Overview
- Industry reporting says the field has moved from ever-larger models to efficient, reasoning-centric systems, a shift crystallized by DeepSeek’s 2025 frontier-level performance using roughly one-tenth the training compute and reinforced by cost and power constraints.
- Executives forecast that companies will require quantified, domain-specific accuracy with rigorous evaluation frameworks before scaling AI agents into core operations.
- Retrieval-augmented generation and products that learn continuously from user feedback are expected to expand to deliver more traceable and business-specific outputs across enterprises.
- Security leaders warn that a surge of non-human identities from agent deployments will require new visibility, containment and human-attribution controls as agents gain privileged access to data and systems.
- Geoffrey Hinton predicts AI will gain the capability to replace many jobs in 2026, even as some CEO surveys point to increased entry-level hiring and new leadership roles.