2024 Tech Trends Scored in 2026: What Shipped, What Flopped, What's Next

The 2024 tech digest that lived on this page predicted a year of “game-changing innovations in AI, AR, VR, and multimedia.” Sixteen months later, it’s time to audit that optimism against 2026 reality. The verdict: generative AI beat expectations, spatial computing collapsed, AV1 quietly won the codec war, and AI agents — barely mentioned in the original post — became the trend that actually mattered.

This rewrite keeps the retrospective honest: we score the 2024 predictions, add what the original missed, and translate each verdict into a decision a software product owner can use this quarter. If you’re re-planning a roadmap that was drafted around late-2024 assumptions, skip to the mini-case and decision framework.

Why we’re scoring our 2024 predictions in 2026

Fora Soft has shipped multimedia and AI products since 2005 — video conferencing, WebRTC platforms, streaming, AI moderation, and, more recently, voice AI agents. Writing a 2024 trend post was easy. Grading it honestly in 2026 is the useful exercise. We see every week which trend bets turned into live products and which turned into abandoned proofs-of-concept.

The numbers we cite in this piece are drawn from Gartner enterprise AI adoption surveys, IDC and Counterpoint device shipments, Google’s AV1 rollout disclosures, Deepgram and LiveKit latency benchmarks, the EU AI Act implementation schedule, and our own estimating experience on 140+ shipped projects. If you want the underlying method on how we cost trend work, see our guide to software estimating.

One caveat worth stating up front. “Trend” is marketing. “Roadmap commitment” is engineering. The rest of this article is about the second.

The 2024 trend scorecard at a glance

Before the deep dive, here are the 2024 calls ranked by how well they aged. “Shipped” means we see production deployments at real companies. “Stalled” means the category stopped growing. “Flopped” means the device or standard failed to find a market.

Generative AI: from novelty to 80% of enterprises

The 2024 version of this digest said companies were “moving past the novelty phase.” That was the correct direction — and a massive understatement. Gartner’s 2025 CIO survey put generative AI adoption at roughly 80% of large enterprises, up from about 33% in early 2024. The customer-service, content generation, and predictive-analytics use cases the 2024 post listed did indeed lead adoption, in that order.

What changed in 2025–2026 is where the value accrues. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) stopped being the dominant pattern; tool-use and agentic orchestration took over. Enterprises that bought “chat with your docs” in 2024 are replacing those deployments with agentic workflows that actually file the expense, update the ticket, or draft the email — not just summarize it.

Verdict: Shipped, and then some. 2024 was directionally right, magnitude wrong.

AI agents: the trend 2024 missed that mattered most

Read the 2024 digest carefully and you’ll notice one omission: agents are never mentioned. In December 2024, the phrase “agentic AI” had just started to surface in research previews. By April 2026, Gartner is forecasting that 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by year-end, up from below 5% in 2024.

What unlocked the category was not a single model release. It was a stack: cheaper long-context models, better function-calling reliability, a small set of agent runtimes (LangGraph, CrewAI, Anthropic’s own SDK) that enterprises stopped resisting, and the realization that LLMs don’t need to be reasoning geniuses to be useful at workflow orchestration. Our own LiveKit AI agents guide walks through one of the production patterns that emerged: a voice agent handles the intake, dispatches to specialized tool-using agents, and hands back to a human on escalation.

Verdict: 2024’s biggest miss. Any trend post written in late 2024 without agents aged badly.

Apple Vision Pro: why spatial computing stalled

The 2024 digest called Vision Pro “a new class of spatial computing devices, creating an entirely new category.” That was the consensus view at launch. It was wrong about the category part.

Counterpoint Research tracked around 390,000 Vision Pro units sold across 2024. Shipments collapsed in 2025, with Q4 2025 estimated near 45,000 units — a ~90% decline year-on-year. Apple reportedly paused production of the original model in early 2025 and shifted engineering toward a cheaper successor. Meanwhile, Meta’s Quest 3 and Quest 3S outsold the Vision Pro line by more than an order of magnitude at a fraction of the price.

Why it flopped at the consumer level:

• $3,499 price tag in a category where $500 is already a stretch for most households.
• No killer app. Media consumption is uncomfortable for 2+ hours; productivity use cases were thin.
• Weight and heat. Users reported fatigue before the battery ran down.
• Ecosystem thinness. Fewer visionOS apps launched in 2025 than in H1 2024.

Verdict: Flopped as a consumer category. Not dead — just much narrower than the 2024 hype suggested.

