2026 Predictions for Agentic AI
Thinkers360 2026 Predictions for Agentic AI are member-sourced from our opt-in B2B thought leader, analyst and influencer community with 100M+ followers on social media combined. The 2026 Predictions for Agentic AI are part of a series to provide actionable insights for business and technology executives.
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We asked a selection of Thinkers360 global thought leaders, analysts and influencers about their predictions for Agentic AI in 2026.
2026: The Year Agentic AI Moves from Experiment to Autonomous Partner
The consensus among Thinkers360 thought leaders is that 2026 will be the inflection point where Agentic AI transcends simple experimentation and becomes a foundational, transformative force in the enterprise. This shift will fundamentally reshape organizational structures, competitive dynamics, and the very nature of work.
Michael Gale (Chief Marketing Officer, EDB) predicts 2026 is when the road to success will be laid out in front of everybody, urging companies to “Copy the leaders not the dreamers”. He highlights that only 13% of enterprises currently have the right foundation for success, achieving a ROI due to their commitment to compliance and “heuristic control.” He foresees mainstreaming Agentic AI in over of enterprises, driven by executives being open to the “hard discussions” required for existential success.
Kathleen Walch (Director, AI Engagement and Community, Project Management Institute) sees Agentic AI evolving from task executors to “strategic collaborators,” proactively managing resources and mitigating risks. She asserts that 2026 must be the year organizations establish foundational Agentic AI governance—defining agent roles, establishing human-in-the-loop protocols for critical decisions, and creating strict auditability and transparency standards to responsibly scale this transformative potential.
Pascal Bornet (Keynote Speaker, Best-selling Author and Social Media Influencer at Intelligent Automation) believes 2026 will mark the end of “goldfish memory” in AI agents with the arrival of production-ready persistent memory architectures. This will transform agents into trusted partners and unlock the “agent-to-agent economy.” He warns of “exponential competitive divergence,” where early adopters will have an insurmountable learning advantage, similar to the early internet era.
Michael Fauscette (CEO and Chief Analyst, Arion Research, LLC) echoes this, seeing agents move beyond assistive tools to “autonomous digital teammates” that act, decide, and collaborate. He predicts the emergence of Agent Ecosystems coordinating across departments and companies, and a dominance of Governance and Ethics by Design alongside Decentralized Governance and Agentic AI Ops to manage this new hybrid digital workforce.
Other experts focus on the structural and philosophical shifts this will enable:
- Indira Bunic (EmpowerU Ignite Your Leadership Journey) predicts a shift from “Smart AI” to “Wise AI”—or “Beautiful Intelligence”—where the technology is guided by human perception, context, meaning, and subjective values, prioritizing the potential to serve both technology and humanity.
- Geetha Ramamoorthi (KBR, Inc.) states that “Work will get Agentified!” moving pilots into production, flattening traditional pyramid organizational structures by reducing middle management, and ushering in an era of modularized agentic components and agent stores.
- Douglas Laney (BARC) looks slightly further ahead, predicting that by 2028, we will see the first billion-dollar company run almost completely by a “workforce” of AI agents, enabling the “Self-Driving Organization.”
In short, 2026 will not just be about using Agentic AI, but about building the governance, memory, and organizational structures necessary to harness its true potential as an autonomous, strategic, and profoundly competitive asset.
Read on to explore our expert panelists’ opinions in depth and join us on Thinkers360.com to be part of the conversation!
What are your Predictions for Agentic AI in 2026?
2026 is when the road to success will be laid out in front of everybody.
Only 13% of enterprises have built the right foundations for agentic and gen AI success. They get 5X the ROI of others who have not made the commitment to heuristic control and compliance of all their data no matter where it is.
Trend One. Copy the leaders not the dreamers in 2026
This pattern will be replicated more and more as others see the success of their peers doing this. In BFIS we will see others copy the successes of companies like BNY, JPMC. Mastercard, STC bank and others. They all are successful because of the conscious choice to be sovereign in how they do this.
Trend Two. Power comes with secure democracy
Companies get power with agentic when it touches deep across business functions. We get past experimentation in 2026 as mainstreaming agentic becomes common in 40% + of enterprises.
Trend Three: Leaders need to have the hard discussions
The 13% who win now will become the 19% that likely win in 2026. The number one driver for agentic success will be executives being open to the hard conversations that will drive this. 2026 will see a lot more of these discussions being existential as they see the success of others.
– Michael Gale, Chief Marketing Officer, EDB
In 2026, Agentic AI will begin to reshape industries and roles across the enterprise. From operations and customer service to product development and project management, these agents will evolve from task executors to strategic collaborators. They’ll proactively initiate actions, coordinate resources, adjust timelines, and mitigate risks, often without waiting for human prompts.
