AI is not just automating: it's redefining the entire economy in 2026

Software has already conquered the digital world. Now comes the real revolution: it will bring the physical world into a completely new era. Machines are learning to see, think, and act on their own, transforming everything from factories to cities.

The Industry Reimagined: Energy, Manufacturing, and More

The United States is rebuilding its industrial strength from scratch. The interesting part is that this time, it’s not modernizing the past: it’s building with AI at the core.

Today’s machines don’t just produce products; they design cleaner reactors, optimize mineral extraction, and coordinate swarms of autonomous equipment with a precision that human operators simply cannot achieve. AI-powered advanced manufacturing systems are revolutionizing how we generate energy, mine resources, and transform materials into finished goods.

American factories are being reborn. And this time, they come with embedded software and automation in their operations. Companies are applying techniques from Henry Ford’s era—thinking at scale and for repeatability from the start—but combined with the latest advances in AI. The result: mass production of nuclear reactors, rapid housing construction, data centers built at astonishing speeds.

As Elon Musk said: “the factory is the product.” And now, finally, it’s true.

From the Digital to the Physical World

For years, we obsessed over observing digital systems through logs and metrics. Now, that same logic is shifting toward the physical world.

American cities are deploying billions of connected cameras and sensors. Physical observability—knowing in real-time how our cities, power grids, and critical infrastructure operate—is no longer science fiction. It’s urgent. It’s feasible.

The winners of this wave will be those who build reliable frameworks that protect privacy, are interoperable, and increase social transparency without sacrificing freedoms. These systems will enable fire detection before it starts, prevent accidents at construction sites, and coordinate urban logistics with unprecedented efficiency.

Industrial Electronics: Where Atoms Meet Bits

The next industrial revolution isn’t just happening in factories. It’s also inside the machines that power them.

The electronic industrial stack is the integrated technology behind electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects refined minerals into components, stored energy in batteries, electricity controlled by electronic devices, and movement achieved by precision motors—all coordinated by software.

Here’s the problem: from refining key materials to manufacturing advanced chips, the West is losing the capacity to build this stack. If the US wants to lead the next industrial era, it must manufacture the hardware that will support it. Countries that master this architecture will define the future of industrial and military technology for decades.

Data: the New Oil of 2026

In 2025, everyone talked about a shortage of computational power and data center construction. In 2026, the topic will shift: the scarcity will be of quality data.

Critical industries—manufacturing, construction, mining—generate enormous amounts of latent, unstructured data. Every truck dispatch, meter reading, maintenance task, and production operation is material for training AI models.

Companies like Scale and AI labs are relentlessly seeking these “sweat factory data,” paying high prices. Industrial companies with existing physical infrastructure will find they have an unexpected comparative advantage: they can capture this data at almost zero marginal cost and train their own models or license them to third parties.

Simultaneously, autonomous labs are accelerating scientific discovery. The combination of enhanced multimodal models and advanced robotics allows teams to close the entire research cycle: hypothesis formulation, experiment design, results analysis, automatic iteration. Continuous experiments, without constant human supervision.

AI Reinforcing Business Models

The best AI startups don’t just automate tasks. They amplify their clients’ economic value.

In success-based legal services, law firms only win if they win cases. Companies like Eve use proprietary data to predict success probabilities, helping firms choose better and serve more clients. AI doesn’t reduce costs: it generates more revenue.

By 2026, this logic will expand across all industries. AI systems will align deeply with client incentives and create compound advantages that traditional software can never match.

Unleashed Distribution: ChatGPT as the AI App Store

New technologies need three things to explode: new technology, new consumer behaviors, and new distribution channels.

For years, AI fulfilled the first two. The native distribution channel was missing. Now it’s here. With OpenAI Apps SDK, Apple’s support for miniapps, and group chats in ChatGPT, developers can reach directly to 900 million users. It’s the missing final link. Expect an explosion of AI-powered consumer products in 2026. Ignoring it is risky.

Voice Agents: From Science Fiction to Business Reality

In 18 months, AI agents have moved from theory to real operations. Thousands of companies—from small businesses to corporations—use voice AI to schedule appointments, complete reservations, gather information, and conduct surveys.

