2026 Predictions: A Year of Human and Machine Revolution
Looking back on my 2025 predictions made me reflect on all that we’ve seen in the tech landscape in 2025: the massive silicon shakeup capped by last week’s Groq news, the rise of agentic computing demonstrated by actual practitioner advancement (see our interview with Walmart).
Reflecting also reminded me of what we haven’t seen yet: an edge explosion (more on this later), or a major AI corporate scandal.
As we turn the page look forward through 2026, my focus is on changes related to infrastructure and AI advancement and the human response to the changing relationships between machines and society. While I still think we are in early innings of the AI era, we are getting to the point of this arc where long term challenges are taking form, and we are starting to see how society is taking in this disruptive change, or rallying against it.
Without further ado, I offer my predictions for 2026:
1) We will see massive adoption of AI inference across the compute continuum from cloud to edge, and a new era of distributed autonomous computing will take hold.
Inference will be delivered based on economic efficiency, driving smaller model jobs to the edge at the point of data origin where efficiency of workload delivery will be the primary focus. For more complex inference, we will see highly tuned inference engines in the cloud deliver performance optimized results.
All will be delivered with bespoke silicon designed for the job at hand, allowing for silicon heterogeneity to continue to thrive in infrastructure deployments. This will be delivered by enterprise and their value chain partners with AI investment starting its slow climb of economic return.
2) AI oversight of machines will become critical in an agentic era.
We all saw the headlines during the fall of 2025: the massive outages at AWS and Microsoft, and how these outages rocked business. The truth is, the foundations of cloud architectures were built for a different generation of computing, and new forms of compute including agentic models with complex and lengthy workflow, are requiring some advancement of stack development that goes to the foundations of system state management.
True composable infrastructure – across compute, storage and network – will be required to provide agent control of workflow completion, and this means looking at the telemetry and management foundations of platforms to give better data to management suites. If you’re thinking… Allyson, we did this a decade ago… think again.
3) The conversations on data privacy and AI control will heat up, led by EU efforts to provide some thought to how AI models access data, how data is protected in this process, and who owns any semblance of IP when IP forms the foundation of model wisdom.
While I do believe the genie is somewhat out of the bottle on this topic already… a public backlash on what is human creation will drive conversations and action well beyond Silicon Valley. This will be driven, I think, by an AI advancement that will produce a fear backlash to the technology that we haven’t seen yet.
4) Brain drain will enter center stage in scientific computing circles as government contracts favor vector-based computing investment advancing AI over more traditional forms of compute needed for many areas of scientific modeling and research.
Think of things like airflow predictions to land planes or advanced climate modeling – studies that require calculation precision. With government grants drying up in some parts of the world (like the US) for this computing, scientists are seeking new shores to advance their research, leaving us with existential questions about the value of science in society.
5) We will see a massive advancement in quantum.
Maybe this last prediction is what I want to see, but with the gathering momentum of quantum compute, I believe we are in for a disruptive moment in creation of sustainable quantum workload delivery. With it, the potential to disrupt human advancement on knowledge well beyond the boundaries of traditional computing.
Buckle up. This year promises an exciting landscape for compute and human advancement. This article wraps the TechArena predictions series, and if you didn't check out the predictions in total, revisit the series here. While not all of these predictions are likely to come true, you can trust TechArena’s voices of innovation to bring you center stage for those that do while also shining a light on those innovations guaranteed to take us by surprise.
Looking back on my 2025 predictions made me reflect on all that we’ve seen in the tech landscape in 2025: the massive silicon shakeup capped by last week’s Groq news, the rise of agentic computing demonstrated by actual practitioner advancement (see our interview with Walmart).
Reflecting also reminded me of what we haven’t seen yet: an edge explosion (more on this later), or a major AI corporate scandal.
As we turn the page look forward through 2026, my focus is on changes related to infrastructure and AI advancement and the human response to the changing relationships between machines and society. While I still think we are in early innings of the AI era, we are getting to the point of this arc where long term challenges are taking form, and we are starting to see how society is taking in this disruptive change, or rallying against it.
Without further ado, I offer my predictions for 2026:
1) We will see massive adoption of AI inference across the compute continuum from cloud to edge, and a new era of distributed autonomous computing will take hold.
Inference will be delivered based on economic efficiency, driving smaller model jobs to the edge at the point of data origin where efficiency of workload delivery will be the primary focus. For more complex inference, we will see highly tuned inference engines in the cloud deliver performance optimized results.
All will be delivered with bespoke silicon designed for the job at hand, allowing for silicon heterogeneity to continue to thrive in infrastructure deployments. This will be delivered by enterprise and their value chain partners with AI investment starting its slow climb of economic return.
2) AI oversight of machines will become critical in an agentic era.
We all saw the headlines during the fall of 2025: the massive outages at AWS and Microsoft, and how these outages rocked business. The truth is, the foundations of cloud architectures were built for a different generation of computing, and new forms of compute including agentic models with complex and lengthy workflow, are requiring some advancement of stack development that goes to the foundations of system state management.
True composable infrastructure – across compute, storage and network – will be required to provide agent control of workflow completion, and this means looking at the telemetry and management foundations of platforms to give better data to management suites. If you’re thinking… Allyson, we did this a decade ago… think again.
3) The conversations on data privacy and AI control will heat up, led by EU efforts to provide some thought to how AI models access data, how data is protected in this process, and who owns any semblance of IP when IP forms the foundation of model wisdom.
While I do believe the genie is somewhat out of the bottle on this topic already… a public backlash on what is human creation will drive conversations and action well beyond Silicon Valley. This will be driven, I think, by an AI advancement that will produce a fear backlash to the technology that we haven’t seen yet.
4) Brain drain will enter center stage in scientific computing circles as government contracts favor vector-based computing investment advancing AI over more traditional forms of compute needed for many areas of scientific modeling and research.
Think of things like airflow predictions to land planes or advanced climate modeling – studies that require calculation precision. With government grants drying up in some parts of the world (like the US) for this computing, scientists are seeking new shores to advance their research, leaving us with existential questions about the value of science in society.
5) We will see a massive advancement in quantum.
Maybe this last prediction is what I want to see, but with the gathering momentum of quantum compute, I believe we are in for a disruptive moment in creation of sustainable quantum workload delivery. With it, the potential to disrupt human advancement on knowledge well beyond the boundaries of traditional computing.
Buckle up. This year promises an exciting landscape for compute and human advancement. This article wraps the TechArena predictions series, and if you didn't check out the predictions in total, revisit the series here. While not all of these predictions are likely to come true, you can trust TechArena’s voices of innovation to bring you center stage for those that do while also shining a light on those innovations guaranteed to take us by surprise.
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