These are the Top 10 emerging technologies of 2026

The World Economic Forum's annual Top 10 Emerging Technologies report showcases the hope technology offers amid global uncertainty.

This year's report, launched at the Forum's "Summer Davos" event in Dalian, China, underlines that technology is at the heart of the unprecedented change the world is undergoing - but can also offer solutions to some of the most pressing issues.

"The technologies we bring forward are chosen for their novelty, their development progress, and their potential for impact," say the authors, Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director of the Forum's Centre for Frontier Technology and Innovation, and Fred Fenter, Chief Executive Editor, Frontiers Media.

"Above all, they are chosen for the signals that suggest they are approaching the moment when decisions made by governments, industry, and research institutions will meaningfully shape how they arrive in the world."

Looking across the technologies the Forum's experts selected as the ones likely to make the biggest impact on our lives, three things stand out:

1. Technologies are increasingly personal, tailored to a single patient or a specific context.

2. Many of the solutions are decentralized in nature, producing food, energy or raw materials closer to where they are needed.

3. They achieve more for less, whether it's space cooling without electricity, food production without animal farming, or substantially reducing the cost of traditional drug discovery.

Electricity grids peak in late afternoon and early evening as energy use rises with people returning home, cooking dinner and engaging in after-work activities. At the same time, energy generation from renewable resources like solar ebbs away as the sun goes down. Typically, thermal energy generation would need to ramp up at this point to cover the shortfall.

Instead, everything-to-grid technology mobilizes distributed assets like electric vehicles and batteries in factories and data centres sitting idle at this time of day, pulling stored electricity back into the grid to meet extra demand.

In California, more than 16,000 solar-equipped homes linked into a distributed electricity network pushed 51 megawatts back to the grid during one such evening demand peak in 2024. This output exceeded the capacity of several fossil fuel-fired peaker plants - and without the emissions.

Lithium is vital for battery storage, which in turn is a key building block for the energy transition. While lithium is not a rare material, the evaporation process from brine traditionally used takes up to two years, is water-intensive and limited to specific geographies. Three-quarters of lithium production is currently concentrated in China.

Direct lithium extraction (DLE) offers a faster, flexible, and potentially more sustainable alternative to traditional lithium production. Using engineered systems, including sorbents, membranes, and solvents, DLE can extract lithium from brine within hours. The remaining water is returned underground. DLE also works with geothermal fluids, oilfield wastewater and recycled materials, reducing the dependence on naturally occurring brine and diversifying supply chains.

Several plants are already in operation, including in Argentina, the US and Australia.

Passive radiative cooling materials are designed to reflect 95% of incoming sunlight to keep surfaces cooler than the surrounding air - without the need for electric space cooling.

They can be applied as paints, coatings, films or building components, offering a low-cost, scalable way to improve energy efficiency and reduce electricity demand. They can be used both in new-builds and existing structures.

Suppliers report energy saving of up to 20% in settings such as grocery and retail stores. Cool roof materials are already mandated in California and China as part of their green building standards.

In the UK, start-up AssetCool has developed a coating that keeps power cables cooler, enabling them to carry 30% more electricity.

Forever chemicals or PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) were designed to resist heat, water and chemical breakdown. Now they are causing severe environmental issues - PFAS have been found in locations as remote as the Arctic and in our drinking water.

Traditional treatments have succeeded in removing PFAS from water, but not destroying them. The only way to do so is by breaking the extremely strong carbon-fluorine bonds that make them so persistent in the environment.

New methods are now emerging that superheat water, apply electrical currents or use UV-driven chemical reactions to crack PFAS bonds. In Michigan, a facility destroying PFAS from landfild run-off has been operational since 2023. Daikin Industries, one of the world's largest PFAS producers, reported that its UV-based method successfully destroyed 99.99% of PFAS during a field trial.

Precision fermentation turns microbes into factories producing proteins, enzymes and drugs. Instead of using crops or animals, the genetic code for these molecules is inserted into microbes like yeast or bacteria. This approach enables a consistent, scalable production in a controlled environment, with outputs that are chemically identical to their natural counterparts.

Precision fermentation is already used to produce microbe-derived egg proteins and animal-free whey protein as a sustainable alternative to egg and dairy in food manufacturing.

Shifting production from farms and extraction to fermentation tanks opens up new ways to manufacture essential products more efficiently and quickly. In addition to food, the technology is also helping to create cosmetic peptides, pharmaceutical compounds and chemicals traditionally derived from fossil fuels.

Highly targeted therapies for conditions like cancer can switch off genes, edit mutations or deliver a therapeutic drug straight to a diseased cell. The hitch: many of them only work well in the lab. Once in a real patient's bloodstream, they often degrade or get deflected by the body's defence systems.

Exosomes are tiny particles that function like a mail system, carrying proteins and genetic material between cells. Loading these exosomes with therapeutics can overcome the barriers faced by synthetic drugs because the body recognizes exosomes as its own.

In a Phase 1 drug trial in the US, pancreatic cancer patients with no remaining treatment options were stabilized thanks to engineered exosomes targeting a previously hard-to-treat mutation. Exosomes also show great potential for addressing neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

There is no one-size-fits-all treatment for cancer. How a cancer presents and how it reacts to treatment varies from person to person. Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines are designed to train a patient’s immune system to recognize and attack their specific cancer cells.

The first step is sequencing a patient’s tumour to find unique mutations and proteins. Then, a custom mRNA vaccine is made to train the immune system to target those markers, ultimately improving outcomes.

One example is a recent melanoma trial in South Carolina where patients receiving a personalized mRNA vaccine alongside immunotherapy saw a 40-50% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death compared to immunotherapy alone.

It is the adage of drug development: 9 in 10 new drugs that enter clinical trial fail. Quantum simulation uses quantum computing to model how molecules behave at the atomic level with far greater accuracy than traditional methods.

By modelling the vast number of possible interactions between them, researchers can better predict how drug candidates will function early on. In turn, this could reduce costly trial failures and open the door to targeting diseases that were previously too complex to tackle.

One example is a 2025 collaboration between IBM and Moderna, which used quantum computing to run one of the largest simulations of protein folding (creating proteins) and mRNA interactions to date.

World models are a new type of AI designed to understand and predict how the physical world behaves, rather than just describing it. By learning from multiple data sources - such as video, sensors and text - they create a virtual representation of real-world events. In turn, this enables them to reason about situations they have never directly encountered. This means AI systems can move beyond pattern recognition and be more flexible and intuitive.

This approach is particularly valuable in fields like robotics and climate modelling, where understanding real-world dynamics is essential. For example, NVIDIA’s Cosmos platform trains robots on vast amounts of physical-world data so they can adapt to new, unfamiliar environments by relying on an internal model of how things work.

Decoding reams of encrypted internet traffic may not be possible today, but could be well within the reach of future quantum computers as the technology improves.

Lattice-based cryptography is a new approach to encryption designed to remain secure even in this scenario. The technology hides data in complex mathematical structures (lattices) and adds small pieces of random information, making it extremely difficult to tell the correct solution from many false ones.

This “noise-based” security defends against classical and quantum attacks, making lattice-based cryptography key for data protection in the post-quantum era. It already safeguards Apple's iMessage, and Google plans to include it in Android, alongside other encryption techniques.

The Forum is spotlighting how innovation moves from breakthrough to scale to impact ahead of 'Summer Davos' in China, 23–25 June 2026. Follow the latest.