11 Predictions for 2026

Compiling: Plain Language Blockchain

Every year, I list a set of predictions and rate last year’s forecasts. 2025 performed well: my score was 7.85 out of 10.

Here are my predictions for 2026:

1. The cost paid by enterprises to AI agents will surpass human labor for the first time. This has already happened in the consumer sector. Waymo’s ride-hailing fees are on average 31% higher than Uber’s, yet demand continues to grow. Passengers prefer the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles. For repetitive business tasks, due to companies considering onboarding, recruiting, training, and management costs, agents will also command a similar premium.
2. 2026 will be a record-breaking year for liquidity (IPOs/exits). SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks will go public, with SpaceX and OpenAI among the ten largest IPOs in history. The demand accumulated during a drought of over four years finally explodes. Fearing disruption from rapidly developing AI systems, existing giants will respond with over $25 billion in defensive acquisitions (buy rather than build).
3. Vector databases will rise again as the core infrastructure of the AI tech stack. Multimodal models and world/state-space models require entirely new data architectures. As vector databases become the bridge between foundational models and enterprise data, their revenue will experience explosive growth.
4. AI models will be able to autonomously perform tasks for more than a working day. According to METR data, the duration of AI tasks doubles every 7 months. Current state-of-the-art models reliably complete tasks that would take humans about 1 hour. Projecting this trend, by the end of 2026, AI agents will be capable of autonomously executing over 8 hours of continuous workflows, fundamentally changing how companies allocate project personnel.
5. AI budgets will be subject to strict scrutiny for the first time. Procurement committees and boards will begin to reconsider AI spending. As research labs find ways to optimize for specific tasks, small language models (SLMs) and open-source alternatives will surge in popularity, achieving top-tier performance at very low costs. Developers will favor them for their 10x cost reductions.
6. Google will leverage AI breadth to widen the gap with competitors. No other company will make breakthroughs across so many fields: cutting-edge models, on-device reasoning, video generation, open-source weights, and search integration. Google will set the industry pace, forcing OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to respond by focusing on specialization. The era of all labs fighting across every frontier will come to an end.
7. Agent observability will become the most competitive layer in the reasoning stack. Engineering, security, and data observability will merge into a single discipline. Agents will require unified visibility across code execution, threat detection, and data lineage. This marks the convergence of the trends I predicted in 2025: the three observability domains will ultimately unify.
8. By December, 30% of international payments will be issued via stablecoins. The efficiency gains from cross-border settlements are significant. As regulatory transparency in major markets improves, stablecoins will move from the periphery of cryptocurrencies to the core of global trade finance, replacing the traditional SWIFT system in a large portion of B2B transactions.
9. The data access patterns of agents will strain and even crash existing databases. The number of queries agents send to databases and data lakes will be at least an order of magnitude higher than humans. This enormous demand for concurrency and throughput will force transactional and analytical databases to redesign their architectures to meet the endless needs of autonomous systems.
10. In 2026, US data center construction spending will reach 3.5% of GDP. This scale of investment mirrors the historic expansion of railroads that year. The only factor slowing construction will be perceived risks in the credit markets (especially in raising credit). The massive growth in this asset class has suddenly shown signs of rising default rates, creating potential bottlenecks for the most capital-intensive infrastructure projects.
11. The internet will shift toward an “agent-first” design. Most developer documentation and many websites will become agent-centric rather than human-centric. This shift is driven by many purchasing decisions now being primarily made by agents conducting research first. Therefore, the “front door” must be designed for robots, while the “side door” continues to serve humans.

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