VR and XR enterprise: where the real ROI showed up

The 2024 digest’s enterprise-VR section aged much better than its consumer-AR section. Training simulations in manufacturing, medical rehearsal, field-service training, and defense procurement have all grown. PwC’s updated 2025 research on VR training retention continues to outperform classroom learning on recall and confidence measures. Meta’s Quest for Business program expanded in 2025, and Microsoft’s Mesh for mixed-reality collaboration shipped inside Teams.

What changed from the 2024 prediction: the winning form factor is cheap passthrough, not premium spatial computing. Quest 3S at $299 is the enterprise unit that procurement actually signs off on. Vision Pro at $3,499 is not.

Verdict: Shipped — at the low end. If you’re building enterprise XR in 2026, your target device is Quest 3S, not Vision Pro.

Video in 2026: AV1 won, 8K didn’t

The 2024 digest cited “advances in video compression allowing 8K and beyond at manageable file sizes.” The 8K prediction has gone nowhere — consumer 8K displays remain sub-5% of new TV sales, and no mainstream streaming service publishes 8K. What actually happened is the codec war ended.

Google has disclosed that AV1 now serves roughly 75% of YouTube watch-time in 2026. Netflix has been AV1-default on mobile since 2020; Meta, TikTok, and Twitch followed across 2023–2025. Browser and device support is universal (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari 17+, Android 10+, iOS 17+ via hardware decode on A17/M3+). H.265 is stuck in its royalty mess; H.266/VVC is a research curiosity. For product owners, this means: if you encode video, encode AV1 for delivery and keep H.264 as fallback. Everything else is overhead.

On the real-time side, WebRTC remains the backbone, but the stack around it matured. LiveKit, Daily, and 100ms built production infrastructure on top; server-side SFUs ship with recording, simulcast, and codec negotiation out of the box. Our explainer on WebRTC covers the fundamentals if you need a primer.

Verdict: AV1 shipped, 8K didn’t, WebRTC stack matured. Mostly correct on direction, wrong on which resolutions matter.

Conversational voice AI: sub-300ms is the new normal

The 2024 digest said voice was becoming “more sophisticated and widely adopted.” The specific achievement of 2025 was crossing the sub-300ms round-trip latency threshold for full speech-to-speech pipelines. At that number, interruptions and barge-in feel natural; above 600ms, users revert to touch-tone IVR patterns. Deepgram’s benchmarks, LiveKit’s voice-agent metrics, and OpenAI’s Realtime API all converged on this range.

Where voice AI shipped in production by 2026: customer support tier-1 (refunds, returns, basic troubleshooting), appointment booking (healthcare, dental, auto service), outbound collections, and in-car voice assistants. Where it has not shipped reliably: long-form therapy-like dialogues, deeply multilingual edge cases, and any task where the cost of a hallucinated action (sending money, canceling a policy) is high.

Verdict: Shipped, with a hard technical bar. 2024 was correct but didn’t call the latency-number that separates useful from unusable.

Blockchain non-crypto: supply chain and credentials finally shipped

The 2024 digest predicted “more real-world blockchain applications in healthcare records, supply chain management, and digital identity.” That one aged well — narrowly. Supply chain provenance (fashion, pharma, seafood, conflict minerals) shipped. Digital credentials under W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0 and Open Badges 3.0 shipped. Healthcare records on-chain did not ship at scale; HIPAA and GDPR write requirements are too painful.

The unlock was EUDI Wallet and the EBSI framework going live across EU member states. Diplomas, professional licenses, and micro-credentials can now be issued as Verifiable Credentials with wallet-based selective disclosure. For a deeper dive, see our guide to blockchain in mobile apps.

Verdict: Shipped, but in narrower lanes than 2024 suggested. If your use case needs a blockchain, it’s probably credentials or provenance.

Cybersecurity: zero trust becomes mandatory

2024 called zero-trust “the standard.” In 2026 it’s a procurement gate. The catalyst was the July 2024 CrowdStrike Falcon outage that grounded airlines, knocked hospitals offline, and cost an estimated $10 billion globally. That was followed by a string of 2024–2025 supply-chain attacks (XZ backdoor aftermath, several npm takeover events, and continued ransomware on MSPs) that ended any remaining debate about trusted networks.

For product builders, zero-trust in practice means: identity-aware proxy in front of every service, SBOM shipping in your CI/CD, signed container images, secrets managed outside environment variables, and — increasingly — a passkeys-first authentication strategy. Passwords are a liability procurement officers now ask about by name.

Verdict: Shipped as a mandatory baseline. Not a differentiator anymore — a table stake.

Edge AI: on-device LLMs ate the mobile app

The 2024 digest didn’t cover on-device AI as a trend. It should have. Apple Intelligence shipped with a ~3B parameter on-device model on A17 Pro and M-series silicon. Google’s Gemini Nano now runs on Pixel 8+ and recent Samsung Galaxy devices; the 2025–2026 updates made it roughly 2.6x faster for on-device summarization and rewrite tasks. Qualcomm and MediaTek both ship NPUs that target 30+ tokens/second at low single-digit watts.

