26 Predictions For 2026
As we come to the end of 2025, the Equal team has been having some spirited conversations about what might be ahead in 2026. From AI eating insurance, robotaxi wars, and the lure to advertisers of 6 billion eyeballs tuning in for the World Cup, we’re sharing 26 predictions across Equal’s core sectors of commerce, supply chain, insurance, and climate, and the broader market for 2026!
COMMERCE:
The average U.S. consumer will NOT get better in 2026 …
The K-shaped economy will continue to bifurcate. The rich got richer. The top 10% of earners made up half of retail spending this year, boosted by market gains. Average consumer sentiments remain at an all time low as the affordability crisis increasingly hits the middle class. Jobs report also looking bad. In a world where daily spikes in Mag 7 gains are driving consumption decisions, we’re going to be in a world of hurt when (not if) the market corrects.
… which means, the value segment will continue to grow
Every single segment of the consumer is trading down or in some classes, just flat out not spending. Walmart and TJX are both up 30% this year, Target is down 30%, and Amazon is flat. With tariffs finally hitting prices, which will continue into next year, everyone’s going to be looking for a deal.
Advertisers won’t be wowed by Google’s first AI ad but it won’t matter. OpenAI will try to respond but find out that ads are harder than it looks
There have been conflicting reports on whether we’ll see the first Gemini ads in 2026. My bet is that we will see something deployed on Gemini next year. The efficacy will be fairly mixed but it won’t really matter? Advertisers weren’t happy with PMax, Google’s last advertising overhaul, but that didn’t make a dent on revenues. Google has a chokehold on advertisers and has developed an insane machine tailor made to satisfy and placate enterprise customers that won’t be easily replicated. Besides Google’s insane consumer reach across Search, YouTube, Maps, etc., it’s developed deep infrastructure across ads deployment and data & analytics as well as a well-oiled GTM army particularly good at enterprise sales and rollout. OAI’s nascent efforts in enterprise and limited success compared to Anthropic suggests they will need to make a ton of investments here – reminder it took Meta 2-3 years to really figure it out!
We’ll see a lot of ads (maybe ads for AI?!) at the World Cup
6B (!!!) viewers are expected to watch 48 countries across 104 games hosted across the U.S., Mexico and Canada next summer. Telemundo, who has the exclusive Spanish-language broadcasting rights across all games, has reported that they’ve already seen 2x the ad spend from 2022. With ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup already breaking records with prices 3x those of previous tournaments, advertisers will be salivating for a chance to grab the IRL eyeballs of a wealthy and global audience. My prediction is that we’ll see one of the major AI players drop major buckaroos for a chance to make a splash! Also no one is asking for this but my personal finals prediction is 3-1 Portugal over Argentina.
More international brands will come to town.
A huge part of why the 2026 World Cup’s so much more expensive than previous iterations is that even a weakened U.S. consumer is by far the most powerful consumer globally. Foreign retailers and brands flooded into the U.S. this year and we’ll see more in 2026
Livestreaming -> liveshopping?
Even though Kim’s Kimsmas x SKIMs TikTok livestream drew fairly anemic views (the numbers I could find cited ~25k peak viewers on an account with 10.6M followers but with no source), I believe 2026 is the year that live shopping will finally reach the mainstream U.S. consumer. Whatnot significantly expanded outside collectibles as fashion and premium plants were among their top 2025 categories. TikTok reported that just over Black Friday Cyber Monday, creators and sellers hosted 760K livestream sessions with 1.6B views on the platform. No surprise, PopMart, the darling of weird stuff in 2025, was a top performer.
The best creators will 10x with AI.
Yes, no questionably, there will be a lot more AI slop. But there will be creators who leverage the proliferation of freemium / cheap AI prosumer products to great advantage. Creators are extremely entrepreneurial and the best ones will find ways to incorporate AI to not only power their efficiency, but also their creativity.
SUPPLY CHAIN & LOGISTICS:
We won’t see a huge freight rebound next year
With this consumer, I don’t anticipate a massive rebound in demand in 2026. If more capacity leaves the market due to compliance crackdown and carrier bankruptcies, prices will at least hold or move up slightly. I don’t think 2026 will look worse for carriers and brokers still in market, but I’m not sure it’ll look much better either.
There won’t be Liberation Day 2.0
Somewhat dependent on midterm results but my bet is that we won’t see the amount of uncertainty regarding tariffs in 2026. Increased real estate demand from the retail segment suggests that c-suites have gotten comfortable with the “new normal” and feel comfortable making longer term decisions again, particularly value players who are looking to capitalize on consumers looking for discounts.
