These 4 big technology bets will reshape the global economy in 2026

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The impact of disruptive technologies will have a material impact on real GDP growth. ARK suggested that capital investment alone, catalyzed by disruptive innovation platforms, could add 1.9% to annualized real GDP growth this decade. Each innovation platform, AI, public blockchains, robotics, energy storage, and multiomics, should provide a structural boost to global growth. 

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However, not all new emerging technologies will have an immediate disruptive impact. ARK noted that quantum computing is unlikely to be disruptive for 20 to 40 years. 

Let’s focus on a handful of the Big Ideas: AI infrastructure, AI consumer operating system, AI productivity, and robotics. 

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1. AI infrastructure: Next-gen cloud

ARK reported that inference costs have dropped more than 99% since 2025, and in some instances, demand for compute and access to language models has increased by 25 times since 2024. In addition, since November 2022, data center systems growth has accelerated from 5% to 29% annually.

According to ARK research, hyperscalers are expected to spend more than $500 billion on capital expenditures (Capex) in 2026, nearly four times the $135 billion spent in 2021, the year before the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. 

Also: Deploying AI agents is not your typical software launch – 7 lessons from the trenches

As AI workloads proliferate in both enterprise and consumer environments, AI infrastructure investment could exceed $1.4 trillion through 2030:

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2. The AI consumer operating system

Consumers are interacting less with apps and more through AI agents. The penetration of AI chatbots among smartphone users is nearly 20%. According to ARK, 95% of the consumer journey occurs before a purchase, and personalization is not optional. 

Also: 5 ways to use AI to modernize your legacy systems

AI agents are compressing the purchasing funnel with unprecedented personalization and speed. It took one hour to complete a purchase during the pre-internet era. Today, that time has collapsed to under 90 seconds in the agentic AI era:

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ARK forecasted that AI agents could facilitate more than $8 trillion in online consumption by 2030. ARK noted that as consumers delegate more decisions to intelligent systems, AI agents should capture an increasing share of digital transactions, from 2% of online spend in 2025 to around 25% by 2030:

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ARK suggested that AI search is taking share from traditional search. From 2025 to 2030, AI search could increase from 10% to 65% of global search traffic, as AI-related search advertising increases by about 50% annually. AI ads are likely to take share from traditional search advertising, with monetization likely to follow with a two-year lag. 

Also: 5 ways to grow your business with AI – without sidelining your people

As AI agents transform the digital economy, AI-mediated consumer revenue could grow by as much as 105% annually across the next five years, from about $20 billion today to around $900 billion in 2030. Lead generation and advertising should drive most of the growth, overwhelming consumer subscription revenue contributions.

3. AI productivity: Scaling digital intelligence

AI agents are becoming more productive. ARK found that advances in reasoning capability, tool use, and extended context are driving an exponential increase in the capability of AI agents. The duration of tasks these agents can complete reliably increased 5 times, from six minutes to 31 minutes, in 2025. 

At the same time, the cost of intelligence is decreasing. Across most domains, the cost of AI models is falling at an exponential rate. Software development costs fell 91% from $3.50 to $0.32 per million tokens in the eight months between April and December 2025:

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The opportunity to accelerate worker productivity is a multi-trillion-dollar market. Globally, spending on software and wages to improve worker productivity totals $1.43 trillion. As businesses increasingly augment knowledge workers with AI, global software spending could accelerate from 14% annually during the past decade to between 19% and 56% during the next five years. While employment growth is likely to slow and average working hours decline, the long-term unemployment rate is unlikely to increase:

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4. Robotics: Leveraging human labor

ARK suggested robots are a growing part of the labor force and took a historical look at productivity and labor hours. As productivity increased, each hour of labor became more valuable, enabling increased output with fewer hours, as living standards continued to rise:

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ARK noted that for the past 60 years, automation has involved structured processes and is likely to create a $26 trillion market opportunity:

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The forecast for robotics also considered humanoid robots, noting that it is exponentially more difficult to develop tasks for humanoids than robotic taxis. Here are some of the disruptors noted in ARK’s research in the space of humanoid robots:

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The autonomous vehicles section of the report is incredibly interesting and further expands on the adoption of AI with use cases that will be applicable in business. According to ARK, robotaxis could generate $34 trillion in enterprise value by 2030. 

Autonomous delivery with smart drones is another major driver of growth. As costs continue to fall, autonomous delivery is likely to reshape consumer buying habits. ARK suggested that autonomous delivery revenue could reach $480 billion globally by 2030. 

Also: 5 ways rules and regulations can help guide your AI innovation

Lastly, if you are a bitcoin investor, like me, you should also check out ARK’s research on how the digital currency is maturing as the leader of a new institutional asset class.

To learn more about ARK Invest’s Big Ideas 2026 report, you can visit here.