“WITH DECISIVE AGENTS, we set out to look beyond the headlines, to explore the technologies quietly reshaping the world from the inside out. In this issue, we turn to one of the most complex and consequential fields of all: electronics. What happens when AI stops being a tool and becomes a true collaborator? One that can reason, design, and solve problems that have resisted human effort for decades.

We are already living through a remarkable inflection point. At the close of 2025, we reached AGI, with AI matching the cognitive capabilities of the top 25 per cent of humans across the vast majority of cognitive jobs. A year ago, this seemed like science fiction. It is not. AGI is here; it will profoundly affect everything, and importantly, it has the potential to create untold value for the world.

At InstaDeep, we have always done the hard thing. This is not stubbornness, it is a deliberate philosophy. Given InstaDeep’s exceptional innovation capabilities, we tackle problems others would shy away from. And it is this that has driven the work behind DeepPCB, our AI agent for PCB design.

For decades, the placement and routing of printed circuit boards has stood as one of AI’s grand unsolved challenges. It is a combinatorial problem so complex that the number of potential solutions far exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe. Today, we are working on solving it. And in doing so, we are putting design capabilities that were once the preserve of large hardware companies into the hands of engineers, startups, and hobbyists alike.

What makes this possible is a collaboration we are immensely proud of. Elite AI researchers, some of whom are among the top 0.3 per cent globally in their field, are working hand-in-hand with seasoned hardware engineers. And what has emerged from that union of combinatorial optimisation and hardware expertise is something the industry had not seen before.

In these pages, you will meet the people behind that work and many others at the frontier of AI-driven electronics. Technology that means someone in a small town in the middle of nowhere should be able to build a world-competitive digital company. This was once unthinkable. It is now becoming a reality.”