2026 AI predictions
AI has been the hot topic for a good few years now. There’s been talks of an ‘AI bubble’ and how it may soon burst, agentic AI is becoming ever more prevalent, and valuations for AI startups and businesses have sky-rocketed.
In this article, we highlight the 2026 AI predictions from tech leaders, investors, and startups, ranging from how it will continue to impact workplaces, agentic AI’s continued rise, and what AI startups can expect to experience when securing funding this year.
AI infrastructure and UK talent
Amy Nauiokas, Founder, Group CEO, and General Partner, Anthemis and Board Member of CommonAI, comments: “As we look ahead to 2026, the defining trend will be a shift from simply using AI as a tool, to building the infrastructure and capabilities that allow the UK to lead in its deployment. Over the past year, we’ve seen promising steps toward strengthening AI infrastructure, from the Government’s announcement of new Growth Zones to increased investment in compute, hardware, and R&D as part of the Tech Prosperity Deal. In 2026, the question becomes whether businesses and governments can convert that momentum into real, scalable value. The organisations that win will be those that treat digital infrastructure as seriously as physical infrastructure, embedding the compute capacity, engineering talent, and data foundations needed to deploy AI safely and at scale.
“We’ll also see a stronger push toward AI sovereignty and homegrown innovation. With AI systems becoming more powerful and more deeply integrated into industry, reliance on a small number of global technology providers is increasingly untenable. In 2026, UK enterprises will look for alternatives that offer more transparency, interoperability, and control. That creates huge opportunities for domestic founders, technologists, academics, and early-stage disruptors, whose expertise remains one of the UK’s greatest untapped assets. If we continue to empower those leaders, strengthen regional innovation hubs, and pair pro-innovation policy with real investment, the UK can build an AI ecosystem that is competitive, resilient, and capable of producing the next generation of globally significant companies.”
AI and the workplace
AI will continue to impact the workplace, from how people work, to who gets hired.
Hiring for AI companies will become important, especially with the current talent gap. Adam French, Partner, London, Antler: “The talent gap in applied AI widens. Demand for AI engineers, product builders, and domain specialists far outstrips supply. UK founders will struggle to hire the people needed to ship AI-native products quickly enough.
“Uncertainty in UK policy and regulation. Changes in AI, entrepreneurial, pension, and R&D incentives create planning complexity. Founders may lose confidence in long-term policy direction even as the UK aims to be globally competitive.”
Miika Mäkitalo, CEO, HappyOrNot, commented: “2025 was the year of learning AI; 2026 will be the year of AI mastery. Employees who integrate AI deeply into their workflows will outperform peers who use it superficially – or not at all. AI fluency will start to matter more than tenure or traditional credentials. AI users will shine. Those who fail to embrace AI at scale will fall behind – not because of lack of effort, but because the speed and quality gap will be undeniable.”
By Orla Daly, Chief Information Officer, Skillsoft, said: “Organisations that flex their workforce based on priorities, and build teams based on skills versus reporting lines will be better equipped to meet the demands of a fast-changing, AI-enabled workplace.
“As AI tools multiply, strong guardrails and a willingness to experiment will be key, but so will the discipline to validate what works. The future of work will belong to organisations that redesign the human side of their workforce with flexibility, clarity, and trust at the core.”
The use of AI in organisations will shift, and effectiveness will take a higher priority. Ben Barnett, Regional Vice President for UK&I, Monday.com, said: “In 2026, successful organisations will stop chasing marginal efficiency gains and squeezing out cost savings, and pivot their focus to effectiveness: jobs and work that are meaningful, manageable, and empowering. AI is already playing a major role here – our AI at Work report revealed that 59% of UK directors think the technology has enhanced decision-making and insights. But building on this momentum requires a holistic approach to effectiveness, with a cultural shift driving motivation and engagement at work at its core.”
In the workplace, fragmented AI tools will become a thing of the past, as people seek singular platforms for everything they need. Jérémy Grinbaum, VP for South EMEA, Amplitude, said: “By the end of 2026, European companies will move away from fragmented AI tools. No team will rely on its own isolated system. Instead, organisations will converge on a single platform that manages data, compliance, and performance in one place. The European AI Act will make managing multiple systems too complex and risky, driving IT and marketing to collaborate on consolidation. Success will no longer be measured by the number of tools, but by how smoothly insights and predictions flow across the organisation.”
