2026: The Year AI Moves from “Tool” to “Teammate”

🤝 The Rise of the “AI Coworker”
Enterprise agents are evolving beyond chat. They are becoming teammates that observe, learn, and remember. These agents will collect institutional knowledge like their human counterparts, recall past decisions, and learn from past tasks. They are built to work on a longer horizon!
🚀 Solving the Unsolvable
AI is cracking problems that have been unsolved for decades. David Budden’s recent attempt to solve the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem using AI is an example of AI playing the role of top-tier (1%) mathematicians. On a larger scale, some startups such as Harmonic are founded around this goal.
⚗️ Science at the Speed of AI
Expect the first few “self-driving labs” where AI agents formulate hypotheses and run physical experiments, turning the scientific method into a high-velocity loop. In these labs, the “brain” has a “body” too! Models understand gravity and spatial reasoning as well as chemical and biological science. An example is Periodic Labs.