The Robot(axi) Wars are coming
Waymo is planning on being in 20 more cities by the end of 2026. Uber is vowing to be in 10 cities. Tesla just tested rides without safety drivers in Austin, although behind schedule as Musk had promised a fleet covering 50% of the U.S. population earlier this year before revising down to 60 cars in Austin. I think it’s highly likely that at least one MSA (likely SF or LA) gets a 2026 sequel to the early Uber / Lyft “win at any price” saga.
Amazon will publicize their first “dark warehouse”
The scale of Amazon’s robotic ambitions came into stark relief this year. Only Amazon could turn a $775M acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012 into a robot army 1 million strong a mere 13 years later. Amazon believes that robots could enable them to automate 75% of ops and reduce the number of people the company has to hire by 600k by 2033. Will Amazon unveil the world’s first “dark warehouse,” a fully autonomous warehouse fulfilling Prime order 24/7 without lights because humans need lights but robots don’t, in 2026? A bit ominous but I am equal parts scared and impressed - as always, we’re #longamazon.
We’re not done with king-making within AI x supply chain and logistics
We’ve already seen significant king-making behavior within other verticals, notably legal and medical. 2025 saw some of this within the supply chain, particularly with AI platforms targeting the freight broker thanks to the $906B topline number of the nation’s freight bill. This is not going to stop in 2026. We’ll see more fundraising activity within freight for sure but expect to see similar fundraising dynamics start within other legacy industries with massive procurement dollars, notable wholesale, distribution, construction, and more.
INSURANCE:
High-performing MGAs will take more market share
A growing volume of non-traditional reinsurance capacity will flow towards high-performing specialty MGAs. As carriers vie for growth in a healthy and softening pricing cycle, the increased competition is creating a strong environment for new distributors to gain share and offer new/innovative products. For the best-performing MGAs, wholesalers and brokers are already seeing expanded capacity panels and favorable reinsurance renewals, which are likely to accelerate after Jan 1.
Casualty and property rate trends will diverge
The inflection toward softer property rates accelerated in 2025, with rates falling 8% q/q by Q3. This follows years of unprecedentedly hard markets, and reflects rates that are rich, growing competition, and a 2025 US hurricane season that (thankfully) resulted in lower insured loss than anticipated. In 2026, expect property rates to continue softening, while casualty rates are buoyed by worsening trends in “social inflation,” fraud, and evolving professional lines liabilities.
Deepfake Fraud becomes an existential threat to loss ratios
Cyber resilience has been a priority (and pain point) for insurers for years. But as AI proliferates across the economy, expect instances of fraud and cyber crime to accelerate with it. Programmatic claims fraud, deepfakes, cargo/inventory theft, and other sophisticated criminal activity is unfortunately evolving faster than risk management infrastructure is being adopted. Carriers, insureds, and even governmental stakeholders will increasingly be attuned to business and systemic risks and loss.
AI-Native Infrastructure for insurers is the new cloud
Investment in agentic workflow capabilities and services took off this year across enterprise carriers and claims organizations. As solutions proliferate and enterprise buyers feel the pressure of proving real ROI, the focus will shift toward infrastructure that supports AI deployment. Carriers want derisked end-to-end solutions, and most will not be able to just throw AI on top of outdated mainframe or even cloud backends. As Deloitte wrote, carriers need to “fix the plumbing for the shiny new technology to work.”
ACA Subsidies will be revived in some form – but it is too little, too late
Despite the longest federal shutdown in history, ACA subsidies have not yet been resurrected. Individual premiums are skyrocketing as healthier buyers may opt out of coverage, and for employers, health benefit costs (already sitting at record highs) are set to increase in 2026 by the highest amount in more than a decade. With massive public support for subsidies and untenable coverage, we expect a retroactive reinstatement of the subsidies. But either way, we expect significantly more focus to be on group benefits design, as the ROI from optimization increases and broader technology integration catalyzes new cost-effective options. Market dislocation creates opportunities for brokers, administrators and health plans that deliver superior savings, transparency, and UX.
