MARAVILLAS DELGADOThe past year has been dizzying, a year marked by an unbridled race between models and processors, a constant competition to lead rankings where practically every week something new appeared and a new record was broken. And no, nothing indicates that this will stop or even slow down in 2026. The records will continue, but we will see much more: the revolution will become more visible in economic, daily and even institutional life. The models will continue to break rankings. There will be no respite: they will continue to destroy every metric imaginable. Video will be incorporated into multimodality naturally. Current limitations, such as the context window or degradation in long autonomous work tasks, will disappear. And techniques such as mixture of experts (MoE) will be consolidated, giving rise to more agile models, with reduced response times and lower costs. Scientists, engineers and artificial actors will see the light. Thinking models capable of operating at the level of a researcher will appear. In practice, some companies, research laboratories and even military organizations will have an almost unlimited number of virtual, tireless and comparatively very low marginal cost scientists and engineers, which will generate competitive advantages that are difficult to match. We will witness a radical transformation in audiovisual production: videos, advertisements and content will be generated mostly by AI, indistinguishable from reality, greatly increasing creative capabilities and production volume. Universities and hospitals AI. The use of AI in hospitals and healthcare medicine will become widespread, especially in China. Preventive medicine, remote diagnosis and wearables integrated into healthcare systems will be monitored by AI. Medical consultation through chatbots will become common in some countries. In the educational field, we will see how AI tutors take over a good part of executive training. Self-driving cars will become widespread in the US and China. Robotaxis will be a reality, operating at a very low price and transforming urban mobility. Its impact will be especially significant for older people or young people without their own vehicle. Autonomous public transport will be the new normal in many Chinese cities, redefining distances, access to services and the very shape of cities. Autonomous trucks will be a reality. Autonomous electric short-haul trucks (semitrucks) are already emerging in China and will quickly become widespread in some countries. This will not only speed up logistics chains, but could reduce their costs by a factor of three or more. More agile, cheaper, faster and adjustable logistics in real time will result in lower prices, greater adaptability and more livable cities. “Last mile” distribution will also begin to be automated, progressively displacing human delivery drivers. An invasion of humanoid robots. China will be at the forefront of humanoid robots applied to logistics, production, hospitals and military uses. Some American companies will compete with it, but Asian dominance will be overwhelming. The software will take a little longer than the hardware to reach maturity, but we will begin to see robots in everyday life. The first companies and logistics centers will appear without human workers, and tasks such as perimeter security or surveillance will be carried out exclusively by robots. The first AI centers in space will see the light. The space is emerging as the ideal location for future computing centers. We will see how SpaceX, Blue Origin and China begin to deploy AI centers in Earth orbit, and how this idea, still surprising today, begins to become normal. The word that will define 2026 will be adoption. Adoption of AI agents in companies and administrations; adoption of AI with wheels (robotaxis), with legs (humanoid robots) and with wings (drones and aerospace systems). A massive adoption that, this time, will begin to profoundly transform businesses, hospitals, universities, mobility, logistics and, more slowly, Public Administration. Esteve Almirall, professor of Data, Analytics, Technology and Artificial Intelligence at Esade.
