As we at Psycray expand our AI automation and machine learning tools, we need to keep our eyes peeled for the latest AI trends.
AI has become a central force in almost every industry, shifting the way teams work, think, and make decisions. According to Forbes, the AI trends we’re seeing now are only expected to grow next year.
Plus, according to Anthony Cardillo from Exploding Topics, 78% of companies globally use AI in their business. In addition, 71% of companies report using AI in at least one business function within their organization, and 92% plan to increase their investment in AI over the next three years.
Across our client base – from healthcare companies to website management platforms – we’re already seeing these trends come into play.
With that being said, here are the 10 trends Forbes predicts for next year. Here at Psycray, we find #10 is especially relevant as the demand for AI services skyrockets. Get ready, because these generative AI trends in 2026 will shift everything from your daily work life to your nightly streaming services:
Creative AI
Generative Video and video solutions come to life.
Generative video was featured in the Argentinian show, “El Eternauta” to create short clips of a building collapse, according to Texas Standard. The 2025 sci-fi TV show follows Juan Salvo as he bonds with a group of survivors following a toxic snowfall that killed millions.
Generative video has been found to cut production time and costs — Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said that the shots in “El Eternauta” were filmed 10x faster than they would have been with standard VFX — so it’s expected to be utilized in entertainment more often.
This trend is not only helpful in entertainment, but it will be especially vital for marketers as video plays an ever-growing role in their social media campaigns.
At Psycray, we understand how vital video is to our clients. While we don’t have direct experience with generative video, we helped a manufacturing subsidiary within a large holding company create timestamped video answers that surfaced in 5 seconds to help new salespeople watch and understand their training videos more efficiently. We combined TwelveLabs’ multimodal video search with large-language model reasoning to let salespeople search for terms and ask questions as they watched the videos.
This allows companies to have a more efficient workflow during their company training periods.
Authenticity remains a priority.
Creators who can leverage human creativity with AI will have more of an impact than companies simply producing “AI slop” (generic AI content without a human touch).
Only 50.3% of people would be less likely to engage with content that is AI-generated. While only 18.4% of people would be more likely to engage with it, according to Exploding Topics.
What’s more, 45% of Americans would rather hire a personal designer than have AI design for them. This suggests that plenty of people still value human creativity in the workplace. While AI for functional tasks is met with less resistance, maintaining authenticity in creative work is imperative to maintaining audience trust.
Copyright quarrels.
Debates over the issues of credit and compensation when using AI will continue to rise in 2026 as lawmakers attempt to balance technological innovation with intellectual property rights.
At Psycray, moving forward, we’re taking care to credit sources of the images we use — a small but vital step in today’s gray legal area.
According to The New Yorker, image-generating AI platforms like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DreamUp all use Laion-5B, a nonprofit public database that indexes more than five billion images from across the Internet without giving the artists copyright, credit, or compensation (which attorney Matthew Butterick dubs the “three C’s.”)
Since AI takes art from other sources to generate images without the artists’ consent or giving them any of the three C’s, AI’s art is not entirely original. In addition, not all creators are candid about their AI use when posting content, which could create distrust between creators and audiences.
So, it’s like the golden rule they taught you in third grade: Treat others the way you want to be treated. Give credit where credit’s due.
Operational AI
Agentic chatbots will increase.
Agentic chatbots will become more mainstream as AI advances from simply responding to individual requests to working more autonomously with third-party apps to perform multi-step processes.
If AI were an orchestra, the AI Agents are the conductors and composers telling the musicians what to play. Agentic AI can perform tasks without human input, though it still needs humans to give it prompts and objectives.
So, the expansion of agents’ brainpower is pretty exciting, to say the least, with its potential to create new connections between ideas.
At Psycray, we’re already using agentic chatbots. For example, when we developed an email triage system to help a trade association manage internal and external inquiries, we added a public contact form and chat interface to improve responsiveness for in-house inquiries. This turned the system into a proactive customer support layer, which enhanced our productivity and reduced wait times.
The real question isn’t whether agents can do more — it’s how organizations will yield them responsibly.
People want privacy.
Expect an increase in privacy-centric AI models that process data on-site or directly on users’ individual devices. People’s awareness of securing business and customer privacy will increase as businesses invest more in AI.
At Psycray, we recognize clients’ desires for privacy by adding solutions like adding a secure single sign-on feature and scanning domains for security and reputation for their websites, such as when we helped SquareStack develop a single sign-on feature and TireRack scan domains for enhanced protection.
Synthetic Data for Training and Analytics.
AI will be used to train and simulate physical, biological, and mechanical systems. For instance, it could model fraud detection systems without exposing real customer data, or simulate treatments and medical trials without sacrificing patient privacy.
This feature will revolutionize multiple industries because it gives them all a chance to “practice-run” before they do something that can affect people. It’s a glimpse of how simulation is upscaling experimentation — not only in a safer way, but also at a grander scale.
Industry AI
Gaming Industry: Generative gaming galore.
In the gaming world, AI will add more to storylines and adapt to users’ actions. It will also have characters that respond and hold conversations just like humans do.
Imagine you’re playing Kirby and he talks to you directly — this is the kind of stuff we’re looking at. Is it creepy? Maybe. Is it game-changing? Literally.
Search/Marketing Industry: Businesses will want to get paid for generative search.
Google’s Search Generative Experience and Perplexity AI will try to close the gap between paid advertising and generative search.
As AI generates more answers to user questions, businesses will have to work harder to get paid for their online search offerings. It’s essentially a battle between machines and money.
Science Industry: AI will aid scientific research.
This year, AI contributed to breakthroughs in energy production, protein folding, drug discovery, and astronomy. In 2026, this trend will expand as researchers keep working to find solutions to global problems such as climate change, curing diseases, and food and water shortages.
This is hopeful news for a world that desperately needs health and safety solutions.
At Psycray, we don’t specialize in scientific research, but we helped Abbott, a global healthcare leader, improve vendor-supplier relationships by creating questionnaires and a custom vendor feedback platform, which facilitated the exchange of feedback between vendors and suppliers.
This kind of feedback was invaluable for improving their business, which goes to show the power of AI in helping healthcare run more smoothly.
Generative AI Industry: More generative AI jobs will open.
Prompt engineers, model trainers, output auditors, and AI ethicists will be in increasing demand as businesses attempt to harness the impact of AI while minimizing its harmful effects.
Our staff regularly leverages AI tools such as Followr, ChatGPT, and Prosp, which aids us in this cutthroat AI atmosphere. We also use Fireflies.ai, an AI assistant that records and transcribes our meetings, so we can refer back to what we said at any time.
In conclusion, AI is expected to play a bigger role in business, entertainment, healthcare, science, gaming, and more. As AI expands in capacity, we’ll likely see an increase in AI usage debates as well.
Business and technology professionals should be aware of these 10 Generative AI trends in 2026 that will transform work and be ready to take advantage of them when the time comes; at the same time, they should also educate themselves on AI ethics as debates increase.
In 2026, the winners in the workforce will be the ones who can combine experimentation with social responsibility — the innovators who know when to automate and when to lend a human hand. As AI continues to transform work and life, you’ll want to upgrade your AI skills to prepare for the shift.