AI futurists predict 2026 shift in search, translation and healthcare

This piece is valuable less for its specific predictions and more as a barometer of elite expectations. When mainstream business media in Southeast Asia runs a long feature taking for granted that generative AI will eat search, enable seamless cross‑lingual video chat, and design drugs, it tells you how rapidly the Overton window has shifted. The interviewees frame 2026 as the year of “generative biology” and real‑time translation, with firms like DeepMind and Nvidia’s Evo models helping compress discovery cycles in life sciences.([thestar.com.my](https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/01/04/7-predictions-for-2026-from-coffee-making-humanoid-robots-to-ai-helping-treat-disease))

For the race to AGI, expectations matter: capital, talent and regulation all respond to narratives. If boards and policymakers internalise that conversational agents will intermediate most information retrieval, they will double down on LLM‑centric architectures and the infrastructure to support them. Similarly, normalising the idea that humanoid robots could soon pass Wozniak’s coffee test raises the bar for embodied AI and may attract more investment into physical agents and test‑time compute.

At the same time, the article is candid about an eventual AI market correction before AGI arrives. That’s a healthy reminder: we’re likely to see booms and drawdowns on the path to more general systems, but the direction of travel—toward deeper integration of AI into core economic functions—seems locked in.