Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2026

Forrester Names Its Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2026, Led by AI Moving Into the Physical World

Research firm Forrester has released its annual Top 10 Emerging Technologies report for 2026, and the headline finding is a shift in AI’s center of gravity: from digital workflows into physical environments. The report frames this as a pivotal transition, with AI now powering robots, vehicles, and ambient experiences that are beginning to reshape how people communicate, work, and buy.

The report structures its list around three benefit horizons — short-term, medium-term, and long-term — giving enterprise leaders a framework for pacing their investments rather than chasing every trend at once. Forrester publicly highlighted five technologies across those horizons, while the full ten-item list remains behind a client paywall. A sixth — frontier AI models — has been confirmed via a companion webinar series, and the report’s introductory framing strongly implies autonomous vehicles and ambient AI round out the physical-world tier of the list.

On the short-term side, Forrester flags agentic commerce and AI security and trust technologies as ready for serious investment within the next two years. Agentic commerce, which involves AI agents handling purchasing and personalization tasks on behalf of users, is expected to deliver ROI first in owned environments such as brand apps and websites. Broader adoption across third-party ecosystems will take longer as the underlying infrastructure matures. AI security and trust technologies are flagged as urgent for sectors where predictive models drive high-stakes decisions — financial services, healthcare, and government in particular — as agentic AI deployments create new governance and control requirements.

The medium-term bracket covers technologies that offer larger rewards but demand more patience and risk tolerance. Agentic software development — where AI agents generate, test, and iterate on code across the full development lifecycle — is expected to meaningfully accelerate software delivery, but Forrester cautions that agent coordination remains immature and stronger guardrails are still needed before the gains become systematic. Humanoid robots also land in the medium-term tier. Forrester sees physical AI and robotics eventually eliminating labor bottlenecks across industries, but notes that integration complexity, safety requirements, workforce adaptation, and data challenges will limit near-term impact.

Frontier AI models, confirmed as a list entry through Forrester’s own webinar programming, occupy a different role in the framework — positioned less as an application-layer technology and more as the foundational infrastructure enabling breakthroughs in reasoning, multimodal understanding, and autonomous action. The report points to use cases in science, engineering, and complex decision-making.

Quantum computing is the sole long-term entry in the publicly disclosed findings. Forrester acknowledges real progress in hardware, algorithms, and hybrid architectures, but maintains that broad commercial value remains years away. Financial services, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing are identified as the sectors most likely to benefit first, particularly in optimization, simulation, cryptography, and materials science.

The report’s framing is arguably as interesting as its list. Forrester is explicitly positioning 2026 as the year AI stops being primarily a software phenomenon. The mention of vehicles and ambient experiences in the executive summary, alongside humanoid robots, suggests the remaining undisclosed entries deal with autonomous mobility and ambient or edge AI — though those specific items are not confirmed in publicly available materials.

Sharyn Leaver, Forrester’s chief research officer, summarized the intent of the framework as helping leaders spread risk across timeframes rather than concentrating bets on a single wave of technology: identify the short-term plays that can deliver returns quickly, while building the institutional knowledge needed to capture longer-horizon opportunities when they mature.