AI Trends Report 2026

The AI trends that will truly move businesses forward in 2026

Together with the AI Hub Frankfurt, statworx presents the AI Trends Report 2026, outlining the 20 most important AI trends of the year across more than 100 pages.

The report puts today’s AI developments into context with a practical, forward-looking perspective.

• A clear focus on operationalizing AI rather than isolated use cases
  
• Integrating AI across processes, organizations, and decision-making
  
• Human-AI collaboration as the new reality
  
• AI governance as the foundation for autonomous agents
  
• Compute, energy, and infrastructure as strategic success factors
  

Comprehensive market analysis, combined with more than 70 insights from leading experts at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Merck, Visa, and many others, helps readers identify strategic opportunities and position themselves for long-term success in a rapidly evolving AI ecosystem.

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The 20 AI Trends at a glance

Category 1: Company

• Trend No. 1 | Results over experiments – AI projects are facing unprecedented pressure to perform
• Trend No. 2 | AI governance as a success factor – Clear rules are shifting from mandatory compliance to a driver of returns
• Trend No. 3 | Agents on probation – Where data and processes are solid, agentic AI can reach its full potential
• Trend No. 4 | Robots, ready for work – Humanoid machines are entering the workplace

Category 2: Work, Organization & Communication

• Trend No. 5 | The second self – AI hardware turns assistants into constant companions
• Trend No. 6 | The quiet Intermediary – AI becomes the command center of marketing
• Trend No. 7 | One-person unicorn – With AI, fewer people can create far more enterprise value
• Trend No. 8 | The New Age of Knowledge Work – AI is reshaping knowledge jobs and redefining core skills

Category 3: Economy, Regulation & Power

• Trend No. 9 | Geopolitics of compute – Processing power becomes a question of global power
• Trend No. 10 | Energy as the bottleneck – Whoever controls power controls the future of AI
• Trend No. 11 | Regulation in reverse – Policy makers are pulling back on AI oversight
• Trend No. 12 | AI on the battlefield – Artificial intelligence is reshaping the logic of military power

Category 4: Science, Culture & Society

• Trend No. 13 | Research 2.0 – AI becomes the world’s new R&D department
• Trend No. 14 | Real was yesterday – AI blurs the line between reality and fiction
• Trend No. 15 | Next-level education – Universities become drivers of the new AI learning culture
• Trend No. 16 | The first AI hit – Artificial creativity breaks into the charts

Category 5: Technology

• Trend No. 17 | Learning worlds for machines – World models connect simulation with reality
• Trend No. 18 | Progress in slow motion? – The biggest AI leaps are now happening behind the scenes
• Trend No. 19 | Order in the AI chaos – DataOps and AgentOps bring control and efficiency
• Trend No. 20 | ChatGPT goes platform – OpenAI builds the operating system of the AI era