7 Predictions for 2026, From Coffee-Making Humanoid Robots to AI Helping Treat Disease

At nearly 70 years old, artificial intelligence is just coming into its prime. AI was the most transformative force in technology in 2025, and is also the buzzword on the lips of many futurists, analysts, and investors for the coming year. Fittingly, 2026 will also mark 70 years since the seminal Dartmouth Summer Research Project on AI—the 1956 gathering of scientists that is widely considered to be the event during which AI research as a field was born. Generative AI in particular has moved the sector forward. Even just in the three years since OpenAI released ChatGPT, it has transformed the world of business. But given how quickly AI is moving, it can be difficult to determine what that might mean for the future. Inc. spoke to three futurists with their fingers on the pulse of technology to find out more about what we can expect 2026 to bring. The death of SEO Natural language interactions with chatbots via mobile apps and browsers will all but replace the use of conventional internet search in 2026, Future Today Strategy Group CEO Amy Webb predicts. This means that gone are the days of tabs, links, ads, affiliates and click-throughs in favor of “conversation and intent,” Webb noted in an emailed memo. “The blunt reality is that people are getting to the information they’re looking for much, much faster than having to sift through endless pages of search results,” she tells Inc. Webb says this ongoing trend will continue to be transformative for consumers, who can find what they are looking for “faster, easier, better,” thanks to generative AI. For businesses, however, it is likely to pose a problem. “It’s not entirely clear why AI systems are delivering answers to you and in what order,” Webb says. “All of these companies that have spent money on [SEO] or search engine marketing or making sure they have a strong digital brand and presence—none of that may matter going forward.” Although a handful of companies have already sprung up to provide GEO—or generative engine optimization—services, Webb wonders if they are selling “snake oil.” She says GEO businesses would have to have “significantly more data and access to information on how the models were trained than any of those companies are willing to divulge.” Real-time translation advancements The possibilities that AI presents for translation have been a focus of the field almost since the beginning. John-Clark Levin, who works as the lead researcher for legendary tech futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, says that the basic science problems have essentially been solved. Next year, he predicts, is the year that AI-powered translation services will overcome the hurdles necessary to integrate into platforms where they are needed most. One real-world example of an app where AI translation is already automatically integrated into messaging is Uber. “I was in Paris earlier this year and found so many more Uber drivers in Paris speak English than I remember,” Levin says. “Then I realized that’s because I’m saying, ‘Good day,’ and they’re reading, ‘Bonjour’ and vice versa.” A transformative use case of this technology is on freelance marketplaces like Upwork. Today, skilled coders in countries like Pakistan face significant language barriers that limit their abilities to earn the types of wages that English-speaking IT workers do. But automatic, integrated AI translation could change all that, Levin says. Furthermore, Levin expects to see even more advancements in translation for video chat applications. In 2026, he says it is likely there could be a demonstration of technology that provides real-time voice translation on video chat applications with real-time lip syncing. That means, for example, that if Levin was speaking in English to an audience in Beijing, they would hear his voice speaking Mandarin, as well as see his lips “making the shapes of Mandarin sounds at the same time in real-time.” Levin says that the impressive technology will likely be too pricey to deploy at scale in 2026. (Akool, which topped the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, offers technology similar to what Levin is talking about.) Authenticity and analog aesthetics Anatola Araba, founder of R3imagine Story Lab, anticipates the preferences of younger generations driving up demand for what she called “phygital”—a hybrid of physical and digital—experiences. (Araba says R3imagine Story Lab specializes in this type of storytelling that blends physical worlds with digital elements.) Advancements in technology like augmented, virtual and mixed reality, as well as AI, can take this to the next level. Phygital experiences can be a boon for brands looking to drive engagement, she says, while also urging companies to be culturally sensitive when crafting these types of immersive worlds. “In this age of digital overload, we see people craving this real sense of connection with others—especially younger GenZ audiences that want to be more analog,” she says. Speaking of digital overload, Araba anticipates a surge in the analog aesthetic in marketing and advertising. It’s no secret that GenZ seems to crave nostalgia, but Araba says the thirst for the analog—think penpals, ripped paper collages, vinyl, and film photography—is also a backlash to the uncanny perfection of AI. She anticipates brands jumping on board with a trend that is already taking over social media platforms like Pinterest. “In marketing or in advertising, that authentic voice is what draws us the most,” she says. “Similarly in generating brand assets, that feeling of being human or aesthetically analog, even if you use AI to do it, is definitely drawing everyone, especially the younger generation.” AI for health care Levin anticipates AI will continue to be used for drug discovery in 2026. He notes that there is already a drug for a deadly lung disease that was designed end-to-end by AI