Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
From AI agents driving a shift in customer experience interactions to AI-search flipping traditional search on its head, AI advancements transformed how businesses operate in 2025. As we look to the year ahead, how will this momentum continue?
CallRail leaders share their AI predictions and what else they anticipate in 2026, from a rise in personal interactions to vertical partnerships and more.
The Relationship Between AI Agents and Humans Will Evolve
2025 was the year of AI agents and in the year ahead, Marc Ginsberg, CEO of CallRail, predicts we’ll see a shift in how consumers engage with agents as they establish stronger levels of trust:
“In 2026, human and AI agent interaction will begin to feel more mainstream. While it felt like a bit of an oddity in 2025, increasingly we have learned how to best interact with them. Voice and text response will be more life-like.
We will also begin to give the models more grace as we understand that, while they are super human in terms of their ability to consume knowledge, like humans they aren’t perfect. As these systems become part of daily life, we will learn to rely and trust them – along with the habit to verify the information provided, just as we do with human interactions. Consumers will appreciate the speed of response (no more long hold times) and further trust the accuracy of answers they receive.
This increased trust, combined with much improved processes for training the models, will create an increased opportunity for businesses to more broadly adopt agents to communicate with customers. These AI agents will begin to become essential team extensions, many with clever names, automating customer conversations, qualifying leads, and extracting valuable insights for informed decision-making. However, the distinction between human and machine interactions will still be clear as their roles will become increasingly complementary vs. competitive. The agents will serve to make humans more efficient and more productive in their roles while leading to deeper, rather than fewer, customer connections.”
Authentic and Personal Interactions Will Drive Success
It’s no surprise that AI has unlocked new opportunities for businesses to enhance their customer experience offerings but as we look to 2026, Laura Beussman, CallRail’s CMO and CRO, believes businesses must also prioritize human relationship building:
“Personalization at scale will force prioritization of real relationships in micro. 2025 was all about how AI can deliver personalization at scale. With the ability to use AI to generate hyper targeted content and workflows in mass, every experience with a business can and should be personalized. But where does that take human to human relationship building? Those person to person relationship building opportunities become even more valuable.
Those personalized at scale processes create the space to spend real quality time with your top customers, prospects, and even your internal team. In person events become even more crucial for that coffee chat where you go from multi touch automated workflows to real connection. Because those human interactions are less frequent, they’re even more valuable and make your leads feel like true VIPs. And everyone wants to feel like a VIP. “
Beussman also sees the year ahead as an opportunity for businesses to leverage AI more strategically to help build more authentic relationships:
“Authenticity for the win – buyers want efficiency, they want quick responses, and they want it 24/7. They also want connection and they want to feel understood. How do you do both? You create a marketing engine that uses AI to automate tasks, moves leads down the funnel and provides always on responses. Then you also, create space to share authentically, build a brand that’s transparent, tells real human stories, and creates an emotional connection.
It’s not an either/or decision, it’s always an AND. The more efficient your marketing strategy is, the more time you can spend thinking about how to share with your audience in a way that is authentic to you, your business and your brand.”
The Year of AI Reality Checks and AI Agents
Companies are becoming increasingly concerned around how much return on investments they’re actually getting from their AI investments, as we head into 2026 Ryan Johnson, CPO at CallRail, believes the industry will experience an AI reality check:
“2025 was the year of easily standing up POCs and getting some traction in the marketplace from the general sense. It was solely focused on successes, money raised, and relation with AI.
In 2026, you will start to see pressure surfacing how hard it is to get traction with AI whether that is scale, controlling cost, or actually finding product market fit. I think the market will start to correct itself where VC money will pull back and failures will start to surface especially with undertone negative global economic pressures. In short 2025 was the year of elation and celebration of AI where in 2026 I think AI will have a reality check of sorts.”
Johnson also predicts we’ll see AI agents uplevel their capabilities:
“AI Agents will continue to get better and become critical for SMBs in 2026. We’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg in 2025, but they will get more sophisticated in 2026.
Whether that is AI Agents that generally get better (more human-like with more context) or AI agents that can communicate with each other with MCP they will just get better and better. They are here to stay and help companies provide better service to their customers and consumers will have better experiences with businesses overall.”
Marketers Must Prepare for AI Search to Overtake Traditional Search
Marketers must prepare to navigate the new era of AI-powered search that’s rapidly emerging and set to take over traditional search according to Beussman and Johnson.
