhancement. That is workflow rearchitecture.
Just as broadband enabled richer applications and cloud computing shifted infrastructure, AI agents began shifting cognitive labor.
The role of the human did not disappear. It evolved.
2026: Compression of Time
Now, as we move deeper into 2026, something else is becoming evident.
The pace itself is the story.
What took the web a decade to reorganize is taking AI only a few years. Models are capable of building complex applications over extended cycles. Some are even reported to assist with debugging or refining components in their own development environments.
Pre-2025 AI already feels dated. That compression is unprecedented.
Telecom took years to absorb VoIP. Years to adapt to the cloud. Years to internalize collaboration platforms and UCaaS. Each shift was meaningful. Each required organizational adaptation.
AI is moving at a velocity that does not allow that kind of luxury.
The Real Continuity
When I wrote that ChatGPT was the era’s Netscape, the focus was on awareness and access. That thesis still stands.
But we are now beyond awareness. We are in an era of structural change.
Netscape did not ultimately win the browser wars. But it triggered the platform war. It forced Microsoft to react. It catalyzed investment. It created an ecosystem.
ChatGPT may or may not be the final dominant AI interface. That is beside the point.
It made AI inevitable.
It forced every industry, including telecom, retail, enterprise software, and media, to confront the same question: what does our workflow look like in an AI-native world?
That is the platform reset.
The Takeaway
The Netscape Moment was about visibility. What we are living through now is about velocity.
The browser once rendered pages. Today, the interface writes code, drafts contracts, analyzes data, and iterates designs. And the speed of that evolution is unlike anything we have seen in prior technology cycles.
If 2023 was the awakening, 2024 and beyond represent reorganization.
The analogy still holds.
But the scale and compression may be even bigger than we first imagined.