As artificial intelligence continues to advance and become increasingly present in daily life, much is being debated about what lies ahead. With this in mind, experts comment on the trends this technology is expected to follow in 2026. Check it out:
For Marcelo Abreu, CTO of Venturus, believes AI will evolve towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is capable of learning, understanding, and performing any human intellectual task. According to the expert, this technology should begin to develop in 2026: “In addition to continuously progressing through self-improvement, AGIs are capable of understanding and performing any intellectual task typical of the human mind. Unlike current AIs, which are specialized in specific functions, it seeks to develop systems with reasoning, adaptation, and decision-making capabilities across multiple contexts.”
Abreu's perspective on the advancement towards more general systems coexists, in the short term, with already very concrete changes in the day-to-day operations of companies. It is in this context that Allan Paladino, CEO of of Lastro, highlights AI adoption and maturity trends for 2026:
“I see two clear movements for 2026. First, the adoption of AI by companies will continue to accelerate, and those that have not yet incorporated these technologies will begin to feel more clearly the impact of falling behind. Second, we will enter a second phase of AI maturity, where it begins to permeate more complex and strategic processes, acting in direct collaboration with teams and expanding human capacity, not replacing it.”
According to For Ricardo Scarpari, co-founder of Vetto AI, a platform that connects Latin American researchers and experts to global artificial intelligence projects, the AI landscape in the corporate world begins to change in 2026: “What held back AI at scale in the corporate environment was twofold: it still made too many errors for many practical applications, and the pace of evolution was so rapid that there was no incentive to invest in production. In the year 2026, models become ‘good enough’ for enterprise, and improvement becomes more incremental at the core of applications.”
From this, Scarpari states that the competition will come to be defined by proprietary data, which determines who customizes better, makes fewer errors, and captures more value.
According to For Nicolas Silberstein Câmara, CTO and founder of Firecrawl, an open-source platform that transforms unstructured internet pages into data readable by artificial intelligence (AI) systems, the coming year will be marked by a consolidation of the strategic use of the technology in companies, focusing on advanced automation and greater operational efficiency.
“In 2026, the main AI trends point to the growing adoption of autonomous agents capable of performing complex tasks, the advancement of highly specialized models by sector, and the transformation of AI into a central infrastructure for companies, continuously guiding decisions and operations.”.
For For Rodrigo Murta, CEO and co-founder of Looqbox, an AI platform that acts as a “corporate ChatGPT,” facilitating data querying and analysis within companies, the coming year will be a turning point in how humans and machines interact daily, expanding the presence of technology in different environments. “2026 will mark the union of the virtual with the real: assistants at scale in the digital realm and the first steps of domestic assistant robots in the physical world.”.
A Nicole Grossmann, mathematician and economist with a specialization in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction from Georgia Tech, states that 2026 will be marked by the transformation of AI into work infrastructure, automating operational tasks and expanding team efficiency. “AI ceases to be an isolated product and begins to operate behind the scenes, creating presentations, reports, and content from a single prompt, while professionals take on the curation and decisions that truly drive the business.”.
As for Rodrigo Gava, CTO and co-CEO of VULTUS, in the discussion about AI trends for 2026, a risk that can no longer be treated as a detail is the asymmetry it creates in cybersecurity. “AI is lowering the barrier to entry for attacks: knowledge has become a commodity, available and instantaneous. It's like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix saying “I know kung fu,” except in our world, this “skill download” means throwing source code into an LLM and coming out with exploitation hypotheses, reverse engineering, and attack variations that previously required hours of specialized work. At scale, this accelerates campaigns and democratizes techniques once restricted to very mature groups.
The likely result for 2026 tends to be more attacks, faster and with greater impact. The uncomfortable part is that defensive AI does not advance at the same pace: the adversary adopts it immediately, while companies need to purchase, validate, approve, train teams, govern, and go through GMUD. The adversary is “scoring more goals” using AI than cyber defenses are.
In this scenario, deepfakes have become a central vector: they have moved beyond disinformation and entered strongly into fraud and high-precision social engineering, with voice and video. With increasingly better multimodal models and real-time generation, the trend is for human detection to become less reliable; “seeing is believing” becomes a trap. And there is still a preparedness gap: many companies remain stuck simulating basic email phishing campaigns, without simulating these new risks.
The message is simple: the legitimacy of digital media can NO longer depend on human perception. It is necessary to validate identity, sender, channel, and context; check device posture and transaction risk; and continuously simulate adversaries. In the end, the AI disruption pushes cybersecurity to execute the basics very well, but with a much smaller margin for error.”.
According to For Fernanda Weiden, CPTO of Cashews, the coming year will be marked by a new stage of maturity in the use of artificial intelligence within companies. “In 2026 we will see more creation and integration of AI agents that enable autonomous experiences for workflows that previously depended on a human. Furthermore, I also see a great opportunity in AI as a catalyst for human productivity. If before it was necessary to have humans to perform complex data analysis, today it is possible to democratize this type of analysis, so that more business areas can make more data-informed decisions without the need for people specialized in this type of analysis. In software development, we are still on a learning curve. We know that AI creates solutions from zero to one, so we will see more and more products exploring this potential, and soon it will also be more useful in advancing and maintaining existing codebases.”.
For For Felipe Giannetti, executive responsible for the expansion of The best translation of "StackAI" from Portuguese to English is simply **StackAI**. The name "StackAI" is likely a brand name or a specific product/company name. These usually don't get translated. in Brazil, the coming year marks the transition from AI as a tool to AI as infrastructure. “In 2026 we will see the consolidation of truly multimodal models, capable of integrating text, image, audio, and video and bringing a much richer understanding to corporate applications. At the same time, agentic systems evolve to execute complete processes with autonomy and native integration into company software, reducing cycles and manual workload. With more capable agents and more efficient models, the market enters the logic of abundance, where AI removes historical bottlenecks and drives productivity at scale.”.