Beussman predicts traditional search tools will be on their way out:
“Attribution solutions that aren’t on the cutting edge of AI search attribution will see their demise. While AI search traffic is still relatively low, every marketing leader is tightly monitoring to see when that changes. They have to be ready, and they’re not going to invest in solutions that aren’t ready for that change. They want tech partners that are innovating, that are out in front, and that they feel confident will have their back when AI search hits the S curve. Any marketing solution that’s not out in front, is falling behind.”
Johnson anticipates AEO will drive new forms of paid marketing:
“With so much focus on the changing landscape of AI and digital marketing such as AEO, search, etc. I think you will see Perplexity, OpenAI, and/or Anthropic launch some new paid digital advertising in 2026.
I’m not sure what it will be or how it will work, but given the big shifts in how consumers are utilizing AI to search it would make sense they would capitalize on this with some new form of paid marketing (search, display, etc.).”
The AI Space Will See Rising Consolidations and Failures
While AI investments continue to skyrocket, Sean McCrohan, VP of Technology at CallRail believes that in 2026, we’ll see AI giants dominate the space:
“By the second half of 2026, we’re going to be seeing more visible consolidation in the AI space. It might not yet impact the major players, but the herd of smaller ventures (particularly AIaaS platforms) will begin to thin either to acquisition or collapse.”
That said, he also sees an opportunity for growth for companies who can support validating multimodal and agent projects at scale:
“Multimodal models and action-oriented agent frameworks were areas of focus in 2025. Neither of these will go away, and foundations in those areas will continue to solidify. They have enabled a variety of new projects. However, there is still a large gap in support for testing and validating those projects at scale. It’s a critical space, and if someone solves it well in 2026, they’re going to mint money.”
McCrohan also predicts that 2026 may see an incident that will underscore why safety guardrails on AI projects are crucial:
“2026 is going to see a major failure of safety guardrails on an enterprise or government-level AI project that makes enough waves to become the memorable poster child example of what can go wrong. That shouldn’t stop us from building projects, but everyone operating at scale should ask whether it is going to be them.”
AI’s Transforming Software Development
While 2025 focused on utilizing AI for code generation, Kristin Marsicano, VP of Engineering at CallRail believes we’ll see use of AI in software development shift in 2026:
“Over the past year, many AI-enablement efforts in Engineering have focused on code generation. That focus has made it clearer than ever that writing code is rarely the bottleneck. The real opportunity is in improving how teams make decisions, define requirements, review code, and ensure quality. As AI continues to mature, the biggest gains will come from how it reshapes collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle.
This coming year I expect to see more teams blurring the lines between Product, Design, and Engineering, reducing friction in handoffs and enabling people to contribute across functions in ways that weren’t practical before. By leveling the playing field for baseline aspects of each role, AI will unlock a more integrated and adaptive way of building software.”
Marsicano also expects we’ll see the long tail impact of AI in software development emerge:
“AI and the Long Tail of Impact in Software Development: In software development, AI will enable higher impact by lowering the effort required for work that typically gets deprioritized. A good example is the “paper cut” bug, small usability issues that seem low impact when attention is focused on top-line growth.
With AI agents capable of triaging, clustering, and recommending fixes for these low-hanging-fruit issues, teams will be able to address them at scale. The result will be a more polished product experience, greater customer trust, and compounding gains that come not from big launches, but from systematically eliminating the small frustrations that used to fall through the cracks.”
AI and Vertical Partnerships Will Rise
The tech industry is seeing a steady rise in AI software and solutions and Madelyn Wing, VP of Partnerships at CallRail, believes that growing offerings will introduce new partnership opportunities:
“AI advancements are going to reshape the relationships between partner and product teams. Integrations will be measured by their ability to share and train models, not just on their sync functionality. Collaborating partners are going to need to develop a deeper, shared understanding of their mutual customers’ business processes in order to empower AI agents to embed directly into their workflows. This shift will require deep communication between product and partner teams to strategically re-architect their roadmaps to co-train AI models using combined, high-value data signals.”
Wing also expects verticalized partnerships to mount:
“We’re going to see a huge push in 2026 toward vertical ecosystems. If you sell to home services or legal teams, those industries already have their core platforms like ServiceTitan, Jobber, and Clio. The marketplace action is shifting straight to these vertical niches, basically creating “micro-marketplaces” right inside those leading platforms for easy discovery. The key takeaway here is that buyers want deep, pre-vetted integrations and they want to buy everything seamlessly through their trusted vertical platform partner to get value fast. With this trend, we are also moving away from traditional warm sales representative handoffs toward more automated, Product-Led Growth (PLG) and automated upsell motions embedded directly within the platform experience.”
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