Predictions for 2026
I spent yesterday at Wales Tech Week, and as the final panel drew to a close, something struck me. I heard a lot of reasonably vague proclamations about 2030, estimates on how far away AGI and Superintelligence are (somewhere between two and fifteen years, it seems), and general hand-waving about the far off changes we’re going to see.
As the call for questions went out, I raised my hand and asked, “What are your expectations for 2026?”. Some interesting responses came back, but it seems to me that we’re so focused on what’s over the horizon that we’re missing what’s in front of our faces.
I spent the rest of the evening mulling this question over, and while the future is incredibly uncertain, the near term is easier to anticipate.
Time will tell how accurate my crystal ball is, but here are some things I think we’ll see over the coming 12 months.
Robots!
Pre-orders are now open for robots in the home from Figure AI and 1x, and while the early models are limited and clock in at around $20,000, delivery is set to begin in 2026 and they’ll only improve with time. The result will be people overcoming their aversion to robots, and we’ll begin to see this in the workplace too. From shop assistants to house cleaners and a whole host of other roles, robots will become part of our daily lives. Add this to the rise of the fully automated “dark factories” in China, and we’re beginning to see the end of most manual labour.
Agents as colleagues, not just assistants
In a similar vein, agentic AI has made incredible leaps in 2025, and this will continue next year. It’s not about chatbots answering FAQs, but autonomous systems that not only respond but act, make decisions and co-ordinate with each other. In truth, this is less prediction and more recognition of where we already are. In the last 90 days, SaaStr has sold more than $1m of event tickets and sponsorship through their inbound enquiry agent, and 20% of their overall sales are now coming from AI SDRs. IDC predicts that 45% of organisations will orchestrate agents at scale across multiple business functions in 2026, and so people will increasingly manage these agents rather than using software to perform tasks themselves.
This isn’t a button-press, though - your teams will need to become skilled at overseeing, guiding and collaborating with non-human “colleagues”. How ready your people are for this shift will go a long way to determining success in 2026.
The big bubble burst?
Fundraising has been slowing down for a while now, and all the signs are (quietly) beginning to point at more rigour coming. Analysts at both the Bank of England and the IMF have whispered that 2026 may be when the bubble bursts. Too many AI startups have been funded to work on trivial things, promising much and failing to deliver. Valuations are inflated, especially considering the unpredictability of the AI models many businesses are built on. With OpenAI tapping up the US Government to underwrite their IPO, it’s not just startups - the promise of the AI business model and its inherent profitability isn’t being realised consistently in the real world. If the bubble bursts, as it inevitably will, we’ll see that the rapid growth of the AI sector has been hiding a large chunk of the real impact of job displacement. It could be a very rough year from an unemployment point of view.
Fall of a giant
AI is an arms race, and pace is everything. The result? In 2026, there’s a very good chance that we’ll see at least one of the AI giants fall under the shadow of a major scandal based on an ethics or privacy failure. This could be a robot error (ChatGPT has already been found guilty of encouraging suicidal ideation, which should have created much more public outcry than it has), a biased decision by a runaway agent or a data breach with major public consequences. When this happens, the big question will be, “Who’s responsible?”
Or it might just be that investors begin to demand profitability on the back of the many billions they’ve invested. Either way, the big names are playing their game of global domination a little too fast and loose - someone will trip up eventually. Given how connected everything is, and how many businesses are putting wrappers around these platforms, this could have major consequences for the ecosystem around the unlucky victim.
In short, 2025 has been a rollercoaster. 2026 could be when all hell breaks loose.
What have I missed? Send your predictions to tom@versapia.ai - I’d love to hear them!
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