World Economic Forum and Frontiers highlight ten emerging technologies of 2026

The World Economic Forum and scientific publisher Frontiers published their report Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 on June 23, 2026. The list brings together technologies that, according to its authors, could influence industry, public policy and society in the coming years. The date matters: this was a June announcement, not an October development.

The idea behind the selection is that several advances are moving from digital applications into physical systems: power grids, industrial processes, medicine, food production and materials extraction. That does not mean artificial intelligence has stopped mattering; rather, the report focuses on technologies that also operate beyond screens.

For readers, the practical value is to use the document as a map of topics to follow, not as a leaderboard. A technology’s inclusion does not prove that it is ready to deploy, will be profitable or will have the greatest social impact.

The list published by Frontiers and the Forum spans a range of fields. It includes systems that allow buildings and electric vehicles to exchange energy with the grid; direct lithium extraction; technologies for destroying per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS); personalized cancer vaccines; and drug delivery using exosomes.

The list also covers daytime radiative cooling, “everything-to-grid” energy systems, robotics, and technologies associated with food production and materials treatment. Frontiers’ announcement describes applications across areas such as power grids, hospitals, factories, mining and food production; not every item is a software product, and they are not all at the same level of maturity.

The announcement page identifies the list by these names: everything-to-grid energy, direct lithium extraction, PFAS destruction, personalized cancer vaccines, exosome-based drug delivery and daytime radiative cooling, as well as advances in robotics and technologies linked to energy, food and materials. The list should be read in context: the available announcement groups some descriptions and does not, by itself, provide a quantitative comparison of all ten.

The shift toward infrastructure and material processes broadens the technology conversation. In energy, connecting vehicles and buildings to the grid means considering two-way electricity flows, storage and demand management—not just generation. In health, the examples involve treatments or ways of delivering drugs, rather than focusing solely on new diagnostic applications.

The report presents direct lithium extraction as an alternative to methods based on evaporation ponds and links PFAS destruction to environmental remediation. These are concrete problems: obtaining materials for batteries and treating persistent pollutants. The technology’s value depends on performance in context, including local conditions, costs and the environmental effects of the entire process.

This framing can help research teams, innovation leaders and readers following the energy transition or biomedicine. It makes it possible to ask more specific questions than “what’s the next trend?”: what infrastructure does a system require, what clinical evidence supports an intervention, or which stage of production could change? It does not answer those questions automatically.

Frontiers defines emerging technologies as scientific or technical advances that are beginning to move from research into real-world applications. That definition covers very different stages: a technology may have promising experimental results, ongoing trials or limited deployments and still be far from widespread adoption.

It is therefore useful to distinguish three things: the existence of an advance, the evidence that it works and the possibility of scaling it. Inclusion in a report indicates that its authors consider the topic relevant; it does not replace a review of scientific papers, regulatory assessments, clinical trials or data from operational facilities.

In practice, anyone evaluating a technology should check what has been demonstrated and under what conditions, who funds or conducts the studies, which alternatives are being compared and what barriers remain. For a personalized vaccine, for example, the decisive question is not simply whether the approach exists, but what clinical results have been observed and in which population. The report should not be treated as an endorsement of the efficacy of a particular intervention.

The title “Top 10” may suggest an ordered ranking, but the available announcement does not provide comparable scores or enough methodology to reconstruct an impact ranking. The ten items are better treated as an editorial selection of notable technologies, not as first-through-tenth positions or a firm prediction of which ones will succeed.

Frontiers’ page explains that the report is produced with the World Economic Forum and aims to identify emerging technologies with transformative potential. The announcement attributes editorial expertise and data-informed insight to Frontiers, but the sources available for this article do not fully explain how maturity, potential scale, benefits or risks are weighted. That lack of detail limits comparison, without undermining the list’s usefulness for locating areas of research.

The distinction matters for businesses and public agencies. A signal of interest may justify monitoring, consulting specialists or analyzing pilot projects; it is not enough to decide on an investment, change a policy or replace an existing technology. The selection can help prioritize questions and seek further evidence, not skip that assessment.

The report does not establish that all ten technologies will reach the market within the same timeframe or that they have comparable levels of validation. Nor does it, by itself, show which will deliver the greatest economic return or environmental benefit. The main caveat concerns scope: this is a selection designed to guide attention, not a full technical assessment of every solution.

To follow each topic, it is worth consulting the specific sources that support relevant claims: peer-reviewed studies, trial registries, regulatory agency documentation and published results from demonstration projects. These materials may confirm progress, but they can also reveal limitations that a summary presentation does not capture, such as energy requirements, scalability, costs or side effects.

The useful conclusion is modest and concrete: the 2026 report puts technologies connected with energy, health, climate, industry and food on the radar, many of them linked to physical systems. It is a starting point for further research, provided that claims about maturity, efficacy and feasibility are checked separately.