Every generation of industry believes it is living through an exceptional moment of change. Today, that belief happens to be well supported by evidence. Across energy, manufacturing, healthcare, finance and materials science, technologies that were confined to research papers a decade ago are now shipping in commercial products, powering factory floors and shaping boardroom strategy. The World Economic Forum, in partnership with the scientific publisher Frontiers, captured this shift precisely in its 2026 Top 10 Emerging Technologies report: for the first time in the report'sfourteen-yearhistory,the majority of breakthrough technologies act directly on physical systems energy grids drug pipelines, food production and manufacturing rather than existing purely as software.
This matters because it signals a maturing of the current technology wave. The last decade was defined by digitization: moving information, transactions and communication onto software platforms. The years ahead appear to be defined by a second act using AI, quantum computing, synthetic biology and advanced materials science to act on the physical world itself, from how batteries are built to how cancer is treated. This article draws on official reports from the World Economic Forum, the McKinsey Global Institute and the International Federation of Robotics to examine the technologies driving this transformation, the industries being reshaped fastest, and the questions leaders still need to answer.
“This year's report marks a decisive shift — the technologies with the greatest impact are moving from software towards the physical realm, even as artificial intelligence continues to support progress on many fronts.” — Frederick Fenter, Chief Executive Editor, Frontiers
1. Artificial Intelligence: From Experimentation to Enterprise Reinvention
Artificial intelligence remains the technology with the broadest industrial footprint, but the story in 2026 is no longer about whether companies use AI — it is about whether they can make it pay off. According to McKinsey's State of AI research, 88% of organizations now report using AI in at least one business function, up sharply from just over half two years earlier. Yet the same research reveals a stubborn “scaling gap”: only a small fraction of companies, generally cited at around 7–10%, describe their AI deployments as fully mature or scaled across the enterprise, and a majority of organizations report no measurable bottom-line impact yet.
The Agentic Shift
The center of gravity is moving from generative AI — tools that draft, summarize and answer — toward agentic AI: systems that can plan multi-step tasks, call other software tools and act with a degree of autonomy inside business workflows. McKinsey's research finds that companies willing to redesign workflows around these agents, rather than simply bolting AI onto existing processes, see substantially greater returns. Adoption of agentic systems is strongest in IT operations, knowledge management and customer service, while regulated sectors such as banking are among the most aggressive adopters overall: financial institutions report AI touching fraud detection, algorithmic trading and personalized wealth management, with high performers attributing more than 10% of earnings before interest and tax to AI-driven initiatives.
The barriers slowing wider adoption are telling. Leaders cite regulatory and ethical concerns, inadequate legacy infrastructure, unclear governance and a lack of organizational readiness — not a shortage of capable models. In McKinsey's State of Organizations research, 72% of leaders admit their organizations are not fully prepared for the changes AI is bringing, even though almost all of them are already using it in some form. The lesson for industry is consistent across sectors: the technology has outpaced the organizational design needed to capture its value.
2. Robotics and Automation: Factories Get a Cognitive Upgrade
While AI dominates headlines, the physical automation of industry is advancing just as quickly, and the two trends are converging. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) reported that global industrial robot installations reached 542,000 units in 2024, pushing the total operational stock of industrial robots worldwide past 4.66 million — a 9% increase in a single year and the second-highest annual installation total on record. The global market value of industrial robot installations hit an all-time high of US$16.7 billion, and the IFR projects installations will pass 700,000 units annually by 2028.
Asia continues to dominate deployment, accounting for roughly three-quarters of installations, with China alone representing more than half of global demand and, notably, now selling more robots to its own manufacturers than foreign suppliers do. Global robot density — the number of robots per 10,000 employees — has more than doubled in six years to an all-time high, a clear proxy for how quickly automation is being embedded into everyday manufacturing rather than reserved for a handful of advanced plants.
Where Robotics Is Headed Next
3. Energy and Materials: Decentralized, Efficient, and Closer to Demand
Perhaps the clearest evidence of technology's move into the physical world comes from energy and materials science. The World Economic Forum's 2026 report opens its list with “everything-to-grid” energy — technology that turns electric vehicles, building batteries and factory storage into active grid assets rather than passive consumers. In one real-world demonstration, more than 16,000 solar-equipped homes in California linked into a distributed network pushed 51 megawatts back to the grid during a single evening demand peak in 2024, output that exceeded the capacity of several fossil-fuel peaker plants, without their emissions.
Battery supply chains are being reshaped by direct lithium extraction (DLE), which uses engineered sorbents, membranes and solvents to pull battery-grade lithium from brine in hours rather than the up to two years required by traditional evaporation ponds — while returning water underground and diversifying supply away from a handful of geographies that currently dominate production. Meanwhile, passive radiative cooling materials, which reflect roughly 95% of incoming sunlight to cool buildings without electricity, are already mandated in green-building codes in California and China, with suppliers reporting energy savings of up to 20% in commercial settings.
Industry is also turning its attention to legacy environmental liabilities. New methods for breaking down PFAS — so-called “forever chemicals” — use superheated water, electrical currents or UV-driven reactions to sever the carbon-fluorine bonds that made these substances so persistent. Commercial-scale destruction facilities are already operating in the United States, with one industrial trial reporting 99.99% destruction of PFAS in treated wastewater.