AI accountability
Accountability when it comes to AI will be important in 2026, especially for customers. James Evans, Director of Product Management, Amplitude, said: “Next year, responsible AI will start not with ambition but with accountability. The most forward thinking organisations will design AI initiatives around the data they can legally and ethically use, rather than building systems first and scrambling for training data later. Consent based value exchanges will become a cornerstone of innovation, where users knowingly trade information for tangible benefit. As legal and public scrutiny intensify, businesses will realise that transparent data lineage and user choice are competitive differentiators, not compliance chores. At the same time, new economic models will emerge to reward creators whose content underpins the next generation of AI models, helping to correct the imbalance between human contribution and machine advantage. Trust, not scale, will become the true measure of AI maturity.”
AI funding
With talks of an AI bubble, and valuations of AI businesses still sky high, the funding landscape is predicted to change.
Tom Henriksson, General Partner at OpenOcean, said: “In 2026, the wheat will be separated from the chaff in the AI market. A vulnerability lurks at the heart of the AI startup ecosystem, and this is the absolutely massive revenue that the current leaders in foundation models will need to generate in order to withstand the cost of building and running these systems.
“New AI startups are benefitting from bigger and more aggressive venture backing than we’ve seen before – but so many are directly dependent on models from core AI companies that haven’t turned profitable yet. If these market leaders invoiced the true cost of inferencing the models, we’d see startups dropping like flies. Only the strongest, best-run businesses will survive.
“Now, I’m not downplaying the impact of AI. It will be utterly transformational and create much more efficiency in how businesses operate day-to-day. However, because the economics of AI today often rely on basic products that are fundamentally unprofitable – at least at their current pricing and cost – you need to be incredibly careful as an investor. Thorough, data-driven due diligence has never been more important to your success as a venture firm.”
Hannah Leach, Partner, London, Antler, predicts: “Some hesitation around AI (at a corporate and VC level) – will it have delivered on what it promised to? Will the purchases made to date have been ‘AI panic purchases’ with no proper strategic intent or ROI? This will have a knock-on effect across the market – longer sales cycles, greater apathy, but will come with it a real emphasis on founders to demonstrate their value/ traction/ outcomes.”
Sarah Finegan, Associate Partner, London, Antler, commented: “The market is splitting. Investors have figured out that not all AI companies are created equal. In 2026, founders building thin wrappers around foundation models will struggle, while those solving genuine infrastructure problems, payments, security, compliance for autonomous systems, will find capital and customers.
“Europe’s regulatory environment, often seen as a burden, becomes an advantage here. Founders who embed compliance and safety from day one will win enterprise contracts, especially as businesses realise they need guardrails before handing financial access to AI agents. The challenge is resisting the temptation to chase hype and instead building boring, critical infrastructure that actually works.”
Agentic AI
2026 will see agentic AI come to the forefront of the conversation. Whilst the topic was spoken about in 2025, experts predict that 2026 will be the year of agentic AI.
David Blake, CEO and Co-founder of Degreed, explained: “AI will move from generating content to taking real action – enrolling teams, triggering workflows, mapping skills needs to work, and automating nudges that drive behaviour change.”
Adam French, Partner, London, Antler: “AI agents move from prototypes to production. 2026 is the year when fully autonomous AI agents start creating measurable business value. Adoption moves beyond pilots into enterprise workflows, regulated sectors, and consumer applications.
Sarah Finegan, Associate Partner, London, Antler, said: “AI agents are forcing a fundamental rebuild of infrastructure across multiple industries.
“Today’s systems, payments, identity, compliance, procurement, logistics, were all built assuming humans would be operating them. Human speed, human approval processes, human patterns of trust. Agents work differently. They process continuously, make decisions in microseconds, and coordinate at machine scale. The infrastructure can’t keep up, and that gap is creating enormous market opportunity.
“The big opportunity in 2026 is the infrastructure rebuild that AI agents are demanding. This means new payment rails, new identity systems, new compliance frameworks, and new expectations for how money should move. Payment rails that handle instant settlement and fractional transactions. Identity systems built for agents, not humans. Compliance frameworks that audit algorithmic behaviour in real-time. The infrastructure to support agentic commerce at scale doesn’t exist yet.
“The next wave of category leaders will build for agents first, humans second.”
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