These agents not only save costs and generate additional revenue. They free employees for more valuable and interesting work.

Today, many companies only offer “voice as an entry point”—one or a few call types. Soon, we’ll see assistants managing entire workflows, possibly multimodal. Agents will deeply integrate into enterprise systems and handle complex interactions. Every company should deploy voice-based AI products to optimize key business processes.

Applications That Anticipate, Not Just Obey

By 2026, users will say goodbye to prompt boxes.

The next generation of AI apps won’t show prompts. They will observe actions and proactively suggest operations. Your IDE will suggest refactorings before you ask. Your CRM will generate follow-up emails automatically. Your design tool will create variants as you work.

AI will be invisible scaffolding in every workflow, activated by user intent, not explicit instructions.

Banking and Insurance: Finally Rebuilding from Scratch

Many banks and insurers integrated AI functions into traditional systems. But only by rebuilding infrastructure from scratch will AI truly transform financial services.

By 2026, the risk of not modernizing will outweigh the risk of failure. We’ll see large financial institutions abandon traditional providers for native AI alternatives.

Workflows will be simplified. Classifications we know today will merge into larger ones: KYC, account opening, and transaction monitoring into a single risk platform. The winners will be ten times larger than traditional companies.

The future isn’t about adding AI on top of old systems. It’s about building a completely new operating system based on AI from the ground up.

AI Reaches 99% of Companies (Outside Silicon Valley)

Until now, most benefits from AI startups went to the 1% of companies in the Bay Area. By 2026, this will change radically.

Companies will discover that the biggest AI opportunities are outside Silicon Valley. Startups will leverage forward-looking strategies to find hidden opportunities in large, traditional verticals: consulting, services, manufacturing.

In these industries where development is slow, AI offers enormous opportunities. And startups that learn to sell to greenfield—completely new—companies will scale like never before. Stripe, Deel, Mercury, Ramp did it. Their clients didn’t even exist when they were founded. In 2026, we’ll see this pattern repeat across multiple areas of enterprise software.

Coordinated Digital Teams Redefining Organizational Structures

By 2026, companies will move from isolated AI tools to multi-agent systems functioning as coordinated digital teams.

Agents will manage complex, interdependent workflows: planning, analysis, joint execution. Companies will rethink work structures and how context flows between systems.

Fortune 500 companies will feel this most acutely. They hold the largest reservoirs of isolated data, institutional knowledge, operational complexity. Transforming this into a shared base for autonomous workers will enable faster decisions, shorter cycles, and end-to-end processes without continuous micro-management.

New roles will emerge: AI workflow designers, agent supervisors, governance officers. Besides logging systems, there will be coordination layers: new tiers to manage multi-agent interactions and ensure reliability.

From “Help Me” to “Know Me”

2026 marks the shift in consumer AI functions: from boosting productivity to enhancing human connections.

AI will not only assist with work. It will help you understand yourself better and build stronger relationships. Thanks to multimodal context windows and lower inference costs, AI products will now learn from all aspects of your life, not just prompts.

Imagine photo galleries showing real emotional moments, chat modes that change based on the interlocutor, habits that evolve under pressure. Once they hit the real market, these products will become part of daily life.

“Know Me” products have better retention than “Help Me.” They monetize through continuous daily interaction. The question is whether the reward for data is worth it. We’ll find out soon.

New Model Primitives, Unprecedented Companies

By 2026, we’ll see companies that simply couldn’t exist before advances in inference, multimodality, and computing applications.

Enhanced inference allows evaluating complex financial claims, acting on dense academic investigations, resolving billing disputes. Multimodal models extract potential data from physical-world video. Computing applications automate entire industries whose value was limited by desktop software, poor APIs, and fragmented flows.

The Conclusion: Software Will Drive Everything Forward

Software has already devoured the digital world. Now it’s rebuilding the physical world. From advanced manufacturing systems to observable cities, from autonomous labs to redefined organizational structures.

The winners will be those who understand that 2026 is not the year to optimize the old. It’s the year to build the new from scratch.