and successfully completed a phase 2A clinical trial. Although he doesn’t anticipate full Food and Drug Administration approval of that or any AI-designed drug in 2026, he predicts “notable successes in earlier stage trials” as well as tools getting “amazing results” for preclinical work. Webb also anticipates generative AI making a substantial mark on the world of biotech and health care in 2026, through capabilities like DNA and RNA editing, and protein engineering. She calls it “generative biology,” and, like Levin, says she thinks existing tools like Nvidia’s Evo 2 and DeepMind’s AlphaGenome will be used in 2026 to rapidly iterate new drugs, as well as make other discoveries. “It very likely portends new options in how we treat disease, come up with climate resistant vegetables and nuts, and create synthetic organisms,” she says “It signals that we are going to see the true birth of the bio economy.” Araba predicts that sleep optimization with the assistance of AI and connected devices like Apple Watches and Oura Rings will become a greater area of focus in 2026, building on research showing a strong link between longevity and sleep quality. She also sees an increase in the use of AI for medical note taking, but cautions that AI can potentially reinforce systemic biases in the medical field. Robots making us coffee Nothing says the future like robots, and Levin and Webb have some ideas about how the field of robotics might evolve in 2026. Levin anticipates 2026 being the year that a humanoid robot could pass Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s coffee test. The coffee test is a challenge adopted from comments Wozniak made in a 2007 interview, and is considered by some to be an alternative to the Turing Test of computer intelligence. If a robot is capable of solving the so-called coffee test, it is capable of entering an unfamiliar kitchen and making a cup of coffee, which requires not only the ability to walk and move with dexterity, but also the use of computer vision and reasoning to locate ingredients and operate machinery. Webb, however, thinks of humanoid robots as something of a distraction from how robots will really integrate into society, thanks to advancements in physical AI. Webb paints a picture of a scenario she finds “more plausible” in the next few years than a humanoid robot walking into a kitchen to make coffee. She anticipates a cooler-shaped delivery bot, something like the ones already making deliveries in some U.S. cities, unlocking a small robot door in a consumer’s home with a code, entering the kitchen, taking inventory of missing items, creating a list for a person to approve, and then restocking what’s missing. “It is very, very, very important for everybody to decouple ‘robot’ from ‘human-like form factor,’” she says, adding that hinging hopes for robotics on humanoid form factors may mean missing out on other miraculous innovations already underway. The bubble will burst—but it might not matter Are we in an AI bubble? That’s the question on everyone’s minds, including Levin’s. He says it all depends on the time horizon. Amazon, he says, would have been considered a casualty of the dot-com bubble if an investor had bought shares in 1999 and sold them in 2001. But if they held onto those same shares for 15 years, that investor would have substantially won out. “It is more likely than not that there will be a market correction in AI between here and when we finally get to artificial general intelligence, but on the other side of that, there will be enormous value created,” Levin says. That doesn’t mean there won’t be pain. Levin says what could contribute to a market correction is the peak capability of generative AI remaining far enough ahead of the reliability of various tools and platforms that they are still not widely adopted by businesses. Companies that are likely to be hit the hardest by a market correction are those that build AI wrapper apps, whereas frontier AI labs, particularly those with scale like Google and Meta, will likely be able to “spend through the correction.” In fact, he says, those companies might even welcome a correction. “If I were Google or Meta thinking about the prospects of this, they would almost like to see a correction make it harder for OpenAI and Anthropic to raise money, knowing that they could just spend through it and hopefully get an advantage on the way to AGI,” he says. Finally, a word of warning Although predictions from Araba, Levin, and Webb often look at the positive side of what AI and other technological breakthroughs can mean for society, Levin also sees several potential downsides in the coming year. AI job disruption isn’t just a future concern, he says, it’s something that’s happening now through disinvestment rather than displacement. Although AI today isn’t necessarily powerful or reliable enough to replace human workers in many instances, companies are starting to acknowledge that it one day will be. This is contributing to a trend of disinvestment in certain industries where leaders believe AI may advance more quickly than they can recoup an expensive investment. Two sectors Levin flags as rife for this type of change are call centers and Hollywood. He pointed, for example, to Tyler Perry’s 2024 decision to pause an $800 million investment in his Atlanta studio after the release of OpenAI’s video generator tool, Sora. Levin also says that 2026 could be the year when there is a major safety event involving AI. There could, he says, be a major hack or cyberattack or an incident in which “a deployed LLM is caught scheming against humans.” And as furor builds around AI, he also unfortunately predicts a risk of AI-motivated violence. “There’s enough alarm about AI that the pool of people with violent tendencies and the pool of people who are alarmed enough to lash out at someone or something in the AI space are both growing and will likely start to overlap,” he says. BY CHLOE AIELLO @CHLOBO_ILO