For mobile product teams, this means three concrete changes:

• Summarization, rewrite, and classification features can be zero-latency and zero-API-cost for the top 60% of your user base (recent devices).
• You need a routing layer: on-device for short, private, or offline work; cloud for long-context or high-quality reasoning.
• Battery and thermals become a feature-gating constraint, not a nice-to-have.

Verdict: Shipped, but 2024 missed it. A 2026 mobile roadmap without on-device AI planning is already outdated.

Regulation: the EU AI Act takes effect

The 2024 digest skipped regulation entirely. In hindsight that’s the most expensive omission on the list. The EU AI Act entered into force August 2024; prohibited-practices provisions applied in February 2025; general-purpose AI model obligations start 2 August 2026; high-risk system obligations follow in 2027.

What this means if you ship any product with an LLM feature and EU users:

• You are, at minimum, a “deployer” of a GPAI system. You need documentation of the intended use, training data sources of your provider, and human-oversight measures.
• If your product does something that looks like biometric categorization, hiring scoring, creditworthiness, or essential-services eligibility, you’re probably “high-risk” and need conformity assessment.
• Chatbots must disclose they are AI. Generated content must be machine-readable as synthetic (C2PA or equivalent).
• Fines are up to 7% of global annual turnover — larger than GDPR’s 4%.

Verdict: The regulatory shift 2024 missed. Roadmap items, not just legal ones.

The 2024 vs 2026 scorecard: what shipped, what flopped

Side-by-side view of every trend the 2024 digest called, plus the ones it missed.

What this means for software product owners

The pattern across these verdicts is consistent. The trends that shipped in 2026 are the ones with measurable unit economics — a latency number, a codec efficiency percentage, a procurement requirement. The trends that flopped are the ones that relied on consumer enthusiasm for a new form factor.

Three implications for your 2026–2027 roadmap:

1. Assume agents, not just chat. If a competitor hasn’t replaced its “chat with your docs” feature with a write-action agent by Q3 2026, it will fall behind.
2. Budget for on-device AI. Mobile P0 features should have an on-device path on recent iPhones and Pixels; cloud is the fallback for long-context.
3. Treat EU AI Act conformity as a hard deadline, not a legal project. Your engineering team owns the audit trail, content-disclosure UI, and logging. Legal signs it off.

If you’re sizing the cost of any of these, the mobile app development cost guide and software estimating guide are both useful starting points.

Mini-case: a 2024 AI roadmap re-planned for 2026

One of our SaaS clients, a mid-market customer-support platform, came to us in late 2024 with a roadmap built around the trends the original digest called out. Original plan: a chatbot feature with RAG over knowledge base, a VR training simulator for support agents, and an 8K video call option for premium customers. Budget: roughly $420,000 over 18 months.

In March 2026 we revisited that roadmap together. Here’s what we changed:

Total replanned budget came in under the original — about $340,000, largely because the Vision Pro line item was removed and the agent layer substituted for a bigger RAG build. Agent engineering inside Fora Soft shaved another ~20% off the delivery timeline because much of the boilerplate (tool wrappers, eval harnesses, trace logging) is now reusable across projects.

The takeaway: a 2024 roadmap is not wrong if it was built on the trends that shipped. It’s wrong where it doubled down on the ones that flopped.

A decision framework: pick your next bet in five questions

Before committing engineering quarters to any of these trends, run the bet through five questions. If you can’t answer all five in concrete terms, the trend isn’t ready for your roadmap yet.

1. Unit economic. What specific number proves the trend is real — a latency, cost-per-call, conversion lift? If you can’t name one, skip.
2. Deployed evidence. Can you name three shipped products using this trend in your vertical? If not, you’re too early.
3. Regulatory exposure. Does this touch EU AI Act high-risk categories, HIPAA, GDPR, or PCI scope? If yes, double the timeline.
4. Replaceable infrastructure. Are you building on a managed service with a contract SLA or on a research preview? Research previews kill roadmaps.
5. Graceful degradation. What happens if the trend stalls for 12 months? If the whole feature breaks, redesign the bet.

The 2024 digest’s winning trends all pass all five. Vision Pro at consumer scale fails #2 and #5. 8K video fails #1.

