What will the year 2026 be like for engineering and R&D

As we have seen the massive development and speed using the AI agent in 2025.

Adoption Wave

Year 2026 would bring the rest of the globe, which is still lagging, will witness more applications for the AI agents due to the rapid development.
In my opinion, small to big service companies will adopt it as a required tool for their engineers.

Technology Transformation

Team will use the AI coding agents not only to write new services/features, additionally, teams will also focus on technology upgrades.
We won’t be shocked if a large software business successfully rewrites its product using a different tech stack, unlike Mozilla’s previous error.

AI Personalization Goes Mainstream

I believe AI personalization will become an essential component of consumer digital goods.
With my current knowledge, I imaging this could take the shape of an AI memory layer (similar to mem0¹ product), improved bigger AI model context window², or a separate plugin product on top of advance RAG³.

Operational Intelligence

I also anticipate a common AI agent solution that functions with multiple cloud providers for the cloud operation cost watcher.

Evolving Engineering Roles

We might see how the team’s roles have transformed from the traditional functions. This could distinguish among the companies preferred terms, such as AI engineer, AI developer, and so on.

New Onboarding Reality

The onboarding process for the new engineers has already changed
We have already seen the new engineers onboarding changes, we could see a mandatory AI agents course for the onboarding starter experiance team fellow to build the team-specific foundational skills.