• Jarrod Vawdrey, Field Chief Data Scientist at Domino Data Lab


• 22.01.2026 12:45 pm
#DominoDataLab #2026Predictions

Prediction 1: The Great AI ROI Reckoning

2026 is when the music stops. CFOs are done writing blank checks for "AI innovation" that can't be tied to actual business results. We're already seeing enterprises start to pump the brakes on a significant percentage of their planned AI spending because leadership finally asked the obvious question: "What are we actually getting for this?" And most teams have no good answer from a year of PoCs that never made it into production.

The handful of use cases that actually move numbers will survive. Revenue up, costs down, cycle time reduced… real KPIs that matter. Everything else gets killed. No more pilot purgatory, no more "let's experiment and see," no more demos that wow executives but never ship. If you can't show business impact in three to six months, you're done. The companies winning in late 2026 are the ones who got religious about measurement early and weren't afraid to kill their darlings.

Prediction 2: Agentic Workflows to Autonomous Agentic AI Systems

Most of what's being sold as "agentic AI" in 2025 is just glorified workflow automation with better prompts. Sure, it's smarter than the old RPA bots, but calling it autonomous is generous. Today’s systems are workflows with LLMs integrated - predetermined paths, needing constant human checkpoints, and break the moment something unexpected happens.

2026 is when we actually cross the threshold into true autonomous agents. Systems that genuinely make decisions, adapt to changing conditions without predefined rules, and communicate bi-directionally with other agents and humans to negotiate outcomes. Your supply chain agent doesn't just execute a workflow when inventory drops, it assesses the situation, evaluates multiple solutions, coordinates with procurement and finance agents, and chooses the best path forward without a script. That's the shift: from "follow these steps intelligently" to "here's the goal, figure it out." Most companies aren't remotely ready for this.

Prediction 3: The Forward Deployed Engineer Becomes the Hottest Job in Tech

Palantir figured this out years ago, but 2026 is when everyone else catches up: the Forward Deployed Engineer is suddenly the most valuable person in your organisation. Not your ML researchers, not your datascientists, the person who can actually make AI work inside your organisation of legacy systems. These folks understand both worlds: they can wrangle a large language model and integrate it with your 20-year-old ERP system that nobody wants to touch.

Here's why they're worth their weight in gold: every company has the same problem. You need AI to compete, but all your actual business runs on legacy infrastructure and software that predates the iPhone. FDEs are the only people who can bridge that gap, getting modern AI to play nice with Oracle databases, and whatever duct taped integrations your company's been running since the early 2000s. Compensation for good FDEs is about to skyrocket, and smart companies are already building internal programs to train them because you can't hire enough of them.