Yet most organizations remain in the early stages of adoption, experimenting with isolated agents and lacking the governance frameworks needed to manage these autonomous systems responsibly. Without clear oversight, the risk of misalignment, over-delegation, and opaque decision-making grows.
2026 must be the year organizations establish foundational Agentic AI governance. This includes:
Defining agent roles and boundaries: Clarify what agents are allowed to decide, escalate, or execute autonomously across different functions.
Establishing human-in-the-loop protocols: Ensure oversight mechanisms are in place for critical, ethical, or high-impact decisions.
Creating auditability and transparency standards: Make agent actions traceable and explainable to stakeholders across departments.
Upskilling employees and leaders: Equip teams to manage hybrid environments where humans and AI agents collaborate in real time.
Organizations that treat 2026 as a governance inflection point will be better positioned to scale Agentic AI responsibly and unlock its transformative potential across industries to unlock its full potential in project delivery.
– Kathleen Walch, Director, AI Engagement and Community, Project Management Institute
I believe 2026 will mark the end of “goldfish memory” in AI agents. We’ll finally see persistent memory architectures become production-ready, allowing agents to remember every interaction, learn from accumulated experiences, and build institutional knowledge over time. This breakthrough will fundamentally transform our relationship with agents—from disposable tools to trusted partners that grow with us. More importantly, it will unlock the agent-to-agent economy, where agents can coordinate autonomously, share accumulated expertise, and create value through their collective intelligence without constant human intervention.
In 2026, I also believe we’ll witness what I call “exponential competitive divergence.” Organizations that embrace agentic AI now won’t just gain incremental advantages—they’ll fundamentally operate in different competitive dimensions. The companies implementing agents today will have two years of accumulated learning by 2026, creating gaps so significant that competitors simply cannot catch up. We’re seeing a pattern similar to the early internet era, where early adopters didn’t just succeed—they defined entire categories.
– Pascal Bornet, Keynote Speaker, Best-selling Author and Social Media Influencer at Intelligent Automation
Beyond Smart to Wise: How Beautiful Intelligence Will Redefine Agentic AI in 2026
2026 will mark the year that AI moves away from demos and into what it truly means to weave human intelligence into systems – manifest in AI with conscious leadership principles baked into its core architecture. The Next Big Thing will be AI that doesn’t just process data but acts in ways that are directly guided by perception, context, meaning, and subjective values as well as reasoning about them with more speculative “what if” scenarios toward a future high-level perspective formation. And companies will find that the most effective AI does what true leaders have always done: prioritizes from a point of view that values their potential to serve technology and humanity. And as we evolve from “smart AI” to “wise AI,” this will demand new leadership that can wield the human capacity and potential of artificial intelligence toward collective flourishing.
– Indira Bunic, EmpowerU Ignite Your Leadership Journey
The Self-Driving Organization
By 2028 we will see the first billion dollar company run almost completely by a “workforce” of AI agents. This interconnected end-to-end automation will enable unprecedented levels of performance, agility, competitiveness, innovation, and regulatory governance and compliance.
– Douglas Laney, BARC
Work will get Agentified!
Agentic AI adoption will move into mainstream business and disrupt organizations’ operating models and transform organizational structures. Pyramid structures will get flatter with fewer people in the middle management. The current pilots in Agentic AI will move into production and we will see more use cases in 2026. We will enter the era of modularized agentic components and agent stores – digital platforms offering such components will start to proliferate, making adoption easier and effortless.
– Geetha Ramamoorthi, KBR, Inc.
2026 marks the year AI becomes truly agentic; moving beyond assistive tools to autonomous digital teammates that act, decide, and collaborate across enterprise ecosystems.Organizations will accelerate deployment of specialized agents in sales, service, operations, and compliance, achieving measurable gains in productivity, accuracy, and decision velocity. Agent ecosystems will emerge; networks of interoperable agents that coordinate across departments and even between companies, forming new digital value chains.A defining evolution will occur in AI governance. Two complementary approaches will dominate:
- Governance and Ethics by Design, embedding transparency, safety, and accountability directly into agentic architectures and workflows.
- Decentralized Governance and Agentic AI Ops, where oversight becomes continuous and adaptive, managed by autonomous monitoring agents and dedicated AI operations teams.
By the end of 2026, forward-looking enterprises will operate hybrid digital workforces; humans and AI agents working side-by-side through natural language and shared goals. The winners will be those who design for trust, interoperability, and ethical governance from day one.– Michael Fauscette, CEO and Chief Analyst, Arion Research, LLC
To see the full set of predictions in the Thinkers360 Predictions Series, please visit our Predictions page. Have comments on these predictions, or predictions of your own? Please join the community at Thinkers360.com and follow us on LinkedIn, X and YouTube to share your insights!
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