Insurance affordability impacts real estate valuations and liquidity
In Q1 2025, as devastating fires wreaked havoc across Los Angeles, the climate risks to homeowners and systemic risks to the insurance ecosystem became front-page national news. In 2026, expect to see insurance affordability become even more intricately tied to property values and desirability. Though some brokers might prefer to ignore it (as evidenced by Zillow recently killing its First Street integration that promised more climate risk transparency), the impact on property sales is already here. In the absence of federal action, expect highly regionalized policies to distort property and insurance markets.
CLIMATE:
Energy efficiency is cool again
2025 brought with it the age of abundance, collapsing the existing narrative around peak energy demand, conservation and sustainability. The problem is that we have seen massive increases in the price of electricity (despite some of the lowest gas prices we’ve seen in years) that made the already daunting affordability crisis even more perilous. With rising energy prices and falling costs of energy management interventions, the ROI for energy savings has never been better. Energy efficiency might start to feel about as cool as the AC folks are blasting at full tilt.
Sponsors and incumbents go shopping
We saw a tremendous amount of hyper-scalers engage in corpdev maneuvers with legacy energy incumbents in 2025, but the truth is that a lot of legacy assets are still trading at fairly significant discounts. Climate has been an ICE COLD fundraising and capital markets environment (unless you are in data centers and nuclear) and the reality is that a lot of these companies still hold significant value. Our guess is that we start to see the pendulum swing back toward buying, especially as well-capitalized players see heightened clarity on policy and seek more proven yield.
Consolidation in Climate Tech
We’re now a few years removed from the boom years of climate tech and seeing companies (particularly those related to sustainability, carbon or EVs) and climate-specific funds running on fumes. Each of these groups are struggling to raise capital in what appears to be the most frigid market for energy-related investment that I’ve seen since the latest climate tech wave (except for pockets focused on data centers, nuclear and resilience, which I would broadly put in the American Dynamism bucket). These companies and funds can only extend their runway for so long and we’re starting to see what we think will be a wave of shutdowns from both founders and funders. This will position those with the capital for success in a much less crowded field than what we saw in 2022.
The GPU depreciation fight turns into a circularity + grid strategy
Hyperscalers and neo clouds have made large, very public bets that the useful life of AI hardware will last longer than the hype cycle. We are already seeing dispersion in depreciation assumptions (e.g. six years vs. four), even as NVIDIA’s release cadence tightens. This creates a reality in which obsolescence does not equal unusable, and secondhand demand for less intensive tasks can stay surprisingly durable.
We expect to see the beginning of an actual GPU refurbishment / secondary market stack emerge, because the economics will be too good to ignore, especially when compute is bottlenecked by power + interconnect. The shape of this is already taking hold in China. Taking this further, we expect regulators/industry to get louder about critical-mineral recycling and e-waste economics.
Interruptible compute becomes the new interconnection currency
In 2026, we expect large load to be perceived both as a customer and grid resource. Google has already signed demand-response style agreements to curtail AI data center load during peak periods, which is a far cry from always on. We expect grid operators will begin explicitly pricing (or requiring) curtailment capability to manage reliability risk.
Storage will become America’s fastest-to-build capacity product
In 2026, batteries will be framed as the quickest reliability lever in constrained regions. The build-rate is already telling you where this goes: the EIA was highlighting major battery additions (with Texas expecting ~7 GW in 2025, much of it in the second half), and industry data shows storage posting record quarters (e.g., ~4.7 GW installed in Q3 2025).
Costs also unlock new use cases as BloombergNEF’s 2025 survey has stationary storage pack pricing down sharply (reported around $70/kWh, ~45% lower than 2024) which expands the set of projects that pencil.
GENERALIST:
AI inequality inside the firm becomes visible and starts driving organizational design
OpenAI’s December 2025 enterprise report shows large usage gaps between frontier and median users. Frontier workers are sending 6x more messages per seat than the median user. In 2026, we expect companies to double down on enablement and internal playbook investment as their AI returns concentrate on power users. This may open new roles and budgets for AI operations as productivity deltas become a talent retention and performance-management issue.
The great unbundling of trust continues across our sectors
The UN’s ITU warned deepfakes are eroding trust and urged for digital verification systems and standards to fight misinformation and fraud. Regulators hardened the surface area as the EU confirmed there is no pause on the AI Act rollout, with general-purpose AI obligations applying from August. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts 40%+ of enterprises will see security or compliance incidents tied to it by 2030.
In 2026, we expect budgets to migrate towards verification layers: governance, monitoring, provenance, permissions, and audit trails, as no organizations want to be the headline. This paves the way for AI governance to become its own disciplinary function with its own headcount and tooling.