Al in 2026: Buzz to real value

The question is no longer what Al can do, but where will it realistically deliver value

- AVIK DAS, SHIVANI SHINDE & AASHISH ARYAN

After over two years of hype, experimentation and big expectations, artificial intelligence (AI) enters 2026 at a more sobering —and consequential— note.

‘The question is no longer what AI can do, but where will it realistically deliver value.

While the hype around artificial general intelligence (AGI) has waned a little, AI agents are now reshaping how work gets done.

Legal battles over data are inching toward negotiated frameworks. The fight for AI supremacy is shifting from models to chips and infrastructure. And governments, including that of India, are asserting greater control over where data, compute and intelligence reside.

From agents and chips to sovereignty and security, here are the AI developments that are likely to define 2026— and those that will remain over the horizon for time to come.

AGI, still along way ahead

AGI or artificial general intelligence is an AI system that can apply knowledge to solve any problem or complete an intellectual task as humans do.

Till last year, many wondered and also bet that AGI will be available by 2026. Some of the people who predicted this include Elon Musk, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among others. The reason for the optimism was the speed with which AI systems were progressing.

However, closer to the end of 2025 that narrative changed. AI heavyweights such as Andrej Karpathy and Demis Hassabis believe that this could be at least a decade away.

Karpathy in a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel said, “We have some very early agents that are extremely impressive and that I use daily — Claude and Codex and so on— but I still feel there’s so much work to be done. My reaction is we'll be working with these things for a decade.”

Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, in a media briefing, has also said that AGI will start to emerge in the next five to 10 years.