By Anabelle Nicoud
Publication Date: 2026-01-01 12:00:00
A year in tech can feel like a decade anywhere else.
Think about it: a year ago, we were discussing how ChatGPT wasn’t able to count the number of “r”s in “strawberry.” Reasoning models from Chinese frontier labs (like DeepSeek-R1) hadn’t taken the world by storm, and neither had open-source reasoning agents.
Claude’s dedicated coding agent didn’t exist yet. IBM’s Granite 3.0 had only just arrived. And the agent conversation was only beginning: MCP had just gained traction in the spring, with a notable endorsement from Sam Altman.
Meanwhile, in the world of infrastructure, chips and compute resources were becoming scarce, giving new territories a competitive advantage.
Over the last few weeks, IBM Think spoke with a dozen experts in tech—researchers, founders and leaders from IBM and beyond—to get their insights on what to expect in the year ahead. Each one shared a common belief for the year ahead: the pace of innovation won’t slow down in…