6 AI Trends Businesses Should Watch in 2026
November 30, 2025 marks precisely three years since OpenAI’s ChatGPT first awakened the world to AI’s real and immediate potential. That brief period has seen proof-of-concept chatbots become industry-shifting tools, redefining how buyers and investors query, access, and process the information which drives their decisions. Nor has the momentum slowed; the arms-race for the most useful AI model is taking new and significant turns with every passing month.
In particular, AI is becoming more personalized, specialized, and selective. Priority has shifted among AI assistants from providing the best average answer to providing the best individual answer by matching particular sources with the particular context of the user. What follows is a brief look at how these trends are materializing and how businesses can adapt to stay visible in 2026.
1. The Quest for User Context
The more deeply an engine knows the user’s context, the better it can apply the information it finds to their particular needs—and the more useful it becomes. The use of user context is already visible in assistants like ChatGPT that reference information from past chats to personalize new responses. Businesses should expect effective data collection to be a major deciding factor behind which assistants can deliver their messages most effectively to the largest number of users.
2. Broad Content, Narrow Delivery
Answers being tailored to detailed user profiles have a direct impact on what AI-optimized content should look like. Targeted, highly-specific content is less valuable when the mode of delivery guarantees a narrowed-down answer. If that is indeed the case next year, businesses may want to produce their content for a broader audience—maximizing applicability—and allow AI assistants to fine-tune the information on their behalf.
3. Segmenting Assistants
The well-known AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot are all general-purpose systems, and much of their popularity has stemmed from their ability to perform a very broad range of tasks fairly well. They are now beginning to face competition, however, from specialized assistants designed to perform a limited range of industry-specific tasks very well. Some are even designed to address particular parts of the purchase funnel. Businesses should monitor this trend in their own industries to ensure they optimize content for the systems their buyers use.
4. Affiliations and Biases
Not all sources are considered equally. Third party news and blogs vastly outweigh categories like social media or product description pages, for instance, making up 62% of citations among prominent assistants. This nuance is compounded by the fact that different assistants have unique and mutable preferences, and that a partnership with a media organization or a copyright lawsuit can promote or disqualify certain content. Understanding these biases will be key to maintaining visibility across various assistants.
5. A New Kind of Technical SEO
The technical frameworks that govern how AI assistants locate and interpret information are distinct from traditional SEO, and optimizing for new file-types and standards—like llm.txt—will only become more crucial for ensuring that content can be found in the first place. Businesses must stay well-informed to keep metadata in line with the latest developments in AI crawling behavior.
6. The Growing MCP Ecosystem
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging standardized system for integrating specialized tools with AI assistants. Any tool that is built according to the protocol can be accessed by any compliant assistant without the need for custom coding. The result is a sort of third-party “app store” that could allow users' assistants to execute complex tasks on their behalf and interact seamlessly with branded integrations. Whether businesses create their own such integrations or take advantage of the media companies that do, MCP represents an intriguing opportunity for next-level user engagement.
The Bottom Line
AI is at once the most rapidly growing and the most rapidly changing information technology in history. Staying visible in 2026 will not be as simple as maintaining the efforts that worked in 2025. But if they monitor the trends listed here, and can build an AI-citation strategy that is flexible enough to shift as they develop, today’s businesses have an opportunity to reach new buyers and investors in a way that is more personal and more valuable than ever before.
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