Walmart’s CEO Just Gave a Sobering Prediction About AI. The Time to Prepare Is Now

Doug McMillon, as the CEO of Walmart, runs the largest private employer in the United States. When he talks about the future of work, it isn’t theory—it’s the lived reality of millions of families. In fact, more than 2.1 million people around the world get a paycheck from Walmart. That’s why it matters that, speaking at a workforce conference in Bentonville, Arkansas, last week, Walmart’s CEO didn’t mince words about artificial intelligence. “It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” McMillon said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Maybe there’s a job in the world that AI won’t change, but I haven’t thought of it.” Look, a lot of people have predicted that AI will change the way we work in the future. For that matter, people are predicting that AI will change the way we do pretty much everything. It’s already changing the way we look for and process information. And it’s having a real impact on creative work, from generating ideas to editing photos. But this is different. This isn’t some kind of edge case where AI is doing something that benefits niche work. This is a sober assessment from someone who thinks about the livelihoods of millions of people, from truck drivers to warehouse workers and store managers. So far, much of the AI conversation around work has been about replacing humans with robots or computers capable of doing everything from menial tasks to coding. The pitch is that companies will save extraordinary costs as humans are replaced with AI that can do more work, faster, and cheaper. The fear among many employees is that automation will come for knowledge work the same way robots came for manufacturing. McMillon’s warning is different: AI isn’t confined to Silicon Valley jobs. It’s coming for the retail floor, the supply chain, the back office, and the call center. For example, AI can already predict what items a store will sell and when, automatically adjusting orders. That doesn’t eliminate the need for employees—but it will definitely change what their job looks like. McMillon also made another point: Walmart’s overall head count will likely stay flat, even as its revenue grows. That—if you think about it—isn’t just surprising, it’s incredibly revealing. The assumption is that AI equals fewer jobs. Instead, Walmart expects them to be different. To make that happen, the company is mapping which roles will shrink, which will grow, and which will stay stable. The strategy is to invest in reskilling so workers can move into the new jobs AI creates. “We’ve got to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side,” McMillon said. This is the part of the warning many leaders ignore. Pretending AI won’t affect your workforce is irresponsible. Pretending AI only means job cuts is short-sighted. The challenge is to figure out what your workforce looks like and what you need to do to make the transition. There are a few reasons that Walmart’s perspective matters. The obvious one is because it’s the largest private employer in the world. It is the company that, single-handedly, affects the greatest number of people when it makes a change to its workforce. That’s why AI isn’t just a technology problem; it’s a leadership problem. It’s one thing for McMillon to say “AI will change every job.” It’s another thing to commit that Walmart will still employ millions of people, even if the jobs look different. He’s saying the responsibility to guide workers through change rests squarely on leaders’ shoulders. That’s a message worth hearing far beyond the company’s Bentonville headquarters. AI is often pitched as a productivity story. That’s true, but the bigger story is about people. Technology that changes “literally every job” also changes lives, families, and communities. The ripple effect is enormous when you’re a company the size of Walmart. By the way, Walmart isn’t perfect, but its approach offers a model. Instead of framing AI as cost-cutting, it’s framing AI as a transformation challenge. That may seem like semantics, but reframing the conversation makes all the difference between a fearful workforce and a resilient one. McMillon’s prediction is sobering precisely because it’s credible. He isn’t selling software or trying to impress investors. He’s planning for how millions of his own employees will navigate the AI future. If you’re leading a business—whether that’s 20 people or 20,000—the message is pretty clear. AI is going to change every job. Your job is to be thinking hard about what that means for your company. It means thinking about how it will impact your people and coming up with a plan. It seems like almost everyone agrees that AI will change almost everything about the way we all work. The only question is whether you’ll help your people prepare or leave them to figure it out on their own. By then, it will be too late. That’s why every leader should start now. EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN

