IBM

A year in tech can feel like a decade anywhere else.

Think about it: a year ago, we were discussing how ChatGPT wasn’t able to count the number of “r”s in “strawberry.” Reasoning models from Chinese frontier labs (like DeepSeek-R1) hadn’t taken the world by storm, and neither had open-source reasoning agents.

Claude’s dedicated coding agent didn’t exist yet. IBM’s Granite 3.0 had only just arrived. And the agent conversation was only beginning: MCP had just gained traction in the spring, with a notable endorsement from Sam Altman.

Meanwhile, in the world of infrastructure, chips and compute resources were becoming scarce, giving new territories a competitive advantage.

Over the last few weeks, IBM Think spoke with a dozen experts in tech—researchers, founders and leaders from IBM and beyond—to get their insights on what to expect in the year ahead. Each one shared a common belief for the year ahead: the pace of innovation won’t slow down in 2026.

“It’s such a crazy time,” Peter Staar, a Principal Research Staff Member at the IBM Research Zurich Laboratory, told IBM Think in an interview. “And it’s only accelerating.”

New agentic capabilities will give way to new possibilities for businesses and individuals alike. “I really see the parallels of music production à la Rick Rubin style with AI creation,” IBM’s Distinguished Engineer Chris Hay told IBM Think. “I don’t limit it to coding. I think we [will] all become AI composers, whether you’re a marketer, programmer or PM.”

Many believe efficiency will be the new frontier. “GPUs will remain king, but ASIC-based accelerators, chiplet designs, analog inference and even quantum-assisted optimizers will mature,” Kaoutar El Maghraoui, a Principal Research Scientist at IBM, said during this week’s Mixture of Experts. “Maybe a new class of chips for agentic workloads will emerge.”