AI in 2026: The Age of Reasoning Web, Physical AI, and the Human Premium
2026: The year AI gets a body—from Waymo's autonomous streets to humanoid robots on factory floors—while the web shifts from clicks to synthesis.
Welcome to Dharma of AI. Find here essay on AI’s true nature, the world it’s quietly building, and our place within that new order. A journey beyond hype and fear into what AI really is. By Jaspreet Bindra—The Tech Whisperer.
Happy New Year!
IPO Boom: Anthropic at about $300 billion, SpaceX at $800 billion, Sam Altman dreaming of a $1 trillion OpenAI IPO. If 2025 saw big IPOs in the Indian tech space, 2026 is where the Big Boys of AI and tech will rock the NASDAQ. While Anthropic with its focused enterprise and code generation approach, and Musk’s SpaceX sending and bringing rockets down like clockwork are shoo-ins for the IPO bacchanalia, the OpenAI one will be looked at with most interest. Google has stolen OpenAI’s crown in the latter half of 2025, and GPT 5.2, OpenAI’s latest model, has not exactly set the house on fire. So, unless he pulls a rabbit out of the hat, the $1 trillion valuation looks like a road too far…
Nvidia continues to rule: Bubble or no bubble, Jensen Huang and Nvidia will continue to rule the AI world. There are barbarians at the gate, with Google’s TPUs promising real competition, and the Chinese building up their own tech and being directed to shun the A200s of Nvidia. But even if Nvidia’s market share were to come down, they would still have a slightly lesser share of an expanded market. Jensen is adept at creating new markets – robotics and physical AI will be the next, a new way of computing, and of keeping both Trump and China happy. The FT Man of the Year 2025 will continue to be King in 2026.
Physical AI (Robotics): 2026 will be the year AI gets a body. Humanoid robots will leave R&D labs and enter warehouses and factories for pilot deployments at scale. The first ones are already out, except they look like a car – autonomous cars, led by Waymo! The company is providing over 250,000 paid trips each week. But what’s happening in 2026 is mind-blowing. Waymo is planning to expand to more than 20 new cities, and here’s the kicker—London will be their first international market, with testing also underway in Tokyo. Thus, physical AI isn’t coming. It’s already here, driving you to dinner.
There will be a correction in AI valuations. There is lots of substance in the AI boom, but there is way too much hype. The signs are there – cross holdings, lots of debt being raised, AI-washing by a bunch of get-rich-quick players, enterprises taking their own time adopting AI. However, this bubble will pop with a less satisfying sound than the dotcom one or the 2008 financial one. The BigTechs at the centre of this boom have robust businesses spewing out gobs of cash, and they can afford a downturn or two. The technology is real, and the fastest growing ever. The pace of innovation is furious, and there is more depth here with infra to models to applications. But, yes there will be a pop, and it will be a good thing. (See my article here).
The ‘Reasoning’ Web: Search engines will fully transition to ‘Answer Engines.’ (as coined first by Perplexity). Web traffic to static sites will be affected as AI browsers synthesize answers rather than providing blue links. The WWW will need a new business model. The WWW was built on clicks; the Reasoning Web is built on synthesis. We need to figure out how creators get paid, or we’ll kill the very content these AI systems need to train on.
Quantum AI Glimmers: We will see the first proof-of-concept “Quantum Machine Learning” algorithms running on early fault-tolerant quantum computers, promising exponential speedups. While quantum computing stocks have been on a tear, the reality check is coming. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said “very useful” quantum computers are probably about two decades away. Google’s Sundar Pichai pegged it at 5-10 years minimum, comparing it to where AI was in the 2010s. The quantum computing market is projected to reach just $4 billion by 2030, compared to AI revenue forecast of $390 billion in 2025.
The “Human Premium”: As AI content floods the internet, “Verified Human” content will become a luxury good. Brands will market “Human-Made” as a premium differentiator. As AI becomes more powerful, the value of humans will increase. As Sangeet Paul Choudary says eloquently, “Humans will become a luxury good” as the world distinguishes true human connection and creativity from the AI Slop inundating our neural pathways.
