At our last Platform Leaders event in London, Benoit Reillier, CEO of Launchworks & Co, spoke on key digital trends for 2026. Read on for a summary of Benoit’s keynote.
Historical context: waves of innovation
The Industrial Revolution began around 1800 in the UK, with a first wave of innovation centred on textiles. It also marked the start of sustained economic growth, which had been largely flat for centuries beforehand. These waves of innovation have continued—moving from textiles to steam engines and, more recently, to digital platforms—and they have accelerated over time. And we have now entered a sixth wave, centred on AI.
When we look at the world’s largest companies over the past 25 years, we can see clearly how the digital-platform wave played out between 1995 and 2025, and how NVIDIA, an AI-powered newcomer, is now taking the top spot.
Review of 2025 trends: as predicted
Last year saw a number of emerging digital trends, including the shift from products to ecosystem competition and the creation of digital twins (of cities, company ecosystems and even human organs for medical purposes). As Benoit noted, AI boosted ultra-personalisation of products and services in 2025, starting with increasingly personal AI conversations and recommendations. New, platform-focussed regulations did materialise, and the automation of platform sides continued to be a disruptive development in 2025, with self-driving Waymo overtaking Lyft in San Francisco and catching up with Uber. The only theme that didn’t quite play out as expected was holistic sustainability, which, despite company-level commitments, was hampered by geopolitical tensions in the US and beyond.
Going forward: 3 key macro trends for the next decade and 6 themes for 2026
Macro trend 1: Scaled cognition
- Agentic AI
- AI-Mediated Discovery and Commerce
Macro trend 2: Physical and digital convergence
- Incarnated AI
- Phygital Fusion
Macro trend 3: Governance and alignment
- Open Ecosystems
- Responsible tech
Macro trend 1: Scaled cognition
“Intelligence (cognition), once a scarce resource, is scaling for the first time at an unprecedented pace and is about to become abundant… this is a macro trend that will shape us as individuals, as well as our organisations and institutions for the next 15 years…”
Benoit Reillier, CEO Launchworks & Co
Two ways in which this will play out in 2026 are Agentic AI and AI-mediated discovery.
Agentic AI will start scaling
We will increasingly delegate tasks to agents that will be accessible through our browsers and specific apps. Agents will work on our behalf in the background, 24/7, and increasingly in teams to help us with monitoring and completing complex tasks.
Organisations will focus on automating existing workflows, with 47% of Fortune 500 companies preparing for AI agents to run some of their core workflows next year. Short term, this will generate productivity gains. However, although these gains are necessary for organisations to keep pace, the true shift is much further reaching. Fundamentally, agentic AI will disrupt industries and reshape entire ecosystems, necessitating the reinvention of organisations around this new reality. This drives the two most important strategic questions for boards:
- What is AI doing to our industry/ecosystem?
- How can we adapt to ensure we continue to play a value-adding role in this new configuration?
AI-Mediated Discovery and Commerce will become a reality
Search is now AI-powered for an increasing number of people, changing the way people find things and get found online. Generative AI is impacting both the supply and demand for information and creating new search usage patterns, with 90% of web content expected to be AI-generated by the end of 2026.
To be visible and trusted online in 2026, organisations will need to build new skills and capabilities. Marketplaces in particular that rely on search to find participants on the two or more sides of their markets need to think strategically about how they can harness that shift, remain discoverable and develop a data moat to remain relevant.
Macro trend 2: Physical and digital convergence
“AI needs a digital representation of the reality to work and this is accelerating the digitalisation of our world. These digital twins can then be optimised, monitored and improved by AI which in turn leads to changes in our physical reality”
Benoit Reillier, CEO Launchworks & Co
Incarnated AI is emerging
We’re at the start of an exponential increase in products embedding advanced AI capabilities – from hoovers to robots, self-driving cars and yet-to-be-invented new form factors that will start to emerge in 2026. Humanoid robots like the NEO from 1X, the Iron from Xpeng and probably Tesla’s much-talked-about Optimus will start to be available throughout 2026. We expect enough influencers and journalists will be able to get hold of a robot in 2026 for your social media streams to be full of pictures and videos!
While these first-generation machines will have limited utility, we expect the second and third generations of these robots to become desirable and useful in middle-class households by around 2030.
Phygital Fusion
We all know about the digitalisation of our world, and this is continuing at pace, but now it’s increasingly impacting our physical world. AI needs digitalised inputs to be helpful. Therefore, everything around us is going to be digitalised through the creation of digital twins, around which AI can then build simulations. In turn, these simulations will impact the real world through feedback loops – even today Google Maps is not only analysing traffic flows, but also changing them.
One key way in which the development of these mirror worlds will play out is by enabling the virtual training of robots, which is 430,000 times more effective than trial and error in our physical world. Leading researchers like Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li are working on these digital worlds and their application to AI, while firms like Meta will enable high-quality creation and sharing of digital twins (with Hyperscape technology) and phygital visualisation in virtual and augmented reality.
Macro trend 3: Governance and alignment
“The governance of our ecosystems will become increasingly important going forward, including the alignment of technology with human needs such as trust and safety, transparency, fairness and sustainability. Our institutions – local, regional and global – will have to adapt at pace and AI alignment in particular will become increasingly important over the next decade.”
Benoit Reillier, CEO Launchworks & Co
Governance and regulation will result in more open ecosystems
Governance and regulation will push for open ecosystems in 2026. Interoperability and security will be key drivers. Somewhat counterintuitively, well-managed open ecosystems can be more robust and resilient than closed ones. For example, a siloed approach to fraud with banks, mobile networks, OTT services and social networks is less effective than open coordination. Organisations with ‘closed ecosystems’, such as Apple, will have to find ways to adapt and open their model to third parties in order to continue thriving in an AI world.
Responsible Tech is becoming a strategic priority
Despite political tensions around the sustainability agenda, responsible tech concerns are moving from ethics committee wishlists to boardroom agendas. Some businesses have started to go beyond net neutrality and circularity and aim to become regenerative with net-positive contributions. This trend is however just emergent and will take time to play out given the geopolitical environment.
There are two major reasons for this focus on responsible tech. First, there’s a need to create trusted human-centric experiences and a sustainable world. Second, AI will be disruptive and cause a lot of uncertainty, with talk of the end of humanity in one article but paradise in another. People are increasingly anxious and worried, which will lead some to protest against technology development and blame AI for society’s ills. “Luddites 2.0” will start to make their voices heard in 2026. Tribes of (often younger) people are already saying that they’ll never use ChatGPT, for example, and would not date somebody who uses ChatGPT. We expect this kind of digital polarisation to increase in 2026. Tech firms will have to invest in ‘tech alignment’ and articulate the benefits of AI, as well as their efforts to mitigate its downsides. This messaging will be key for tech firms to craft a vision of what we want to happen and what desirable outcomes look like.
Stay tuned in 2026, and do not hesitate to reach out and get in touch if you’d like to discuss any of these topics with the team at Launchworks & Co.
