AI Predictions for 2026

What Lies Ahead for the Year

2025 was a year of great expectations for AI, and arguably results that didn't quite meet expectations. Will 2026 be the year that AI returns value on all those investments? Will it be the year agents replace software developers? Heavybit’s community of founders, operators, and investors have shared their predictions for 2026: AI, software, and potentially a few slightly less serious subjects.

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Corey Quinn, Co-Founder / Duckbill

Dropping Soon: The Other Shoe

“In 2026, there’s going to have to be some kind of reckoning in tying AI spend to business value that comes out of it. Because AI is only gonna suspend disbelief for so long before the bill comes due. So when the music stops, you’re probably gonna want to make sure you have a seat.”

Philip James, Engineering Manager/Freed

AI Models Go In-House Sooner Than We Think

“I have a longstanding bet on where AI is going: I think we’re going to see more companies start making small models available on their own hardware. I think it’s going to become more important for companies to own their own inference and models and start bringing that in-house instead of relying on the ever-growing foundation models. This might be a contrarian opinion, but I think [foundation models] are going to hit a ceiling just on hardware availability sooner than anybody thinks. So I think it’s going to get more important to bring that knowledge in-house.”

Amir Zohrenejad, Partner/Heavybit

2026: The Year of RL?

“I think reinforcement learning (RL) is going to be big. Working with AI is going to be more about working with post-training learning.”

Alexander Jung, Co-Founder/Unikraft

No End in Sight: More AI Deployments, Workloads, and Hardware

“We’re seeing really massive deployments these days. There’s lots of people who are generating content continuously: Workloads, things that are untrusted, and completely ephemeral. That’s going to continue to grow exponentially. We’re also seeing a lot of hardware being built out, which is an indication that [AI] is only going to become more abundant.”

Jeremy Edberg, CEO/DBOS

AI to Amplify, not Replace Engineers

“Last year, we heard the prediction that ‘all junior engineers are going to be fired and replaced with AI coders.’ That may be starting to come true for some people, but others are realizing the folly of that, and they’re doing the opposite. They’re actually hiring engineers and teaching them how to leverage AI to be better. My biggest concern was that we’d get rid of all the junior engineers and not have any senior engineers in a few years, but I’m hearing that bigger companies are actually hiring juniors out of college. I think in the next year, the AI coders are going to get better. The tools are going to get better. And we’re going to learn how to use them as tools to enhance what we do, not replace what we do.”

Dana Oshiro, Partner/Heavybit

Where Should Tech Investors Be Looking This Year?

“In terms of categories, everyone seems to be investing in inference, and as a result, there’s going to be a lot of new startups that we’re going to see on the hardware and edge side, [including] custom chips and advanced architecture.”

Chad Metcalf, CEO/Continue

AI: Less About Manual Intervention, More About Being Continuous

“We’ll see doubling down on actual AI use cases that yield some sort of value and [connected] to some sort of ROI. In code tools, that looks like continuous AI. If code goes so much faster, everything after it has to go faster too, and that means it all has to be continuous and a developer can’t intervene every single time there’s attention required.”

Priyanka Sharma, Investor and Startup Advisor

Will AI Transform Front-End Development First?

“My prediction is based on my recent experience building out the Web presence and positioning for my new company. Even though it wasn’t my job, I suddenly got into building it out myself. Initially, we were going to have a very traditional Wordpress implementation (and Wordpress is awesome, by the way!), but one thing led to another, and I was in Cursor building the site out. And it has been such a fun process. And by chance, I saw a conversation about this: Cursor released a post about how they have gone CMS-free. Sanity responded with what I thought was a very thoughtful and smart response. It’s the conclusion I came to myself in building this site: We need a CMS of some kind eventually. So I think the space around front-end development, around static websites...things that are not super-complex when it comes to functionality and how mission-critical they are...that kind of development is going to change dramatically in my opinion.”

Victoria Melnikova, Head of New Business/Evil Martians

AI’s Last Mile Problem...Solved?

“I think AI is going to get more intricate. I’m really looking forward to complete AI pipelines. Right now, it feels like we can get 80% of the way there, but we have to [work manually] to get to 100%. I’m really hopeful that we can resolve this in 2026, and go from scratch to a 100% production-ready state [with AI tools.]”

Simon Wistow, Co-Founder/Fastly

AI Will Transform Our Lives, But Not Completely

“I think two things are going to start to happen. One, I think we’re going to start to see an interaction between the AI companies and e-commerce companies in the same way we’ve seen between the publishers and the AI companies. We’ll start to see more agentic commerce and the e-commerce space really starting to have to reckon with how buying and zero-click transactions are done. The other thing that might happen is we’re going to start realizing that AI is going to end up more like the Web or the iPhone, in that they have completely transformed our lives and are part of every part of our lives, but...our lives are not completely unrecognizable. I think that’s how AI is going to end up. It’s going to infuse into everything, from kids’ toys to coding to commerce to whatever. But in some ways, our lives won’t be unrecognizable, they’re just going to be enhanced.”

Brian Douglas, DX/Continue

AI? You’ll Need Infrastructure for That

“My prediction for the year is that we’ll see this AI infrastructure wave really take off. Now, we’re going to need all the same tools we built for the last 15-20 years. So [for example], embedded Linux: Think of that for secure and AI runtimes. Things that are now CPU-bound now have to be GPU-bound. I fully anticipate that’s the next thing we should be paying attention to.”

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