AI Trends

Accountability takes the lead

Companies of all sizes will pay far more attention to regulations and stricter governance. AI adoption is moving incredibly fast, and we need to scale it responsibly, with real governance, not just theoretical frameworks or soft guidelines, but enforceable rules and operational standards.

This means not only ensuring data privacy, but also using AI responsibly and transparently, especially with the rise of synthetic media and the latest developments from models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, etc. It also means designing and applying AI in ways that are inclusive, fair, accountable, and respectful of copyrights, and keeping a human-in-the-loop to judge creativity and evaluate AI outputs.

Expect global and regional regulatory frameworks to tighten, including mandatory AI risk assessments. AI adoption will continue to accelerate, but the pressure to do so responsibly will be higher than ever.

Commerce becomes conversational

Everything is shifting toward personalised, conversational interactions with chatbots, for insights, information, and now even purchasing. Developments are moving rapidly in that direction. With Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which powers ChatGPT Instant Checkout, the ecosystem is evolving fast. However, these capabilities are still limited to specific regions, mainly the U.S., and are not yet available worldwide.

Instant Checkout raises real concerns: more exposure of personal and payment data, unclear responsibility if a purchase goes wrong, and questions around privacy and control. With global rollout still uncertain and regulations varying by region, many open issues remain.

Will we all be buying through ChatGPT by 2026? Possibly, but only if trust, security, and regulation catch up. And businesses that haven’t considered their AI visibility yet need to start building a strategy now to ensure they can be found and stay competitive in this new landscape.

AI investments stay strong and strategic

Despite talk of an AI bubble, investment will stay strong at a massive scale from Nvidia, Meta, OpenAI and others. Infrastructure build-out, especially data centres and compute, will continue at record speed, with governments and private capital all competing for dominance. 2026 will intensify the AI platform battles as companies fight for model performance, speed, cost efficiency, agent ecosystems and enterprise integrations.

Across industries, investment in AI is rising quickly to improve productivity and performance. According to Deloitte’s 2025 survey, 85% of organisations increased their AI investment in the past 12 months, and 91% plan to increase it again this year. But this also adds pressure on measurement and ROI, one of the biggest challenges today. Measuring AI impact is not straightforward, and success depends on clear workflows, strong integration, and responsible adoption. Teams need patience, experimentation, and alignment with business strategy to see meaningful results.

The landscape will remain competitive, aggressive, and expensive, and this level of competition will continue to push innovation further.

Autonomous agents: progress, but complexity remains

While 2024–25 introduced a wave of agentic systems, 2026 will bring even more hype and conversation around AI agents. Everyone is keen to adopt them, but true autonomy is still complex. Simple agents that retrieve information from grounding data and answer questions work well, but building agents that can plan, reason, and execute tasks end-to-end remains difficult and requires significant technical setup.

Democratising AI agents will still be tricky next year. To become routine, daily tools, they need to be far more accessible to businesses without deep technical expertise.

We will continue to see progress, with personal AI assistants capable of executing multi-step tasks and workplace agents supporting productivity across functions.

AI agents won’t transform everything overnight, but over time they will fundamentally change how work gets done.

The browser becomes intelligent

AI-native browsers will combine everything in one place: AI chatbots, browsing, task understanding, and full task execution through AI agents. While 2025 has been a year of early developments and rapid evolution, 2026 will be the year these browsers consolidate and should gain real user share. We’ll see this through platforms like ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet, and upgrades across existing browsers such as Microsoft Edge’s new Copilot Mode and Google Chrome integrating Gemini directly into the browser.

AI-native browsers will enable:

• Conversational-first interfaces
• AI that can browse and navigate the web on your behalf
• Real-time summarisation and comparison across pages
• Integrated multi-agent experiences directly in the browser

This will mark the next stage of the internet, where browsing becomes conversational, proactive, and fully AI-driven. For businesses, this shift makes it increasingly important that content is transparent, structured, and machine-readable, so AI systems can accurately understand, summarise and include it within responses.