AI Trends 2026: A Mid-Year Reading From the Engine Room

The 12 AI trends that actually matter at the 2026 mid-year mark are: MCP becoming the default integration protocol, agentic AI moving from pilot to production, multi-LLM memory as the new differentiator, voice agents reaching consumer scale, generative UI rendering inside chat, GEO replacing parts of classic SEO, small specialized models beating big ones on cost, 1M token context arriving in production, tool-use as the universal layer, AI coding agents crossing 3 million weekly users, EU AI Act