How technology will redefine the world in 2026, beyond AI

For the past two years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has captured nearly all the attention across media, policy, boardrooms, and public imagination. However, the global technological landscape is far richer, more complex, and more dynamic than any AI-only narrative suggests.

The latest HIT Radar 2025 by SDA Bocconi’s DEVO Lab confirms this broader picture. Innovation today advances through a constellation of technologies, many of which evolve far away from the AI spotlight. Reading HIT Radar 2025 together with the 2024 edition reveals a multi-year trajectory that helps understand what will take center stage in 2026: the center of gravity of technological innovation is shifting toward the infrastructures, interfaces, and intelligent systems that will underpin the next decade of digital transformation.

Infrastructure is becoming intelligent

Across industries, technologies traditionally considered “deep tech” are moving forward, sometimes slowly, sometimes surprisingly fast:

Blockchain Layer-2 solutions have entered a phase of accelerated maturity. In 2025, they account for more than half of Ethereum’s transaction volume and support a new generation of scalable, lower-cost digital services.

Hyperscale Edge Computing continues its steady rise. With over 1,000 hyperscale data centers worldwide by 2024 and growing investments in micro-edge deployments, companies are increasingly able to process data where it is generated.

Quantum, photonic, and neuromorphic computing (all still early-stage) are progressing in parallel, each addressing different bottlenecks of classical architectures: error correction, energy efficiency, and real-time local intelligence.

These developments may not generate headlines like AI, but in practice, they determine what AI and every other digital system will be able to do next.

Human–technology interaction is transforming

A second major shift involves how humans interact with technology.

Mixed Reality (MR) is advancing with the release of new-generation headsets (both consumer and professional ones). This has made MR more capable and more usable in enterprise contexts. HIT Radar 2025 emphasizes the growth of applied use cases:

• • immersive training,
• • remote industrial support,
• • design and prototyping,
• • high-risk environmental simulations.

Despite ergonomic challenges and privacy concerns, MR is steadily migrating from niche demonstration to specialized productivity tool.

Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are also advancing rapidly thanks to:

• • lower-cost EEG headsets,
• • improved neural decoding through machine learning,
• • the first minimally invasive implants entering clinical trials.

The Radar highlights early use cases in neurorehabilitation, communication support, and cognitive monitoring, domains where AI augments, rather than replaces, human capability.

Together, MR and BCIs illustrate a broader trend: technologies are moving closer to the human body and mind, redesigning the boundary between physical and digital experience.

Robotics is entering the real world

Humanoid robotics, introduced in HIT Radar 2024 and reconfirmed in 2025, remains one of the most polarizing technological areas. On one side, major industrial pilots, spanning logistics, retail, and manufacturing, demonstrate significant progress in locomotion, manipulation, perception, and task-level autonomy. On the other hand, both Radar editions note the gap between lab-grade performance and real-world consistency, along with new safety and cybersecurity considerations arising from cloud-connected robotic intelligence.

Although in many Countries humanoids remain experimental, the trajectory is unmistakable: robots are steadily becoming co-workers, not merely mechanical tools.

The foundations of future connectivity are already being built

While 5G continues to expand globally, 5G-Advanced is now emerging as the real enabler of advanced use cases such as:

• • high-precision industrial automation,
• • large-scale IoT deployments,
• • advanced sensing and coordination systems.

At the same time, HIT Radar 2025 introduces an early insight on 6G. Even though commercial rollout is years away, the first prototypes are beginning to appear.

This shift echoes a central message: connectivity is becoming more distributed, more intelligent, and more intertwined with computing.

The takeaway: AI is only the beginning

Artificial Intelligence remains a crucial pillar of digital transformation. But the most important insight from the DEVO Lab’s HIT Radar’s 2024–2025 trajectory is that AI is part of a much larger technological rebalance. Innovation in 2025 is about the convergence of multiple technologies, each advancing at its own speed, each enabling the others. If AI is the brain, these other technologies are the nervous system, skeleton, senses, and environment of the digital world.

Understanding them, beyond the noise and beyond the hype, will be the real differentiator for the next decade.