Every year brings a new wave of AI predictions. Most are hype. Here’s what I actually think will matter.
2024 was about prompt engineering—learning how to talk to AI. 2025 was about context engineering and agents—learning how to make AI useful. 2026 will be about something bigger: scaling AI across the entire company.
Not just for developers. Not just for data teams. Everyone.
I’m sharing three perspectives on what this means:
Multi-agent orchestration — The shift from single agents to coordinated teams of specialized agents working in parallel.
Enabling AI company-wide — Why CTOs must make safe, effective AI tools available to everyone—before shadow AI fills the gap.
Everyone builds their own agents — The most important shift: empowering every employee to create and own AI agents that automate their work.
These aren’t speculative. They’re pragmatic bets on where the value will come from in 2026.
2024 was the year of prompt engineering. 2025 was the year of context engineering and AI agents.
My take: 2026 will be the year of multi-agent orchestration—multiple specialized agents working in parallel with shared memory and context.
Here’s what that means in practice:
An architect agent reasons deeply about a problem and creates a plan. It then delegates individual tasks to the right agents for the job. Writing straightforward code? A fast, lightweight agent. Testing whether a new feature actually works? That might need deep thinking and multimodal capabilities to understand the UI, the logs, and the expected behavior.
The skill isn’t just “use more agents.” It’s knowing which agent for which task—and orchestrating them effectively.
Your value shifts from writing code to delivering value faster. You’ll spend more time directing agents, verifying results, and catching what matters: bugs and security flaws.
Clean code aesthetics? They matter less now—AI can read and refactor messy code just fine. But buggy or insecure code is the real risk. When you’re not writing the code yourself, how do you catch the problems? That’s the skill to develop.
Legacy code you don’t understand? Just ask AI to explain it—or better yet, have it make the changes for you.
Software craftsmanship isn’t dead. But it’s no longer the differentiator. In 2026, what sets you apart is the combination of judgment, the courage to push limits, and the ability to compress time to value. The landscape is shifting fast—and the most valuable skill is constantly discovering what’s possible and helps to deliver value more effectively.
As a CTO in 2026, your job isn’t just to adopt AI for engineering—it’s to enable everyone in the company to use AI. Not optional. Not “nice to have.” This is an imperative.
Here’s the reality: 78% of AI users bring their own tools to work—and 52% won’t even admit they’re doing it (CloudSphere, 2025). They’re not being malicious. They’re trying to be productive. And if you don’t give them approved tools, they’ll find their own.
Shadow AI is already inside your company. The question is whether you’re going to fight it or channel it.
Give people tools they can safely use with company data. This doesn’t mean chasing whatever went viral on LinkedIn last week—it means providing tools that do the job well, with proper security and data governance. If the approved option is good enough, people won’t go looking elsewhere.
Rethink how you train people to use AI. Forget scheduled training sessions that are outdated by the time they happen. AI is moving too fast. Instead, build a culture of continuous knowledge sharing—colleagues learning from each other, pairing with AI-savvy team members, sharing what’s working in real time.
And set a goal: every employee tries to use AI to solve a problem at least once per quarter. Make it a company KPI. If it doesn’t work today, things will have progressed enough to solve it next quarter. The point is to keep pushing, keep experimenting, and keep learning—because standing still means falling behind.
This isn’t a one-time initiative. It’s ongoing. The tools will keep evolving, and your people need to evolve with them.
Here’s my most important prediction for 2026: everyone in the company—not just developers—needs to be able to build and own their own AI agents.
Not “use AI tools someone else built.” Build their own. To automate the boring, repetitive tasks that drain their time and energy, so they can focus on creating value.
The numbers back this up: knowledge workers could automate 30–70% of their current tasks with AI (McKinsey). Organizations using workflow automation are reducing operational costs by up to 30% (Gartner, 2025). And by 2026, business-user developers will outnumber professional developers 4:1.
This isn’t about job loss. It’s about job evolution. AI agents won’t take over the world—but they might take over your inbox. And that’s a good thing.
You need to provide three things:
Tools and platforms — Give people no-code or low-code tools to create and orchestrate agents. Make it easy to start, with templates and guardrails built in.
Training and knowledge sharing — Help people figure out what to automate and how. This isn’t a one-time workshop—it’s continuous peer learning and idea sharing.
Expert support — Pair business users with AI-savvy team members who can help them set things up and solve problems. Not gatekeepers—enablers.
Yes, this creates governance challenges. Yes, you’ll need guardrails to prevent a mess of ungoverned automations. But the alternative—centralizing all AI development in IT—is too slow. The companies that win will be the ones that trust their people to build, with the right support and oversight in place.
Everyone creates. Everyone owns. That’s how you scale AI across the enterprise.
The companies that win in 2026 will be the ones that trust their people to build.
Not just use AI. Build with it. Own it. Push its limits.
The landscape is shifting fast. What works today won’t work in six months. The most valuable skill isn’t mastering any specific tool—it’s constantly testing what’s now possible.
2026 won’t reward the companies with the best AI strategy on paper. It will reward the ones that move fastest, learn continuously, and put AI in the hands of everyone.
That’s the bet I’m making. What’s yours?
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