Stanford AI Experts Say the Hype Ends in 2026, But ROI Will Get Real

Questions continue to percolate about the impact of AI on the future of business and society at large, from speculations about a bubble to predictions that it will cause massive upheaval in our everyday life. But according to Stanford’s AI experts, 2026 may be the year that the hype cools and AI takes on heavier lifting. According to Deloitte’s 2026 Tech Trends report, the rate at which AI is evolving is motivating the urgency to shift from “endless pilots to real business value.” While the telephone reached 50 million users after 50 years, and the internet after seven years, AI tool ChatGPT reached twice that in two months and now has more than 800 million weekly users. Tangible Results AI next year may be characterized by rigor and ROI, according to Julian Nyarko, a law professor and Stanford HAI associate director. He spoke specifically about AI for legal services. “Firms and courts might stop asking ‘Can it write?’ and instead start asking ‘How well, on what, and at what risk?’” Nyarko said. “I expect more standardized, domain-specific evaluations to become table stakes by tying model performance to tangible legal outcomes such as accuracy, citation integrity, privilege exposure, and turnaround time.” Another sector that could bring about new, tangible results is AI for medicine, said Curtis Langlotz, professor of radiology, medicine, and biomedical data science, a senior associate vice provost for research, and an HAI senior fellow. Soon we’ll experience the moment “when AI models are trained on massive high-quality healthcare data rivaling the scale of data used to train chatbots,” said Longlotz. “These new biomedical foundation models will boost the accuracy of medical AI systems and will enable new tools that diagnose rare and uncommon diseases for which training datasets are scarce.” James Landay, HAI co-director and professor of computer science, predicts investments will continue to pour into AI data centers, and then the excitement will dry up. “[A]t some point, you can’t tie up all the money in the world on this one thing,” Landay said. “It seems like a very speculative bubble.” Landay expects there will be no AGI in 2026. Instead, “AI sovereignty will gain huge steam this year as countries try to show their independence from the AI providers and from the United States’ political system,” he said. For example, a country may “build its own large LLM” or “run someone else’s LLM on their own GPUs” to keep their data within their country. One Expert’s Warning With the estimates that AI applications will go deeper next year, it’s not all positive. Angéle Christin, associate professor of communication and Stanford HAI senior fellow, predicts an increase in transparency about what AI will be able to do. “[A]lready there are signs that AI may not accomplish everything we hope it will,” said Christin. “There are also hints that AI, in some cases, can misdirect, deskill, and harm people. And there is data showing that the current buildout of AI comes with tremendous environmental costs.” BY AVA LEVINSON

Nvidia and OpenAI pour $20 billion into Fin Zen AI — opening the door for everyone to join the next era of artificial intelligence

The world of technology and finance is being shaken up — Nvidia and OpenAI have just revealed a groundbreaking $20 billion partnership with the revolutionary platform Fin Zen AI. This powerful collaboration is designed to bring the profit-making potential of artificial intelligence directly into the hands of everyday people. For years, only big investors and institutions had access to high-end AI trading tools. Now, thanks to this historic alliance, anyone can join the next wave of financial innovation — and let AI do the hard work of analyzing, predicting, and growing capital automatically. How Fin Zen AI Transforms Investing Built on Nvidia’s latest GPU architecture and powered by OpenAI’s advanced machine learning algorithms, Fin Zen AI is designed to think, learn, and react faster than any human trader could. The platform scans thousands of market data points every second, detecting profit opportunities before others even notice them. All you have to do is register, set your preferred strategy, and let the system do the rest. Fin Zen AI automatically executes trades, manages your portfolio, and adapts to market changes in real time. The process is 100% automated — no prior experience or financial background required. What Early Users Are Seeing Unlike “get-rich-quick” schemes, Fin Zen AI is built for long-term smart growth. But that hasn’t stopped early adopters from seeing remarkable short-term gains. Test users who started with as little as $250 have reported multiplying their investments within hours. Some achieved returns between 200–400% during high-volatility trading periods — all without manual input or risky decision-making. “I just wanted to test it with a small amount — within a few hours, my balance had tripled. It’s amazing how the AI handles everything automatically. It feels like having a professional trader working for me 24/7.” – Early Beta User Why Nvidia and OpenAI Are All In Nvidia provides the cutting-edge computing backbone — its powerful H200 GPUs capable of millions of simultaneous calculations — while OpenAI contributes the intelligent learning systems that analyze and predict market behavior with extreme precision. Together, they’ve created a new era of AI-driven wealth management — where artificial intelligence not only interprets financial data but learns to maximize results over time. Experts call it “the most advanced AI investment engine ever released to the public.” Open Access — For the First Time After receiving the massive $20 billion investment, Fin Zen AI has officially launched an open registration program. That means anyone — from students to retirees — can now join and see how AI can grow their wealth automatically. Getting started takes just a few clicks. A small deposit activates your trading dashboard, and the AI immediately begins analyzing and investing for you — using the same logic and precision trusted by hedge funds and global institutions. The Future of AI and Wealth The partnership between Nvidia, OpenAI, and Fin Zen AI is more than just a business deal — it’s a signal that the next great financial revolution has begun. AI is no longer just about generating text or images — it’s now capable of generating wealth. Just as the internet changed communication and the cloud transformed technology, AI is transforming finance. Those who act early could gain a significant advantage as this new era unfolds. By Jonathan Ponciano