HAPPY NEW YEAR 2026: SOME WORKTOP PREDICTIONS

Happy New Year! Whatever 2026 may bring, I am sure that it will mean changes for all of us in one way or another – and that includes for your best local granite worktops company!

Crystal-ball-gazing is always a risky business but I am going to stick my neck out with some predictions for the coming year.

If 2025 was the year when we shifted from occasional, experimental use of ChatGPT to finding our phones offering to write our emails for us, 2026 is going to see the new technology become fully entrenched and the new normal.

In terms of online searches we have already noticed a difference. Instead of short keyword searches – “granite worktops”, “quartz worktops near me” – and so on, we find that people are getting AI to do far more of that initial researching and even kitchen design for them. Longer questions get asked, and the AI is doing more of the donkey work, from material selection to comparing of companies. Never has it been more important to have a website which gives good, honest information in real English, backed up by great reviews on Google, Facebook, Trustpilot and Checkatrade.

In-house, AI is also making its presence felt. Don’t worry – we pride ourselves on having a real, genuinely human public face – no bots on the phone at AG! But we are just beginning to use AI for slab image recognition. With the ever-growing number of products in the market place, we value machine-driven help in classifying and pigeon-holing. This helps us to give both a truly broad and yet focussed offering to suit our customers’ needs!

As your local granite worktops installer, we want to rise to the challenge of embracing new technologies to improve our excellent customer service still further.

Even when many people are feeling the pinch, and the economy never seems to pull out of the doldrums, there are always customers with the means and discernment to choose Affordable Granite for their kitchen worktops.

This is just a fact of life, and we know that we must continue to meet the very high expectations of the luxury market. In my time at AG we have installed worktops for many famous people from every sphere of life – film stars, TV celebrities, politicians, racing drivers, footballers and leading journalists. We all hope that economic conditions will ease; as and when they do, we hope that you will look no further than Surrey’s best granite worktops firm!

The tide of colour has been coming back to British kitchens – and worktops – for years. Now we feel that flow more strongly than ever.

Black, white and grey are boring? I don’t know, but I do love the return to colour! Perhaps it is true that economically harder times tend to give people a hunger for bolder statements and eye-catching designs. For whatever reason, more and more customers are avoiding the monochromes and putting colour into their kitchens.

At the same time, and related to the hunger for colour, we have seen a desire for “real” materials and craftsmanship. Perhaps this is a reaction to the synthetic and artificial which is all around us. People may search for local granite worktops using AI – but once they have found us they want authenticity, with natural materials and traditional stonemasonry skills to the fore. And they want those materials and craft to make a unique statement in their kitchen.