AI in 2026: Five Defining Themes

AI is quickly evolving from a set of powerful tools to a central component of the competitive enterprise. Specialized models, AI agents, and AI-native architecture will ensure that AI continues to embed itself into the very core of enterprise operations—with potentially powerful benefits.

To navigate AI’s evolution, organizations need to understand that it’s no longer just a question of “What can AI do?” but “How do we set our organization up for success with AI? How do we build for it? What problems do I solve with which models? How do we govern it?”

Looking ahead to five critical themes that will define enterprise AI in 2026, these present both opportunities and challenges for organizations. Let’s dive in.

1. New categories of AI foundation models unlock enterprise value

Advances in generative AI stem from breakthroughs in “foundation models,” massive neural networks trained on vast amounts of data that can be adapted to a wide range of tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) were the first wave of foundation models at scale. General-purpose LLMs, trained on the equivalent of all the text on the internet, opened the door to many value-adding use cases, including summarizing documents, writing code, and powering applications like ChatGPT and Claude. Over the last few years, we have already seen the foundation model approach applied to other domains, such as video creation and voice.

In 2026, specialized foundation models optimized for specific data types and domains will power the high-value enterprise AI use cases. Video generation models have already shown that models grounded in real-world physics data can reason about scenes and physical dynamics. Emerging world models demonstrate that simulating the physical world unlocks new possibilities in simulation, synthetic training data, and digital twins. Vision-language-action models demonstrate that robot-specific foundation models can generalize to new tasks and environments, enabling the transformation of web-scale knowledge into real-world actions in logistics and manufacturing.

In the enterprise domain, a similar shift is underway for structured data found in databases and transactional business software. While LLMs are impressive across many enterprise use cases, they cannot handle tasks like numerical predictions, such as inferring a delivery date or supplier risk score. However, work on relational foundation models shows that training on structured datasets—for example, data in tables, rather than generic text or images from the internet—can deliver high predictive accuracy without the tedious feature engineering and training required in classical machine learning. This means organizations can deploy predictive models in days, not months. Recent launches of relational foundation models, such as SAP-RPT-1, Kumo, and DistilLabs, highlight how new models can directly support use cases like forecasting, anomaly detection, and optimization across ERP, finance, manufacturing, and supply chain scenarios.

In 2026, these specialized models are expected to scale to deliver superior performance and economics for structured business tasks, surpassing general-purpose LLMs and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. These models will emerge as the workhorses behind high-value enterprise tasks.

2. Software evolves toward AI-native architecture

AI has seen various approaches create value over the decades, from the first rules-based expert systems to probabilistic deep learning and the recent explosion in generative AI. In 2026, organizations will shift from enhancing existing AI applications and processes to AI-native architectures, which will fully realize the promise of modern AI.

AI-native architecture adds a continuously learning, agentic intelligence layer on top of deterministic systems, enabling applications to become intent-driven, context-aware, and self-improving rather than being statically coded around fixed workflows. Agentic systems will still only be as good as the context layer they can reliably retrieve and ground on. Here, organizations should invest in truly comprehensive, semantically rich knowledge graphs that provide a scalable source of context, making AI-native software dependable and self-improving.

Enterprise applications will increasingly be built natively around AI capabilities, featuring user experiences designed for multi-model, natural language interaction; AI agents reasoning through complex processes; and a foundation managing foundation models, services, and a knowledge graph capturing semantically rich business data. AI-native architecture also enables more employees to create apps—such as smaller, ad-hoc productivity applications—in a matter of minutes without straining IT. 

AI-native architecture builds on, and even requires, established SaaS principles and investments in modern cloud applications. The technical term for combining probabilistic, adaptive AI models with deterministic systems of record is called neurosymbolic AI. It brings together AI’s best capabilities to adapt with reliable, governable, and deterministic processes. Next-gen applications will not just have AI bolted on; they’ll be built around AI at their core. This means combining reasoning, business rules, and data to deliver insights and automation seamlessly. Imagine ERP systems that proactively flag anomalies, recommend actions, and even execute workflows autonomously—all while staying aligned with company policies and regulations.

3. Agentic governance becomes mission-critical

Over the past two to three years, generative AI has introduced a wave of value-added use cases. These use cases were largely based on users sending a prompt to a model, receiving a response, and then interacting with the model again.

Last year saw the start of the next wave of innovation: AI agents capable of planning and iteratively reasoning through multi-step tasks, including selecting tools, self-reflecting on progress, and collaborating with other AI agents. These advanced AI agents promise to tackle complex business processes that were previously immune to automation, such as analyzing myriad documents, records, and policies to resolve a dispute or book a trip.

However, the proliferation of AI agents, many of which handle critical tasks and sensitive data, demands the development of new capabilities. Agentic governance will emerge as a critical capability as organizations deploy hundreds of specialized AI agents. The “agent sprawl” challenge will mirror previous shadow IT crises, but with higher stakes given agents’ autonomous decision-making capabilities.

