(17 Feb 2026) Each year, I make a point of reading tech-trend reports outside our lane. Scholarly publishing and education have their own constraints, but technology waves rarely start here. They break first in industries that live and die by speed, automation, and customer experience — finance, commerce, and marketing. When those sectors begin redesigning for agent-mediated discovery or autonomous operations, I treat it as an early signal of what will reach our workflows next — just with different risk tolerances and trust requirements.
With that lens, I recently read eight impactful technology trend reports from Bain, CB Insights, Deloitte,Gartner, IBM, McKinsey and Kantar, and SaM. What surprised me wasn’t any single prediction. It was the consistency of the underlying shift across different sectors and authors and audiences. The same message surfaced repeatedly:
AI is no longer a feature. It’s becoming infrastructure — and the unit of value is moving from “a better tool” to “a better system.”
That matters a lot for scholarly publishing and learning/e-learning, where our “systems” (submission → review → production → dissemination; or authoring → teaching → assessment → credentialing) are deeply intertwined, highly regulated, and trust-sensitive by design.
Hong Zhou shares four themes he saw repeated most often, what they mean for our industries, and where the reports quietly disagree here.