AI in Governance: Corporate Boards will begin using “AI Board Members” (observer seats) to provide data-driven, unemotional risk analysis during strategic meetings. AI literacy will become a KPI as Boards, regulators and education ministries will start asking for measurable AI literacy programmes, not just generic “digital skills” talk.
AI will continue to impact jobs. We saw the first signs in 2025 where entry level cognitive jobs were most impacted. This will continue and accelerate in 2026, as more sectors beyond software and customer service start getting impacted. This will create societal dissatisfaction and a backlash. It will also lead to structural changes in companies (Humans + agents), education (more of humanities) and the way young people look at jobs going forward.
Military AI Escalation: The wars of 2025 were fought with more drones than humans. Operation Sindoor, Ukraine v/s Russia, to an extent in the Middle East. This trend will accelerate in 2026 and beyond as autonomous drone swarms and robot soldier armies will become the standard deterrent in geopolitical conflicts, sparking a new Geneva Convention discussion on LAWs or “Lethal Autonomous Weapons.” Companies like Anduril and Chinese drone makers will gain.
Cognitive Atrophy Fears: A major public health crisis will be declared regarding “Cognitive Atrophy” in children—the loss of critical thinking skills due to over-reliance on AI tutors. This will give rise to “Disconnect” Movement: A counter-culture movement will rise, rejecting AI-mediated interactions and prizing “analogue-only” spaces and communities.
Agents will move from “copilot” to “colleague”: 2026 is likely when agentic AI quietly runs whole workflows—closing tickets, reconciling invoices, triaging code—under light human supervision. Think about it: an AI agent that monitors your inbox, spots a customer complaint, pulls up their purchase history, cross-references inventory, drafts a response with a discount code, gets approval from a manager-agent, sends the email, and logs everything in your CRM. All before you’ve finished your morning coffee. The question isn’t “will this happen?”—it’s “how fast can companies adapt their culture to work alongside non-human colleagues?”
Smart glasses will go from novelty to normal-ish: Ray-Ban Meta-style glasses plus Apple/Google/Chinese rivals will start to feel like “the new AirPods”: not universal, but no longer weird. More devices will come from the much ballyhooed OpenAI – Jony Ives one to something from Amazon’s buy of Limitless.
Meanwhile in India: India will host the big AI Impact Summit in February. This is a certainty, not a prediction. But I believe there will be announcements around some kind of DPI for AI, a Digital Public Infrastructure protocol to democratize access to compute and models, similar to UPI for payments. This might happen at the Feb 2026 AI Impact Summit. On a personal note, it will be the beginning of realising my JanAI dream.
Sovereign Cloud Operational: India’s GPU-based sovereign cloud will go fully live, mandating that sensitive government and banking data be processed on domestic AI infrastructure. Government portals, PSU banks and regulated sectors are likely to pilot IndiaAI-backed sovereign models for chatbots, summarisation and translation, reducing over-reliance on foreign APIs. Perhaps this is more of a fond hope, but if it happens it augurs well for the country. We cannot let all our AI be managed from outside the land.
Vernacular Content Explosion: The internet will finally sound like India. 90% of new content consumed in India will be in regional languages, generated and dubbed instantly by AI. The choice of interface will be voice, as India becomes the biggest voice driven AI market in the world. It will also be the market with the highest numbers of subscribers for all the big global AI players (other than the Chinese).
IndiaAI GPU clusters will finally feel real: As IndiaAI compute capacity ramps, more Indian startups, researchers and MSMEs will actually train and fine-tune on domestic GPU clouds at subsidised prices. States will compete openly as AI destinations for these GPUs and others. Following Andhra Pradesh’s push, expect Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and others to announce their own AI roadmaps, sandboxes and incentive schemes to attract the mega investments.