Three years since ChatGPT supercharged the AI field, predicting the future of the fast-changing technology is not for the faint of heart. But one sure bet is that, in the last weeks of the year, our inboxes will bulge with experts who want to give it a go anyway.

Many of last year’s predictions concerned the onset of AI agents. Now they’re more or less here, and businesses will be increasingly focused on getting them to work together, trusting them, and dealing with the risks they might present, our experts seem to agree.

There remains an undercurrent of worry about ROI still being somewhat TBD, and fears of an AI bubble have heightened in recent months. World models, another not-entirely-new term that’s somewhat definitionally vague, are suddenly seeing more interest as a potential way to give LLMs better bearings.

Here are some of the major themes that tech pros told us might define AI development in 2026.

Agents in concert: Those AI agents that companies have “hired” may be in need of some trust falls at a corporate retreat. Coordinating between agents and making them more trustworthy were big topics among prognosticators.

How businesses are able to array agents to handle complex processes will be more important than tapping the most sophisticated model, PwC’s advisory chief technology and information officer, Vikas Agarwal, told us.

“People that look at that whole chain…will have a lot of measurable outcomes,” Agarwal said. “And I believe there are going to be winners and losers in a separation of people that think about the approaches from that way.”

Keep reading here.—PK

After well over a hundred years bearing the scrawny “emerging technology” tag, is geothermal energy about to pop off?

Earlier this year, Tech Brew reported that despite being pioneered at the start of the 20th century, geothermal energy is still considered emerging tech in the US. Geothermal expert and Cornell University Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems Jefferson Tester told us at the time that geothermal struggled to compete with other renewable energy sources like wind and solar because “you can’t look at a geothermal system underground like you can look at a wind turbine or a solar field.”

What a difference a couple of months makes: After the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” kickstarted a rapid sunset of clean energy tax credits for solar and wind power, but preserved production and investment subsidies for geothermal, all eyes are on the underground energy resource. And geothermal pros we talked with said they’re ready to take advantage of the tech’s big moment.

“We’re at an inflection point for geothermal,” Dawn Owens, Fervo Energy’s head of project development and commercial markets, told Tech Brew. “It’s finally ready to take off.”

Keep reading here.—TC

When you think electronic health records (EHR), you likely think of Epic, as the healthcare software company has records for 325 million patients and is the largest in the US.

And when you think of the modernization of the EHR, you may think of AI scribes like Ambience, Suki, and Abridge, the note-taking assistants designed to speed up clinical documentation.

Scribes can save physicians 15,000+ hours in work per year, a 2025 study published in the journal NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery reported, and between $200 billion to $360 billion in annual healthcare spending, McKinsey and Harvard researchers reported.

But in September, the inevitable happened: Epic announced it was developing its own AI tools, including Art, an AI scribe that will, like other apps, share medical information with clinicians in real time. It’s part of Epic’s “native AI charting” developed in partnership with Microsoft, and is expected to launch for “limited use” early next year, a spokesperson from the company told Healthcare Brew and other outlets.

So what will happen to the scribe startups when the EHR giant releases its own AI tools?

Experts told Healthcare Brew they expect some market shift, but think their technologies provide strong value to providers.

Keep reading here.—CM