AI is entering a new phase, one defined by real-world impact.

After several years of experimentation, 2026 is shaping up to be the year AI evolves from instrument to partner, transforming how we work, create and solve problems. Across industries, AI is moving beyond answering questions to collaborating with people and amplifying their expertise.

This transformation is visible everywhere. In medicine, AI is helping close gaps in care. In software development, it’s learning not just code but the context behind it. In scientific research, it’s becoming a true lab assistant. In quantum computing, new hybrid approaches are heralding breakthroughs once thought impossible.

As AI agents become digital colleagues and take on specific tasks at human direction, organizations are strengthening security to keep pace with new risks. The infrastructure powering these advances is also maturing, with smarter, more efficient systems.

These seven trends to watch in 2026 show what’s possible when people join forces with AI.

Aparna Chennapragada, Microsoft’s chief product officer for AI experiences, sees 2026 as a new era for alliances between technology and people. If recent years were about AI answering questions and reasoning through problems, the next wave will be about true collaboration, Chennapragada says.

“The future isn’t about replacing humans,” she says. “It’s about amplifying them.”

AI agents are set to become digital coworkers, she says, helping individuals and small teams punch above their weight. Chennapragada envisions a workplace where a three-person team can launch a global campaign in days, with AI handling data crunching, content generation and personalization while humans steer strategy and creativity. She predicts organizations that design for people to learn and work with AI “will get the best of both worlds,” helping teams tackle bigger creative challenges and deliver results faster.

Her advice for professionals: Don’t compete with AI, but focus on learning how to work alongside it. The coming year, she says, “belongs to those who elevate the human role, not eliminate it.”

AI agents will proliferate in 2026 and play a bigger role in daily work, acting more like teammates than tools, says Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of Microsoft Security. As organizations rely on these agents to help with tasks and decision-making, building trust in them will be essential, Jakkal says — starting with security.

“Every agent should have similar security protections as humans,” she says, “to ensure agents don’t turn into ‘double agents’ carrying unchecked risk.”

That means giving each agent a clear identity, limiting what information and systems it can access, managing the data it creates and protecting it from attackers and threats, Jakkal says. Security will become ambient, autonomous and built-in, she says, not something added on later. In addition, as attackers use AI in new ways, defenders will use security agents to spot those threats and respond faster, she says.

“Trust is the currency of innovation,” Jakkal says, making these shifts vital to helping organizations keep up with new risks as AI continues to become more central to how work gets done.

AI in healthcare is marking a turning point, says Dr. Dominic King, vice president of health at Microsoft AI.

“We’ll see evidence of AI moving beyond expertise in diagnostics and extending into areas like symptom triage and treatment planning,” King says. “Importantly, progress will start to move from research settings into the real world, with new generative AI products and services available to millions of consumers and patients.”

That shift matters because access to care is a global crisis. The World Health Organization projects a shortage of 11 million health workers by 2030 — a gap that leaves 4.5 billion people without essential health services.

King points to achievements demonstrated in 2025 by Microsoft AI’s Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO), which solved complex medical cases with 85.5% accuracy, far above the 20% average for experienced physicians. With Copilot and Bing already answering more than 50 million health questions daily, he sees advances in AI as a way to give people more influence and control over their own health and wellbeing.

 AI is already speeding up breakthroughs in fields like climate modeling, molecular dynamics and materials design, says Peter Lee, president of Microsoft Research. But the next leap is coming. In 2026, AI won’t just summarize papers, answer questions and write reports — it will actively join the process of discovery in physics, chemistry and biology.

“AI will generate hypotheses, use tools and apps that control scientific experiments, and collaborate with both human and AI research colleagues,” Lee says.

This shift is creating a world where every research scientist soon could have an AI lab assistant that can suggest new experiments and even run parts of them. That’s the logical next step, Lee says, building on how AI works alongside developers with “pair programming,” for example, and uses apps to automate everyday tasks like shopping and scheduling in other domains.

It’s a transformation that promises to accelerate research and change how scientific discoveries are made, he says.

 AI’s growth isn’t just about building more and bigger datacenters anymore, says Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer, deputy chief information security officer and technical fellow for Microsoft Azure. The next wave is about making every ounce of computing power count.

“The most effective AI infrastructure will pack computing power more densely across distributed networks,” Russinovich says. Next year will see the rise of flexible, global AI systems — a new generation of linked AI “superfactories” — that will drive down costs and improve efficiency, he says.

AI will be “measured by the quality of intelligence it produces, not just its sheer size,” he says.

Think of it like air traffic control for AI workloads: Computing power will be packed more densely and routed dynamically so nothing sits idle. If one job slows, another moves in instantly — ensuring every cycle and watt is put to work. This shift will translate into smarter, more sustainable and more adaptable infrastructure to power AI innovations on a global scale, Russinovich says.

Software development is exploding, with activity on GitHub reaching new levels in 2025. Each month, developers merged 43 million pull requests — a 23% increase from the prior year in one of the main ways teams propose and review changes to their code. The annual number of commits pushed, which track those changes, jumped 25% year-over-year to 1 billion. The unprecedented pace signals a major shift in the industry as AI becomes increasingly central to how software is built and improved.

Mario Rodriguez, GitHub’s chief product officer, says that sheer volume is why 2026 will bring a new edge: “repository intelligence.” In plain terms, it means AI that understands not just lines of code but the relationships and history behind them.

By analyzing patterns in code repositories — the central hubs where teams store and organize everything they build — AI can figure out what changed, why and how pieces fit together. That context helps it make smarter suggestions, catch errors earlier and even automate routine fixes. The result will be higher quality software that helps developers move faster, Rodriguez says.

“It’s clear we’re at an inflection point,” he says. Repository intelligence “will become a competitive advantage by providing the structure and context for smarter, more reliable AI.”

Quantum computing has long felt like science fiction. But researchers are entering a “years, not decades” era where quantum machines will start tackling problems classical computers can’t, says Jason Zander, executive vice president of Microsoft Discovery and Quantum. That looming breakthrough, called quantum advantage, could help solve society’s toughest challenges, Zander says.

What’s different now is the rise of hybrid computing, where quantum works alongside AI and supercomputers. AI finds patterns in data. Supercomputers run massive simulations. And quantum adds a new layer that will drive far greater accuracy for modeling molecules and materials, he says. This progress coincides with advances in logical qubits, which are physical quantum bits grouped together so they can detect and correct errors and compute — a critical step toward reliability.

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 marks a major development toward more robust quantum systems, Zander says. It’s the first quantum chip built using topological qubits, a design that inherently makes fragile qubits more stable and reliable. It’s also the only quantum solution engineered to catch and correct errors. That architecture paves the way for machines with millions of qubits on a single chip, providing the processing power needed for complex scientific and industrial problems.

“Quantum advantage will drive breakthroughs in materials, medicine and more,” Zander says. “The future of AI and science won’t just be faster, it will be fundamentally redefined.”

Lead image created by Kathy Oneha / We. Communications. Illustrations produced with Create in Microsoft 365 Copilot. Story published on Dec. 8, 2025.