4. Precision Health and Biotechnology: Medicine Tailored to the Individual
Healthcare and life sciences illustrate the personalization trend the World Economic Forum identifies as a defining feature of this technology cycle. Precision fermentation — inserting the genetic code for a target protein into yeast or bacteria and letting it grow in a controlled tank — is already producing microbe-derived egg proteins and animal-free whey protein at commercial scale, alongside pharmaceutical compounds and cosmetic ingredients traditionally sourced from crops, animals or fossil fuels.
In oncology, personalized mRNA cancer vaccines represent one of the most promising applications of precision medicine. By sequencing a patient's tumor to identify its unique mutations, researchers can design a custom vaccine that trains the immune system to recognize and attack that specific cancer. In a melanoma trial in South Carolina, patients who received a personalized mRNA vaccine alongside immunotherapy saw a 40–50% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death compared with immunotherapy alone — a striking result for a technology still in clinical trials.
A related innovation, exosome drug delivery, addresses one of medicine's most persistent problems: therapies that work in the laboratory but degrade or get deflected once inside a real patient. Exosomes are naturally occurring particles that the body already uses to shuttle proteins and genetic material between cells; loading them with therapeutic payloads lets treatments slip past the immune system's defenses. In a U.S. Phase 1 trial, pancreatic cancer patients who had exhausted other treatment options were stabilized using engineered exosomes targeting a previously untreatable mutation, and the approach is now being explored for neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
Even drug discovery itself is being reengineered. Roughly nine in ten drug candidates that enter clinical trials fail, often because researchers cannot fully model how a molecule will behave inside the body. Quantum simulation applies quantum computing to model molecular interactions with far greater accuracy than classical computers allow. In 2025, IBM and Moderna ran one of the largest quantum-assisted simulations of protein folding and mRNA interactions to date — an early signal of how quantum computing may eventually shorten the drug development pipeline.
5. Quantum Computing and Post-Quantum Security
Quantum technology is advancing on two fronts simultaneously: as a tool for solving previously intractable computational problems, and as a threat to the encryption that currently protects the world's digital infrastructure. On the offensive side, quantum simulation is already accelerating drug discovery and materials research, as noted above. On the defensive side, the World Economic Forum highlights lattice-based cryptography as a critical emerging safeguard: an encryption approach that hides data inside complex mathematical structures and adds deliberate “noise,” making it extremely difficult for even a future quantum computer to distinguish the correct solution from countless false ones.
This is not a distant, theoretical concern for industry. Lattice-based cryptography already protects Apple's iMessage, and Google has committed to including it in Android alongside other encryption techniques. Because encrypted data intercepted today could potentially be decrypted retroactively once quantum computers mature — a risk security researchers call “harvest now, decrypt later” — organizations across finance, healthcare and critical infrastructure are being urged to begin migrating toward post-quantum cryptographic standards well before quantum computers pose an immediate threat.
Snapshot: The Numbers Behind the Transformation
88% | of organizations worldwide now use AI in at least one business function, according to McKinsey's State of AI research — though only a small fraction report fully scaled deployments. |
4.66 million | industrial robots were operating worldwide by the end of 2024, per the International Federation of Robotics — a 9% year-on-year increase and roughly double the count of six years earlier. |
US$16.7 billion | the record global market value of industrial robot installations reported by the IFR for 2025. |
51 MW | of power pushed back to California's grid in a single evening by over 16,000 linked solar-equipped homes — a real-world demonstration of everything-to-grid energy technology. |
40–50% | reduction in cancer recurrence or death risk seen in a melanoma trial combining a personalized mRNA vaccine with immunotherapy, versus immunotherapy alone. |
10 | breakthrough technologies identified in the WEF/Frontiers 2026 report, eight of which act directly on physical systems rather than software alone. |
Sources: McKinsey State of AI (2025/2026); International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics report; World Economic Forum / Frontiers, Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026.
Strategic Implications for Industry Leaders
Conclusion: Building for a Physical-Digital Future
The technologies profiled here agentic AI, autonomous robotics, grid-interactive energy systems, precision biology and post-quantum security do not operate in isolation. They are converging. AI models trained on physical-world data are teaching robots to adapt to new environments; quantum computing is accelerating the biological simulations behind personalized medicine; and decentralized energy technologies are being coordinated by the same class of intelligent software systems reshaping factories and financial services. This convergence is precisely what the World Economic Forum's 2026 report captures when it describes a shift “from software towards the physical realm.”
For industry leaders, the strategic task ahead is less about chasing any single breakthrough and more about building the organizational capacity governance structures, skilled talent, redesigned workflows and updated infrastructure to absorb multiple waves of physical and digital innovation at once. The organizations most likely to thrive over the next five years will be those that treat emerging technology not as a series of isolated pilots, but as an integrated shift in how value is created, delivered and protected. As the authors of the WEF report put it, these technologies are, by design, not finished stories what happens next depends on the choices industry, governments and researchers make today.
Sources
World Economic Forum & Frontiers, “Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026,” published 23 June 2026, weforum.org.
McKinsey & Company / McKinsey Global Institute, “The State of AI” and “The State of Organizations 2026,” mckinsey.com.
International Federation of Robotics, “World Robotics 2025 Industrial Robots” and “Top 5 Global Robotics Trends 2026,” ifr.org.
— By: Faheem Ashraf