After two years of dazzling AI pilots, 2026 is the year businesses face a crucial reality check. It’s now very clear that enterprise-wide applications like agentic AI are in a different league from the quick vines of the burgeoning number of bottom-up one-dimensional AI point solutions. The realization is there: Businesses are already questioning whether they can run AI effectively and safely at scale.
Edward Funnekotter, Chief AI Officer at Solace, charts a path forward to provide AI models with access to enterprise applications and data that ensure security, observability, and trust for every business – enabling them to maximize the success of every deployment.
PwC, in its 2026 AI Business Predictions, sets out the issue before us: “Because AI feels easy to use, early wins can mask deeper challenges. But real results take precision in picking a few spots where AI can deliver wholesale transformation in ways that matter for the business, then executing with steady discipline that starts with senior leadership.”
The last two years were defined by the explosive promise of Generative AI, then followed the Agentic-driven rush. The year 2026 is going to be a year of reckoning, one that truly shows which AI applications make the grade. We are moving away from the initial rush of excitement and getting back to real business value. While the models themselves continue to improve, the focus for enterprises is shifting from “what can this cool demo do?” to “how do we run this safely in production?”
Here are four key trends that I see defining the AI landscape in the coming year.
1. It’s judgment day for the AI bubble
Despite the technological leaps of the last two years, there is a looming pin that may burst the AI hype bubble. As we look toward 2026, the industry is bracing for a reality check as AI transitions from experimental pilots to robust AI applications that have the rigor to stand up to everyday use in industries that demand real-time delivery in order to match customer, supplier, and employee expectations.
In mid-2025, MIT Media Lab/Project NANDA released a new report that found that 95 percent of investments in Generative AI have produced zero results. The issue isn’t that the models aren’t capable; it’s that there is a massive gulf between a prototype built in three days and a secure production system. In 2026, we may see high-profile failures where companies give models “too much rope” without adequate guardrails, resulting in reputational damage or data loss.
However, this isn’t a sign of the technology failing, rather a signal that we need to apply what can be considered traditional, reliable engineering principles to these systems. The bottom-up adoption, where workers find tangible, small-scale uses for AI, remains highly successful, while massive top-down initiatives struggle. Here’s where a cohesive architecture designed specifically for the complexity of the enterprise comes into its own.
We need to treat AI projects not as standalone science experiments, but as first-class citizens of the IT landscape, and this is precisely what an agent mesh does. An agent mesh provides a real-time data platform that connects AI agents to the nervous system of the enterprise. Supported by a sturdy event-driven platform, an agent mesh will fundamentally transform how agentic AI systems serve users, respond to business events, and integrate with enterprise data, allowing any AI project – from simple single-agent to powerful multi-agent orchestrated solutions – to interact in real-time with enterprise applications and data.
2. Data secured by architecture that serves up the right data – to avoid intermingling and prompt injection
AI’s power lies in its ability to process large amounts of natural language much faster and cheaper than the human mind. As businesses race to give AI agents access to internal documents, SharePoint, and live web searches, we are creating a high-risk environment for data intermingling. The value of Agentic AI lies in its ability to make decisions without constant human oversight, but that autonomy creates a conflict: how do you trust a system with the keys to the shop?
The threat landscape is evolving at pace. We are already seeing real concerns around “prompt injection,” where nefarious actors embed malicious text blobs into web pages. When an agent fetches that page to summarize a topic, the hidden text acts like a hypnotist’s keyword, overriding the AI’s instructions and forcing it to exfiltrate internal data. Or, imagine an agent accidentally copying confidential salary information or commercially sensitive data into a public setting because it “made sense” to the model at that moment.
In 2026, we will see a heavy focus on data management to solve this. The goal is to prevent the AI model from ingesting raw data unnecessarily. Instead of feeding an LLM a thousand rows of a database – which is slow, expensive, and prone to hallucination – we need systems where the AI simply directs a software tool to filter the data and return only the relevant answer. This is where an agent mesh can enforce intelligent data management that only passes relevant information to the AI model. Not only does this mean better data security, it also helps reduce AI compute costs and avoids hallucinations.
3. Forget prompt engineering – helping AI to respond better with context engineering
Because of the way its memory currently works, it is hard for AI to feel like a human colleague. Currently, most interactions are stateless, meaning each interaction is a fresh start, because the AI has, at present, limited ability to remember previous context once a session ends. This has been partially addressed by auto-learned memory, where AI systems automatically store, recall, and learn from past interactions and experiences without explicit human programming for each specific memory. However, even with auto-learned memory, it is not always a given that the AI will apply this in the correct manner.
Humans, on the other hand, are excellent at context switching. For instance, we behave differently with an acquaintance than we do with a close colleague. AI struggles with this nuance. If a system remembers everything, it might apply personal context to a business decision where it doesn’t belong.
This will drive the rise of context engineering. It is no longer just about prompt engineering; it’s about organizing the metadata, history, and tools provided to the model. We need to build architectures that allow us to swap rules of engagement dynamically, ensuring the AI uses the correct memory for the specific task at hand.
Overcoming these limitations requires a disciplined approach to managing and delivering the right context at the right time – standard work for a communication backbone powered by an agent mesh. AI agents are then fed real-time events, ensuring they can operate and react with up-to-the-second awareness for decision-making.
4. Meet the AI “team” – the rise of multi-agent systems
Finally, 2026 will be the year of the multi-agent system. Just as a single human cannot be an expert in every department of a company, a single AI agent cannot hold the context for an entire enterprise. If you try to add too much information to one agent, its performance degrades.
Just like in a human organization, a manager agent who can asynchronously orchestrate work among a group of expert agents with different skill sets can produce more sophisticated and accurate outcomes than a single generalist agent who must keep all the business context in mind without going deep into any specific domain. The solution is a “team” of specialized agents working together—orchestrated by Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communications. We are already seeing the emergence of protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and A2A standards.
To make agentic AI systems work, businesses need a robust transport layer, which an agent mesh provides. That allows these agents to subscribe to events, communicate asynchronously, and solve complex workflows securely. This approach not only enables each agent to operate at peak efficiency within its specialization but also allows tasks to be executed in parallel, reducing overall response time.
Taking the AI road less travelled into 2026
The flashy phase of AI is peaking; in 2026, AI will start having to earn its keep. For the year ahead, AI’s competitive edge isn’t just in better models or smarter prompts, it’s in connecting AI to the live, operational pulse of the business from day one.
The year ahead will be defined by the companies that can bridge the gap between a cool demo and a secure, governed, and engineered reality that delivers value to specific uses cases in their business.
It’s a year to get down to the fundamentals of strong implementations that ensure data security, improve the context of every model, and allow agents to work together in a robust enterprise infrastructure.
Edward Funnekotter serves as the Chief Architect and AI Officer at Solace. Leading the architecture teams for both Cloud and Event Broker products, he also leads the company’s strategic direction for AI integration within products and internal tools. In 2004, Edward began his journey with Solace as an FPGA architect. He later transitioned into management and led the Core Product Development team for several years before ascending to his present position.
Beginning his professional journey at Newbridge Networks, Edward took on the role of an embedded software developer after earning his Electrical Engineering degree from Queen’s University. After his tenure at Newbridge Networks, he embraced an ASIC architecture position at a Californian Internet Routing chipset firm. There, he successfully architected and designed multiple high-speed network processors and queuing chips.
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