Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026

The World Economic Forum's 2026 report highlights ten emerging technologies characterized by a shift toward personalization, distributed production, and material efficiency. Key innovations include 'everything-to-grid' energy systems, direct lithium extraction, and passive radiative cooling for zero-energy buildings. The report also details breakthroughs in biotechnology, such as precision fermentation for food and personalized mRNA cancer vaccines, and computational advances like quantum simulation for drug discovery and world models for physical AI. Each technology is analyzed through a strategic lens to identify the regulatory, financial, and infrastructural conditions required to scale these innovations while ensuring equitable access and trust.

• Everything-to-grid energy transforms buildings, vehicles, and devices into active grid nodes that can store and return power to balance supply and demand in real-time. This is supported by new battery chemistries using lithium and sodium to reduce dependence on cobalt and nickel, and coordination software that orchestrates millions of assets.
• Direct lithium extraction (DLE) allows for the recovery of lithium from brines in hours rather than the years required by evaporation ponds, with recovery rates reaching 80–95%. DLE enables production from geothermal fluids and oilfield wastewater, potentially shifting the geography of supply away from traditional hubs like China, Chile, and Argentina.
• Passive radiative cooling materials can lower surface temperatures by emitting heat into space through a narrow infrared window without using electricity. These materials, which can be integrated into paints and films, have demonstrated energy savings of 15–20% in retail settings and can reduce indoor temperatures by 5–10°C.
• PFAS destruction technologies are moving from laboratories to commercial scale, using methods such as supercritical water, specialized electrodes, and UV light to break the strong carbon–fluorine bond. Examples include a facility in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a field trial by Daikin Industries processing over 170,000 gallons of industrial wastewater.
• Precision fermentation uses engineered microbes to produce proteins, fats, and drugs identical to those from animals or plants, reducing land and water use. Commercial applications include fermentation-derived whey protein by Perfect Day and egg proteins by EVERY, with some processes using 87% less water than cattle-derived products.
• Exosome drug delivery utilizes the body's own membrane-wrapped packets to transport therapeutic cargo across biological barriers, including the blood-brain barrier, without triggering immune responses. Over 200 clinical trials have been launched since 2022 for cancer and neurological diseases.
• Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines are synthesized based on a patient's unique tumour mutations to train the immune system to recognize cancer cells. In a trial for high-risk melanoma, combining these vaccines with pembrolizumab reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49%.
• Quantum simulation for drug discovery models molecular interactions directly using quantum physical principles, reducing the high failure rate of clinical drug candidates. This technology is particularly promising for rare and orphan diseases that were previously considered 'undruggable' due to complexity.
• World models enable AI to learn physical dynamics from multimodal sensory data rather than just text, allowing robots to generalize to new physical situations. NVIDIA's Cosmos platform, trained on 20 million hours of data, is a primary example of this deployment.
• Lattice-based cryptography provides a quantum-resistant alternative to current encryption by hiding data in complex geometric structures. It enables fully homomorphic encryption, allowing computations on encrypted data without exposing it, and is being adopted by the NSA, EU, and SWIFT to prevent 'harvest-now-decrypt-later' attacks.

APA

World Economic Forum (2026). Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Top_10_Emerging_Technologies_Report_2026.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026. 2026. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Top_10_Emerging_Technologies_Report_2026.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 |date=June 2026 |url=https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Top_10_Emerging_Technologies_Report_2026.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2026top, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2026}, month = jun, url = {https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Top_10_Emerging_Technologies_Report_2026.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }