It’s time to dust off our crystal balls as we conjure our Top 10 tech predictions for 2026. 

In this episode, we take a look into the year ahead and unpack a bumper crop of new tech ideas and category acronyms from AWO and ANAA to EIG and beyond. 

AI is firmly in the driving seat for 2026. It’s racing us towards real paradigm shifts in how businesses operate, how value is created, and how entirely new categories are born. 

So buckle your seat belts. This is going to be a fun ride.

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Paul Maher

Jonathan Simnett

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What do we have to look forward to today?

Vendors are gonna begin offering agent orchestration layers, policy engines. Verification and simulation sandboxes, and we love a good sandbox. So we think this becomes a new platform category. We call it a agentic work orchestration, a WO.

See what you did that.

Right at number nine, we think there's a radical change. Uh, and we are looking for the AI first infrastructure, which should be called the AI Compute os or AI Compute Operating System. Um, there's a high demand for model training, fine tuning and deployment, and this is driving, uh, a new systems layer that sits lower down in the stack, perhaps under commodities or docker or one of the alternative, there are alternative technologies out there.

This is gonna automate. All of the manual IT ops processes that are involved in deploying, managing and scaling containerized applications. So a new compute operating system is all to play for. That's a category that's gonna manage all of the GPUs, TPUs, NPUs, accelerators, memory, fabric, model routing, and power use.

Well, it's this, you know, which models were used. Which prompts or agents actually acted how data was transformed? Who or what approved the actions? So a new compliance tech category emerges. AI chain of record. Right. And

We also need, uh, legal interactions. So we think at the difference engine there's gonna be a halfway house as there was with the GDPR legislation. And as we see recently, all powerful US category leaders like Reddit is finding out in the Australian courts as it challenges their decision to make teenagers.

Data governance and secure networking,

Uh, and is Annie. Uh, tech adoption proves there are early versions. Think about mainframes, luggable, or dial up internet and palm pilots even. And then there's a steady state. Um, and in a steady state you often suffer a price war, which is exactly what we've seen going on. Smaller models such as MRL three and others from Microsoft and Chinese, Alibaba.

Maybe that's all we need. And for more of this, have a look at how this prediction was presaged in episode 50 of the Difference Engine. Back with our conversation with Amber Vertigo.

And what characterizes these? Well, they combine real-time sensor networks, digital twins, multi-agent optimization engines, and demand forecasting and scenario simulation. The point is these systems will pull together technologies already existing. In supply chain management, which we know is SCM, and that's a existing category.

Um, but they will make a step change in to continuously negotiate, plan, and adapt with minimal human input.

Yeah, yeah, it was.

You've got products such as lovable rept cursor, um, and this is giving a whole new cadra of innovators a way to build. Without overthinking things like data structures, user interfaces, or even um, controversially IPO ownership. To me, this is like how hip hop DJs redefined musical structure with scratching and breakbeats, and last year.

Well, I think it's just because this is a paradigmatic shift, because software becomes more like. Governed emergent behavior. Think about that very, very dynamic, um, rather than the static code, which we've basically built for the entire history of the computing industry, and that just makes it just a little bit more organic.

Mm, nice.

Um, and we're gonna call that the elastic security mesh. Now, I'm, I'm sorry if that sounds like, uh, some obscure form of underwear. Uh, it's not meant to. Um, it's something that is formed of self adapting security layers. Now what do they do? Well, we think they're gonna detect model misuse and drift. Um, they're gonna auto patch vulnerabilities.

They're gonna regulate against permissions, and they're gonna provide dynamic microsegmentation. So the point of this is, is, and you know, we've seen that in, in some of the clients we've worked with is, is that this is part of a journey where security becomes continuous, you know, it's model aware, um, and it's predictive.

We do know it's coming.

And, you know, it's quite clear that compute demand is rising faster at the moment and energy availability. Uh, so infrastructure is not being matched by energy availability. Um, and we know that particularly in the. In this environment that the sheer energy requirements of AI processing is not a good ESG look.

Where and how computing is executed based on sustainability and of course cost.

So why this is important is it marks the evolution from decades of attempts at data management. To a different approach of knowledge orchestration.

We're actually getting some value. Something's gotta give. I mean, we've got dashboards and data lakes and they used to do. Data management, but they're just too static and ponderous for this new AI world. Uh, we need AI at speed and everyone who's used AI at scale, for instance, for deep research or coding, understands the limitation of current context windows.

Um, and we see workarounds like snapshots or running several LMS in parallel. But this is a major issue, uh, and we need to solve how we're using data and data operations, uh, for ai.

There's a controversial title and now being quote unquote upgraded. Uh, and we see a lot of what they call forward deployment engineers. This is going to continue, um, forward deployment. Engineers literally make the difference between retaining loyal customers and growing AR a RR are all being called out publicly, which is, uh, in this social media world, death to future sales.

That sounds reasonable. How about director of machine policy and governance? DMPG? Uh, that's exactly what it says on the team. So it's

Anyway, if this new breed have, have to embrace architectural tradition by wearing ridiculous work, wear jackets, red spectacles, and saying zeitgeist a lot, uh, the good news for it insiders is that it architects, uh, become responsible for, and we think this is a term we're gonna hear a lot in in the next 12 months, digital labor.

Not just digital systems. Now that's a fundamental reframing of enterprise operating models and the roles that go with them.

Never forget that people

Traditional accounting is now being replaced with a sort of futures based logic. And just like in the cloud computing era, the accountants need to catch up. Of course they do. Um, witness Oracle's recent use of something called RPOs. What's an RPO? Jono? It's a remaining performance obligations. Yeah. Does it sound a bit like BS to you?

Does it sound like WeWork when they try to rewrite, uh, the accounting rules? Oh, yes. That, that great real estate company masquerading as tech. Yeah. Great office for, um, as far as we can tell about RPOs, this is about future expected cash or possibly debt. It's really hard to understand, um, uh, from the newly announced.

Slightly unclear partnerships they have, uh, this is Oracle has with Nvidia Meta and others

Sold and been paid for, but couldn't come onto the books. And when that kicked in, valuations normalized and everybody was happy. And you know, a whole of m and a valuations in software is based on recurring revenues now. Exactly. Massive change. So our final prediction listeners is that there will be a new AI friendly.

Type of financial metric. It may or may not be RPOs yet to be, uh, seen. Remember, this took, uh, this process took years, uh, back in the cloud era, but we think at least it will be starting in the next year.

And there will be a new language emerging that describes the technological principles behind the changes wrought by the latest. Industrial revolution that is upon us. And make no mistake, we are in the relatively early stages of an industrial revolution. Now, these changes are so fundamental. Perhaps we should think of moving on from the current.

Perhaps we should embrace. New opportunities to act for the common good. Now that should be our New Year's resolution and machine ene heard it first on the Difference Engine. Folks,