Forward-thinking enterprises will establish comprehensive governance frameworks addressing five dimensions: agent lifecycle management (version control, testing protocols, deployment approval, retirement procedures); observability and auditability (agent inventory, logging, reasoning paths, and action traces); policy enforcement (embedding business rules, regulatory constraints, and ethical guidelines into agent execution); human-agent collaboration models (defining autonomy boundaries, approval requirements, and escalation pathways); and performance monitoring (tracking accuracy, efficiency, cost, and business impact).

The organizational shift will prove profound—from viewing AI as an independent tool to managing agents as digital coworkers requiring onboarding, performance reviews, and continuous improvement. HR and IT functions will collaborate on “digital workforce management” as organizations treat agentic governance as seriously as they do traditional workforce oversight.

4. Intent-driven ERP and generative UI emerge as a new user experience

Consumers are becoming increasingly familiar with computer interactions requiring prompts in natural language, voice, and even images and gestures. At the same time, generative AI’s ability to create text, graphs, code, and HTML on the fly is improving rapidly. In parallel, AI agents enable users to simply express their intentions, allowing the agent to determine how to work toward achieving that goal.

These advancements open the door to varied and entirely new modalities for users to work with enterprise software, as well as “no-app ERP” experiences. For example, to book a customer visit, a worker typically needs to open an analytics application to review the account, look in the CRM system to retrieve the customer’s address, and then navigate to another application to book travel, among other tasks. 

In 2026, we will see “gen UI” experiences increasingly surface via digital assistants, relieving users from the need to navigate between multiple applications and perform manual tasks. With time, AI will allow the user to simply express the intent: “Prepare a trip to my customer with the most leads.” From here, an AI agent will plan out the steps and required systems, interacting with the user to confirm travel details while dynamically generating analytical graphs and briefing material in the window. As AI agents develop stronger calculation and prediction tools, users will be able to “speak to their data” more naturally, with agents making data-based decisions in the background. To be clear, interactions with agents will extend far beyond a chat box; organizations will enjoy rich visualizations, complete workflows, and the ability to build hyper-personalized apps with just a few commands.

The user interface will not disappear. No-app ERP experiences and autonomous agents require the same foundational substrate that humans rely on for their daily work: structured workflows, security, governance, and business logic defined in business applications. The difference is that agents consume these primitives programmatically at scale, not only through a GUI, and humans can interact with these agents via natural language without ever needing to open the application.

These capabilities will usher in a new paradigm for human-AI collaboration and productivity in the workplace. Personalized experiences and adaptive workflows across applications and data sources will lower adoption barriers. This ability to focus solely on achieving a user’s intention, regardless of the interaction modality and underlying systems, will drive return on investment (ROI) in AI and enterprise software.

5. Deglobalization drives sovereign AI offerings

AI sparked debates about digital sovereignty among nations due to AI’s potential impact on everything from scientific discovery and national security to economic productivity and even culture. Events in geopolitics, such as supply chain disruptions caused by tariffs and war, have only intensified the urgency that many nations and organizations feel to become digitally sovereign.

Digital sovereignty has two broad definitions. First, digital sovereignty is an information security designation governing data storage and access, such as U.S. FedRAMP and German VSA, required to process sensitive governmental data in a “sovereign cloud.” Second, and more broadly, sovereignty refers to the provenance of physical assets, intellectual property, legal jurisdiction, and services along the cloud stack. For example, does an application utilize an AI model created in Europe, the U.S., or China, and is the data center geographically isolated? 

The high stakes, geopolitical uncertainty, and complexity of “sovereign AI” will lead enterprises to increasingly demand AI and cloud solutions that are simultaneously cutting-edge, flexible, and fully sovereign. This intensifies the shift from globalized one-size-fits-all cloud to regionally compliant, AI-powered enterprise platforms. At the same time, governments will continue to refine their national AI strategies to invest in areas along the stack where they can compete and create value.

Executing on the 2026 AI themes

In 2026, AI is poised to move from a supporting tool to a fundamental pillar of the enterprise. This shift is driven by a convergence of defining trends—including increasingly capable agents, generative UI, and AI-native architecture—that push AI from the application layer and into the very core of business operations.

Organizations that thrive will be those that recognize this shift and build an enterprise that is purpose-built for AI: establishing robust governance to manage a new, collaborative workforce of humans and AI agents; embracing gen UI to lower adoption barriers and an intent-driven user experience that helps employees interact naturally; seeking out specialized foundation models that are precisely tuned for enterprise use cases to drive business value; and, finally, building applications natively around AI that combine reasoning, business rules, and data, delivering proactive insights and automation.

However, in 2026, organizations will still need high-quality, connected data. Data siloes severely limit the effectiveness of AI. As mentioned, AI-native architecture requires established investments in modern cloud applications that harmonize data across the entire business—because unified data means AI’s outcomes are more accurate and relevant.

Jonathan von Rueden is chief AI officer at SAP SE.
Walter Sun is senior vice president and global head of AI for SAP Business AI at SAP.
Sean Kask is vice president and head of AI Strategy for SAP Business AI at SAP.