Looking back at 2025, the AI developments we witnessed were as diverse as they were disruptive. Some will save lives, such as the model that detected lung cancer in CT scans more accurately than human doctors. Others, like Ballerina Cappucina, were fun and had their 15 minutes of fame.
Last year saw just about every facet of life and business impacted by AI, and there was a story in it for almost everyone. If you like infrastructure, we saw the rise of neoclouds like Coreweave to support AI’s insatiable hunger for compute power. If you follow open source and geopolitics, the high-performing models from non-U.S. organizations like DeepSeek put a scare into the current AI leaders and shook their stock prices. Do you like tech rivalries? Then the race between Google and OpenAI for dominance was must-read. Finally, if you favored culture stories, AI-generated commercials from Coca-Cola and the ensuing backlash were right up your alley.
One thing is for sure: AI found its way into almost every product, app, and service in 2025. As we enter the next phase of the AI Era, here are the trends we’re watching in 2026:
The Intersection of Technology, Globalism, and Politics Drives AI Sovereignty
Corporations and countries see the enormous potential of AI and don’t want to be left behind. One concern is becoming too reliant on any platform or nation for those capabilities, so being able to show independence from AI providers and their political systems will be a trend in 2026.
Adding teeth to the AI sovereignty movement is the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which mandates that you control all incident response without depending on vendor support tickets and that your critical business functions are not concentrated with a single provider that can be compelled by a government to hand over your data.
AI sovereignty could be a program where a country builds its own large LLM. Another version of AI sovereignty could be running another organization’s LLM on their own native GPUs so they can be certain that their data never leaves their borders.
Companies Move Away From SEO and Towards AI Optimization
Remember how you used to shop? Let’s say you wanted a new keyboard for your home office. You would search on “best computer keyboards” and then read through some of the enormous list of articles that rated keyboards, come to a decision, and make your purchase. Now you can search specifically on “best ergonomic keyboards for home office,” focus on the AI results and click on the recommended links to learn about products.
Backing up this trend is a CapGemini study that showed 58% of all consumers and 67% of Millennials are already using AI as their preferred method of product research. This is going to force every organization to optimize first for AI discovery.
Economic AI Dashboards Become Ubiquitous
Even though we’re still in the early innings of the AI ballgame, there is still a gap between the investment and the ROI. As more companies transition from pilot phases to enterprise implementation, real-time AI dashboards will shine a light on the areas where AI is improving productivity, creating new roles, or displacing employees. Insights from these dashboards will be used to justify future IT budgets and spend.
AI Is a Career Multiplier
When NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang said, “If you're not using AI, you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI. That we know for certain," he was sounding the alarm for all of us to upskill. The job market is being driven by the search for people who can augment their capabilities with AI “thinking partners” to handle repetitive tasks so they can focus on the work that requires creativity and complex problem-solving. While beginning the AI fluency journey around effective prompting, remember to stay sharp in areas AI can’t easily replicate, such as negotiation, judgement, and empathy.
2025 showed that the pace of AI changes is accelerating. We expect 2026’s momentum to continue to snowball.
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