Five pitfalls we see in 2026 tech roadmaps

After reviewing dozens of 2024-era roadmaps in the last six months, the same five mistakes recur:

1. Still shipping pure RAG. If your AI feature summarizes but doesn’t act, you’re behind. Plan one agent workflow this quarter.
2. Spatial-computing sunk costs. Teams that bought Vision Pros for dev are reluctant to switch; switch anyway to Quest 3S for enterprise pilots.
3. Ignoring AV1 hardware decode. Shipping an H.264-only pipeline in 2026 is a bandwidth tax on your users and your CDN bill.
4. Voice AI without a latency budget. If you’re not instrumenting ASR-to-first-audio, you can’t tell when your vendor regression degrades UX.
5. Punting EU AI Act to legal. Engineering owns the audit trail. Legal sign-off comes last, not first.

If you’re shipping to mobile and worried about App Store sign-off on AI features, our app-store approval guide covers the specific disclosure patterns reviewers are now flagging.

KPIs that tell you the trend is working in your product

Trend adoption means nothing if you can’t see it in a metric your product team already watches. For each of the shipped trends, there’s a KPI pair to track week-over-week:

When to ignore a trend entirely

Not every trend belongs on your roadmap. Ignore a trend if any of the following applies:

• Your users are on devices that don’t support it (older iPhones without an A17, Android without Gemini Nano, etc.).
• Your vertical is regulated in a way that makes the trend’s default implementation non-compliant (biometrics in hiring, for example, without human-oversight wrapping).
• Your team has no one who has shipped the trend in production. Consulting help or hiring beats a self-taught first attempt.
• Your P0 metric is retention and the trend only affects acquisition. Save it for next year.
• The unit economics don’t clear even optimistic assumptions. Voice AI at $0.30/call on a product that earns $0.05/user/session is not a feature, it’s a subsidy.

Ignoring a trend is a decision with evidence — not an oversight.

FAQ

Is it too late to start an AI feature in 2026?

No. It’s too late to ship a chat-with-your-docs feature and call it a differentiator — that’s table stakes. It’s not too late to ship an agent that files the ticket, a voice interface that hits sub-300ms, or an on-device AI feature that cuts your cloud bill. Those are still ahead of most competitors.

Should we build on Vision Pro for enterprise?

Only if your buyer is a C-suite exec with a dedicated Vision Pro in their office. For workforce rollout, Quest 3S at $299 clears procurement ~12x more often than Vision Pro at $3,499.

What’s the cheapest way to add voice AI to an existing product?

A LiveKit-based voice agent wrapping your existing API takes 4–6 weeks for a pilot and runs on a per-minute cloud LLM bill. Avoid building your own ASR or TTS stack from scratch in 2026 — hosted vendors are cheaper and faster than anything you’ll build in-house in one quarter.

How much does EU AI Act compliance actually cost engineering?

For a deployer of a general-purpose AI system with standard risk profile, expect ~4–8 engineer-weeks for documentation, content-disclosure UI, logging, and provider-evidence intake. High-risk-category systems are a different conversation — conformity assessment alone runs into six figures.

Is AV1 encoding too CPU-expensive to be worth it?

Hardware AV1 encoding on AMD RX 7000, Nvidia 40-series, and Intel Arc GPUs closed that gap. Cloud encoders (MediaConvert, Bitmovin, Mux) all support AV1 at commodity prices. Software-only encoding is still slow but rarely the right choice in production.

What’s a realistic timeline to replace a RAG chatbot with an agent?

Pilot in 6–8 weeks if your existing tools already expose HTTP APIs; 10–14 weeks if you need to build new endpoints for the agent to call. Expect another 4–6 weeks for safe-write guardrails, observability, and human-handoff.

Should I wait for the next big trend before investing?

The next big trend in 2027 will depend on something that’s shipping in 2026. Teams that sit out a trend cycle also sit out the hiring pipeline and institutional knowledge that powers the next cycle. Pick one or two bets from this list and ship them.

Does Fora Soft work on all of these trends?

We ship AI agents, voice AI (LiveKit and Realtime API), WebRTC video platforms, AV1 pipelines, mobile apps with on-device AI routing, and XR on Meta Quest devices. We do not build custom foundation models or pure blockchain protocol work.

What to read next

Sum-up: what to carry from 2024 into 2027

Re-reading the 2024 digest with 2026 eyes is clarifying. The trends that shipped all had a number attached — a latency, an adoption percentage, a codec efficiency, a regulatory deadline. The trends that flopped relied on novelty alone. The trends that mattered most (agents, on-device AI, EU AI Act) weren’t even on the 2024 list.

If your 2024 roadmap is still in flight, this is the quarter to audit it. Replace RAG with agents where the workflow has write actions. Swap Vision Pro for Quest 3S if you’re doing enterprise XR. Ship AV1. Budget a voice agent if your product has any inbound call volume. Plan the EU AI Act audit trail before 2 August 2026.

And when the 2026 digest gets rewritten in 2028, the trends that will matter are already shipping in someone’s production logs today. The question is whether it’s yours.