2026 Emerging Technology Trends

Introduction from Larry Feinsmith, Head of Global Technology Strategy, Innovation and Partnerships

Our Global Technology Strategy, Innovation and Partnerships team helps ensure that JPMorganChase remains connected to innovative and emerging trends in both the immediate and long term. Each year, the team puts together a collection of emerging technology trends, along with market and industry perspectives.

This year’s report identifies key predictions and distills the most meaningful technology trends by providing a concise overview of each, offering insights from the broader market and industry. The trends represent pivotal areas of innovation, identified through continuous ecosystem connectivity, internal benchmarks, detailed research and insightful conversations with domain experts across JPMorganChase and externally.

The report highlights a set of high-impact predictions and themes that are rapidly reshaping the technology landscape.

The success of enterprise AI initiatives is reliant on enabling AI agents to effectively and securely access the most relevant data and tools, empowering them to deliver unique and differentiated products and services to customers and clients. As end-to-end automation transforms the software development lifecycle to support the volume of code generated by AI tools, developers will focus less on manual coding and more on architecting context-rich applications, using AI tools and context engineering techniques.

Read our takeaways on context-driven architecture.

The intense AI infrastructure buildout that has been taking place for years shows no signs of slowing down and the environments that have come online have become a strong foundation for significant software innovation and ecosystem development. Compute architectures will evolve into hybrid classical-quantum workflows and neuromorphic systems, leveraging CPUs, GPUs and specialized accelerators to address diverse computational demands across the infrastructure landscape. The progress in quantum hardware will lead to many scientific quantum advantage demonstrations showing a quantum computer performing a scientifically interesting computation that is impossible classically. These demonstrations will be uncontested by classical techniques and will fuel the race to demonstrate commercially relevant quantum advantage in the years to come.

Read our takeaways on how inference demand is driving continued AI buildout.

The dominant interface won't be an app, a browser or a workspace. It will be a single AI-native environment that collapses every workflow into one continuously personalized stream. Users will stop navigating between tools or tabs and start inhabiting intelligent interfaces that anticipate, execute and transact across every modality of work and life.

Read our takeaways on the end of app switching and the future of interface.

Organizations will rely on advanced simulations to test, validate, and optimize products, processes, and scenarios before deploying them in the real world. These virtual environments will enable continuous, scalable experimentation, allowing teams to model user interactions, system exposures, and operational outcomes with speed and precision.

Read our takeaways on AI powered simulation and testing.