Scottish Mortgage 2026 Forum: The Golden Age of Change
Claire Shaw – Portfolio Director
- A Golden Age of Change: why AI marks a new paradigm shift and reshapes long-term growth investing
- From digital assistants to autonomous trucks: where value is emerging and where it scales next
- China, platforms and patience: seeking outlier returns more broadly, amid global technological change
As with any investment, your capital is at risk.
At Scottish Mortgage’s early 2026 forum for professional investors, managers Tom Slater and Lawrence Burns argued we are entering a “Golden Age of Change” – a period of intense innovation that could “dwarf the advances we have seen over the past two decades”.
AI Creates an Intelligence Paradigm
Slater borrowed NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s surfing metaphor: companies can’t ride a wave by resisting; they must “feel where it’s going and go with it.”
The work starts early – “begin paddling long before the AI wave hits” – and then requires full commitment when momentum arrives.
The “most dangerous point of surfing is the drop”, when you transition from paddling to standing. That means, once companies have product-market fit, dropping what they were doing from a legacy perspective and going all in to deliver that product and meet demand.
He said a conversation with Spotify co CEO Alex Nordström captured the shift in mindset: what firms need now is “anticipation”. Slater agreed that the last decade rewarded extrapolation, but “today, we’re back to this point of needing to anticipate.”
He framed intelligence as the next paradigm shift, replacing the internet-mobile-cloud era, which created the “giant network companies that dominate the global economy today”.
“For us, as long-term growth investors, what’s exciting about this is that when you get these shifts, it gives rise to new large companies, new growth opportunities, because the paradigm determines where value accrues within the ecosystem.”
So far, he said, “most of the value has amassed at the silicon chip layer, and mostly at NVIDIA.” That is likely to persist while compute remains scarce, “we still will need a lot more silicon.”
Slater pointed to personal assistant chatbots and coding assistants as the two applications that have emerged so far. “OpenAI’s ChatGPT is in the top five most visited websites in the world… and that’s why OpenAI is worth $500bn today.”
Coding, he said, is “the beating heart of the modern economy” but also “the biggest constraint to growth” given the shortage of engineers. But he said that Scottish Mortgage holding Anthropic has passed the drop and is already surfing as one of the fastest-growing technology companies of all time, compounding its revenues at about 10 times per annum.
As AI moves from software into “embodied intelligence”, Slater expects “even more profound winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most economics,” because only a small number of firms can fund the race.
He predicted the path would look gradual until it suddenly isn’t, shifting from the progress seen in the internet-mobile-cloud paradigm to sudden equivalence in the intelligence paradigm, where there will be a “dramatic swing”.
Within embodied intelligence – where AI is integrated into physical systems, enabling interaction with the physical world – autonomous trucking is nearing that threshold.
Progress to here has been slow as safety is non-negotiable: “If you are going to take a 36-ton juggernaut travelling at 60 miles an hour and take the driver out of it and replace him with a computer, you have to be sure that that thing is going to be safe.” But things are changing, and Slater highlighted how holding Aurora has successfully positioned itself to benefit as autonomy scales.
In logistics, he made the same point about speed and consumer behaviour. With Zipline, “if you change that hour [delivery window] into 15 minutes, then you change consumer behaviour” – and “there aren’t enough humans to do that, so this [55 billion deliveries a year] will be a drone market.”
China, Platforms and Outlier Returns
Burns began with his recent trip to China. Sentiment has shifted sharply, he said, but “far less has changed on the ground.” China “remains a place that produces visionary entrepreneurs” and where technologies can be rolled out “at extraordinary speed and scale”.
In batteries, he noted that “85 per cent of global battery cell production is in China,” and that Scottish Mortgage holds CATL, which “accounts for roughly 40 per cent of the global market share.” He sees a “multi-decade opportunity” as the platform expands beyond EVs, including into grid storage.
In electric vehicles, he described BYD as “the clear global leader accounting for roughly one in four electric vehicles that are sold worldwide.” After meeting BYD’s founder, Burns relayed a message that went beyond cost: “it’s not just that we’re producing cheap cars profitability, but we’re producing much better cars.”
He was candid on the risks: “Geopolitical risk is real. Domestic regulatory risk is real.” Reflecting that, he said Chinese exposure has fallen from about 24 per cent at the end of 2020 to around 12.5 per cent currently. Even so, he argued there are still “opportunities for a small number of exceptional companies in China.”
In those cases, “tech and growth remain very much discounted and on sale.” He also noted the market’s pricing of geopolitical risk can be uneven: if there were a genuine economic schism, companies with deep operational and revenue links to China would likely be affected far more than current valuations imply.
And, he added, “understanding China has never been more important than it is today,” alongside Silicon Valley, in tracking how technology is evolving.
Burns then turned to platform businesses. Most firms operate as “a linear value chain,” he said, creating value by selling products and/or services to consumers; platforms are different. They “create value by facilitating transactions between two participants and sometimes more. They orchestrate ecosystems, set rules, provide shared infrastructure and align incentives so others can create value.”
“As platforms scale, they tend to get better.” Scale strengthens network effects, improves data and recommendations, and lets the largest platforms amortise infrastructure across millions of participants. They are also “highly adaptable”, and the biggest can deliver “second, third, or even fourth acts”.
Owning them, Burns concluded, requires a particular mindset: “You need imagination. A willingness to analyse not just what does exist, but what could exist. And you also need patience… the financial profiles can look very unappealing and then suddenly inflect and become very positive when they turn that monetisation on.”
Q&A and Closing Note
In Q&A, Burns reiterated that the portfolio is built bottom-up, while trying to avoid “blind spots” in future-relevant regions.
Slater pointed to Shopify’s adaptability as commerce channels evolve, and he updated on SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink, considering the opportunity ahead and the acquisition of EchoStar’s spectrum licences for direct-to-device connectivity. He added on SpaceX, “I think what's really important … is that you make an investment decision which is based on the underlying fundamental performance of the company and then [think] about how that feeds into the broader construction of the portfolio.”
Burns closed with a reminder of the portfolio’s breadth: “Scottish Mortgage is not, and I don’t think it ever will be, a bet on one country, one trend, or one new technology. It’s an investment in global change and global progress in its many forms.”
About the author - Claire Shaw
Portfolio Director
Claire Shaw is a portfolio director and plays a prominent role in servicing Scottish Mortgage’s UK shareholder base. Before joining in 2019, she spent over a decade as a fund manager with a focus on managing European equity portfolios for a global client base. With a background in analysing companies and communicating investment ideas, Claire is also responsible for creating engaging content that makes the Scottish Mortgage portfolio accessible to all its shareholders. Beyond that, she works closely with the managers, meeting with portfolio companies and conducting in-depth portfolio discussions with shareholders.
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