InfoQ AI, ML and Data Engineering Trends Report - 2026
InfoQ, Friday, October 30th, 2026
InfoQ's 2026 AI, ML and data engineering trends report covers small models, agents, System One models, inference, evaluations and physical AI.
The report summarizes the InfoQ editorial team's view, drawn from a podcast discussion with external guests, of where AI and ML are heading in the next year.
It says language models have shifted toward small models, reasoning models are rising, and AI agents are moving from personal agents to team agents to organization-wide use.
System One models such as TypeSafe AI's Jev should see more adoption for deterministic, faster and cheaper inference.
AI inference keeps growing, evaluations are getting heavy attention as a way to verify agents, and physical AI is connecting software intelligence to machines that perceive and act.