As we approach a new year, enterprise AI is entering a decisive phase beyond experimentation toward real impact. But what does that really look like?
According to SnapLogic technology and product leaders, including Chief Scientist Greg Benson, CTO Jeremiah Stone, and Senior Product Manager Kate Shaw, we are looking toward a future defined by specialized AI agents, disciplined orchestration, and business process reengineering, to set the foundation for meaningful, scalable transformation. We share their bold predictions on what comes next.
Greg Benson, Chief Scientist, SnapLogic
Adaptability becomes a core AI skill
“Adaptability to the changing coding agent landscape will be the most important skill for developers. You can’t just learn one tool and be done; the technology shifts too quickly. The ability to continuously adapt to new AI capabilities will separate those who thrive from those who fall behind. The only constant in this field is change.”
The rise of specialized AI coding agents
“Over the next year, coding assistants will evolve into sophisticated AI coding agents capable of managing entire software development processes and projects. This will fundamentally reshape the role of software engineering as agents transition from simply suggesting code to being able to design, debug, and build applications.
This will lead developers to create agents for specialized tasks that allow agents to work together to deliver full, production-ready solutions. For software engineers, this means the role will no longer be focused on writing code, but rather being system orchestrators who guide and supervise AI-driven workflows.”
Kate Shaw, Sr. Product Manager, SnapLogic
Polarization over AI use will deepen
“Technology is moving faster than trust, and that increasing gap will shape how AI evolves and reveal a societal split over AI adoption. Some will embrace its potential to transform work, while others will resist its reach into human roles, rights, and creative work.
The result will be a growing divide between AI acceleration and apprehension, and how we handle that tension will define whether AI becomes a tool for progress or another source of inequality.”
Jeremiah Stone, CTO, SnapLogic
AI Agents become mainstream, making programming AI systems through context engineering a highly sought-after skill.
“In 2026, creating scalable, production-ready Agentic systems will take off. Context engineering, creating structured, repeatable short-form specs that serve as the shared automation language between humans and models, will be the hot skill for AI developers.
The future of AI isn’t about better prompts. It’s about automation and better specifications. Agile killed documentation; AI is bringing it back from the dead, because clarity is what makes models work in scaled production systems.”
In 2026, companies won’t fail to build AI; they’ll fail to orchestrate it
“By 2026, enterprises will hit an AI governance and orchestration wall as early AI productions are scaled without proper governance and cross-enterprise orchestration. Early experiments and agents will collide or simply fail to interoperate, forcing companies into costly iterative rewrites to make systems functional, secure, and compliant.
The hardest mile in AI isn’t getting models to run — it’s cleaning up the mess they leave behind.”
2026 is the year of the Small Language Model
“In 2026, the AI models doing the most valuable work will be small models inserted into existing legacy workflows and systems to handle tasks that previously required human intervention. Enterprises that have experimented with large language models are finding that they are too expensive and slow to scale effectively.
Instead, they are discovering that small, fast, and specialized models that augment the intelligence of the enterprise provide manageable and high-impact returns. This will give rise to new kinds of tools and companies that are specialized around specific industry verticals and business processes. Small, specialized, and fast beats large and generalized.”
Resurgence of Business Process Reengineering
“In 2026, we will see a resurgence of Business Process Reengineering. First popularized by Hammer and Champy in ‘Reengineering the Corporation,’ this approach prioritizes radical business process change through focus on business process redesign.
Companies that are most successful in deploying AI in 2026 will reimagine value flows completely, transforming entire functions and processes rather than incremental change. This will empower leaders and teams to make dramatic and high-value changes to how business outcomes are achieved.”
Path to sustained AI impact
Success in the year ahead will hinge less on new models and more on putting today’s AI to work. Enterprises must prioritize governance and orchestration to ensure specialized agents operate securely and at scale.
At the same time, organizations need to upskill for adaptability, helping developers evolve into system orchestrators who can manage complex AI workflows. Additionally, AI should catalyze how companies approach their end-to-end value chains through business process reengineering. These steps will move companies beyond costly experimentation to sustained, high-value impact and a thriving ecosystem.
We can’t wait to see how our customers will take Agentic Integration to the next level. Want to see it for yourself? Book a live demo and step into the future.
