AI trends we'll see play out in 2026

Tuesday, 6 January 2026

To some, artificial intelligence (AI) may feel like just another buzzword organisations can’t stop talking about. But this year, the technology — often described as approaching human‑level intelligence — is tipped to become mainstream in the workplace.

Until now, most people have used AI in a personal capacity, turning to tools like ChatGPT for information or inspiration. In 2026, however, many employers are expected to shift from dabbling in the technology to adopting it widely across multiple departments.

Microsoft Australia and New Zealand chief technology officer Sarah Carney said the emergence of agentic AI marked the next evolution of the technology, bringing with it new levels of convenience and productivity.

Agentic AI is a series of agents or systems that can independently set goals, plan, make decisions, and take actions to achieve goals with minimal human intervention.

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The past year has seen a big evolution of AI, Carney said.

“This next 12 months will see the firming up of these human-AI partnerships, and part of that will be how we manage agents as part of a workforce. In 2025 there was lots of AI everywhere, but 2026 will definitely be the year of agentic AI, where you will actually feel or see that far more obviously. Physical AI is probably still a year or two away from being more generally available.”

She said Microsoft had customers such as BMW, which had recently refitted a factory with AI‑infused robots to support its operations, but that this was still very much a testing phase. She believed “embodied AI” was still a few years away from becoming mainstream, and noted — half‑jokingly — that she would happily have a household robot beyond her robotic vacuum, but such technology would take a few more years to become commercially viable.

Businesses that had fully adopted AI, in all or most of their departments - not just in IT, were beginning to see transformation, and interesting use cases of the technology were emerging, Carney said.

She expected small firms to rapidly ramp up their uptake of the technology this year.

She said organisations would move beyond simply giving employees an AI tool and would start thinking about how to reinvent their work entirely — not just adding AI to existing processes, but rethinking what they do from the ground up. That could involve process re‑engineering, she said, and would ultimately lead to better outcomes.

Health and research

Carney said AI in health, healthcare and research would be a hot topic over the next 12 months - areas expected to see significant adoption, and gains.

Whakarongorau Healthline New Zealand was an example of an organisation that had lent into AI to solve common problems, she said.

“One concern is the call they can't quite get to because they've got to put people on hold, and so they're looking at how they use AI to hold people in that moment, long enough for a human to be able to get to them.

“We’ll see a really big uptick in health in the next 12 months, because it will give health providers the ability to get back to the thing they always wanted; to connect with humans,” Carney said.

“You go to the doctor and they spend so much time taking notes, filling forms and doing admin that they’re losing the opportunity to spend more time talking to you … so I think health and the ability to get back to what it is they all joined the field to do with AI will be powerful.”

Carney said the use of AI to accelerate research was also “emerging strongly”. “The Government went to tender recently for organisations to help support and administer funds designed to do AI research, and so you can see how New Zealand can see this is the next trend.”

Alongside increasing productivity and freeing workers from menial tasks to focus on those that added more value, an unintended consequence of AI adoption had been driving inclusivity, Carney said, with the tech able to quickly bridge education and access gaps.

New Zealand had so far lagged behind the global average for AI adoption, falling short of where it might be expected to sit as a developed nation. Carney attributed that partly to a lack of skills and understanding.

“Diffusion of the technology has been shown time and time again across hundreds of years. The faster the any technology, whether it's electricity, computers, mobile phones, the faster it diffuses, the greater economic benefit there is, and so we’re hoping we can get there in Australia and New Zealand over the next 12 months, so that we can start to realise some economic benefit.”

Vista Group, a global leader in film industry software, including cinema management and distribution and view engagement, was another local firm widely using AI and reaping the gains, said Carney.

She said history had repeatedly shown that the faster a technology spread — whether electricity, computers or mobile phones — the greater the economic benefit. She added that they hoped Australia and New Zealand would reach that point within the next 12 months so the countries could begin to realise those economic gains.

AI tools

As more companies and workplaces rolled out AI tools, those that didn’t - or didn’t have comparable systems that made life easier and more creative for staff, would risk losing talent, Carney said.

“It will be become more and more of a challenge, and we've seen that from our own customers who deployed Copilot. We asked our team if we took it away whether they'd still work for us and they said no.

She said AI had become a genuine retention tool, and that employees would increasingly expect to have access to it. In a competitive talent market, she said, people would naturally gravitate toward organisations offering these tools — especially graduates who had developed their skills with AI at university and wanted to put them to use. She warned this would lead to a battle for talent.

Great governance in an organisation could help people lean in, use the tools and build confidence in adopting the technology in existing systems, Carney said.