2026 Will Be the Year AI Gets Practical

[etfs]

If 2025 was about testing AI’s limits, 2026 is shaping up to be the year the technology becomes genuinely usable. Experts see the industry moving away from chasing ever-larger language models and toward making AI fit cleanly into real workflows, products, and devices. The shift is from flashy demos to targeted deployments that solve specific problems.

This transition reflects a broader “sobering up” across the sector. Instead of brute-force scaling, teams are focusing on smaller models, better architectures, and tighter integration with how humans actually work—marking a clear evolution from hype to utility.

[mendez]

“above the api” is such a clean way to put it, nobody wants to be replaced by a webhook