If 2023 through 2025 were the years of model breakthroughs, 2026 will be the year of routing. We are entering an era where intelligence is abundant—almost embarrassingly so. Capability-to-cost curves are doubling every few months, yet most teams are still chasing “the best model” as if brute IQ were the differentiator.

The End of the Model Race

We have spent years obsessed with benchmarks and leaderboards: whose model reasons faster, whose score is higher, whose release wins Twitter for the day. That race is effectively over. The frontier models will keep improving, but the meaningful advantage has shifted to orchestration.

Cheap intelligence means every model has a purpose. Some are fast, some go deep, some are small and hyper-specialized. You do not need to send every task to the most powerful model when a lighter, cheaper one will do.

Think about your refrigerator. Dorm room? Mini fridge. Large family? Full-size. Restaurant? Walk-in. A Chicago winter? Leave the leftovers outside. No one installs a walk-in freezer in a studio apartment, yet that is exactly how many teams use AI today: every ad-hoc query, note, and routine task goes straight to the biggest, most expensive model. By 2026, that will look as absurd as chilling a single soda in a commercial freezer.

The Future Is Hybrid

The next era of AI will be hybrid by design. Cloud models will continue to dominate for raw scale, but locally hosted intelligence is rising fast—on your devices, in your vehicles, inside your infrastructure. Economics, privacy, and latency all favor having capable, specialized models running close to the work.

Expect to see models embedded everywhere: AI glasses handling vision tasks locally, smart homes running lightweight reasoning on-device, vehicles with copilots that work without connectivity, personal servers fine-tuned on your writing and data. In Justice and Public Safety, we are already planning the return of on-prem deployments for CJIS workloads, sensitive court documents, evidence handling, and fusion centers powered by open-source models.

The future will feel less like calling a single cloud brain and more like living inside a web of cooperating intelligences—fast, personal, contextual.

Intelligence as a Utility

The State of AI 2025 report put it plainly: the cost of intelligence is collapsing faster than anyone expected. AI is becoming a utility. You will pay for what you use, route tasks based on cost, latency, and reliability, and mix providers as needed.

One model for deep reasoning. Another for real-time processing. A third running on your phone to summarize notes. Soon you will not think about which model answered your query any more than you worry whether household electricity came from solar or hydro—unless it fails.

A World of Tools, Not Gods

There is a quiet liberation in this. The field has spent years searching for “the one model to rule them all.” 2026 will break that spell. Intelligence is no longer a rare asset. Differentiation comes from how you route it, embed it, and design around it.

We will each build a tool belt of models, each suited to a specific job. Creativity and systems thinking matter again. The fridge analogy holds: you do not always need the most powerful appliance—you need the right one, in the right place, doing the right job.

The Age of Routing

If the last few years were about racing, the next decade begins with routing. The smartest systems will not be those that think the hardest; they will be the ones that know where to think, when to think, and how much that thinking should cost.

We will move from worshiping the smartest models to building the smartest systems. That shift—designing the routing fabric, not just admiring the frontier—will decide who leads the next wave of AI.