Eight of the Ten Most Consequential Technologies of 2026 Are Not Primarily AI. Your Board Has Not Adjusted for That.
The World Economic Forum and Frontiers have just published a list. Its central finding is being missed by South African corporate strategy.
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The dominant technology conversation in South African boardrooms over the past three years has been organised around one subject. Artificial intelligence. How to adopt it. How to govern it. How to write the policy. How to answer the auditors. That conversation is important, and it is not going to stop. But it is now incomplete in a specific way that the World Economic Forum and Frontiers have just made visible. Their new annual report on the ten most consequential emerging technologies of 2026 has an argument buried in the framing that most of the South African commentary on the report has missed. Eight of the ten technologies act directly on physical systems. Only two involve a software or computational dimension of the kind current AI strategy addresses. And the boards preparing their organisations for the next five years have been strategising for the wrong ratio.
CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND
The World Economic Forum and Frontiers co-published the fourteenth annual Top 10 Emerging Technologies report on 23 June 2026. The list itself is a mixture of what the report calls energy, materials, health and computing technologies, and each of the ten is at what the report calls a tipping point between scientific progress and real-world impact. The ten, in the order the report presents them, are everything-to-grid energy, direct lithium extraction, passive radiative cooling materials, PFAS destruction, precision fermentation, exosome drug delivery, personalised mRNA cancer vaccines, quantum simulation for drug discovery, world models, and lattice-based cryptography.
The framing that accompanies the list is where the news actually sits. The technologies with the greatest impact, the report argues, are moving off screens and into the physical systems that underpin modern economies — energy, medicine, food, and materials. Frederick Fenter, the Chief Executive Editor of Frontiers, put the argument plainly in the announcement: “the technologies with the greatest impact are shifting from software towards the physical realm — even as artificial intelligence continues to support progress on many fronts.” Stephan Mergenthaler, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum, said the ten together tell “a broader story about where innovation is heading.”
Eight of the ten technologies act directly on physical systems: everything-to-grid energy, direct lithium extraction, passive radiative cooling, PFAS destruction, precision fermentation, exosome drug delivery, personalised mRNA cancer vaccines, and quantum simulation for drug discovery. Two are physical-world enablers rather than physical technologies in themselves. World models are AI systems that learn how the physical world behaves from multi-modal data to forecast complex real-world scenarios, from superstorm behaviour to industrial system dynamics. Lattice-based cryptography is next-generation mathematical infrastructure designed to protect the digital systems on which the physical world’s information flows depend, once quantum computers become powerful enough to break existing public-key cryptography. Neither of them is what the current AI strategy conversation is about.
INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS
The temptation is to read this as a story about artificial intelligence being oversold. That is the wrong reading. AI is not overrated. It is central. Every one of the ten technologies on the list is enabled in some way by artificial intelligence — the report itself was assembled using an AI nomination workflow that screened more than 1,200 candidate technologies across academic and industry sources. What is being said in the list is not that AI has been overrated. It is that AI has been the story for so long that the boards, ministers and industrial policy makers currently doing five-year strategy have been strategising as if the technologies that will reshape their economies are all going to be some form of software. They are not. Most of them will be physical.
The consequence for a South African board is specific and immediate. If eight of the ten most consequential technologies of the next five years act on power grids, drug pipelines, food production, cooling systems, mining, materials and cryptographic infrastructure, then the strategic question your organisation is answering has to change. It is no longer only “how do we adopt AI responsibly?” That question remains important. But it is now the wrong question if it is asked alone. The right question sits alongside it: which of the physical technologies on the WEF list will materially reshape our industry, our infrastructure, our supply chain or our customer proposition in the next five years, and are we preparing for any of them?
Some are more immediately South African than others. Everything-to-grid energy, the report’s first-listed technology, describes electric vehicles and buildings that store and return power to the grid on demand. In a country that has just launched Eskom Green as a dedicated renewable energy business with a two-gigawatt near-term target and a thirty-two-gigawatt pipeline through 2040, this technology is directly relevant, and its adoption depends on choices being made now about grid architecture, tariff design and battery deployment.
Direct lithium extraction, second on the list, matters less to South Africa directly, because lithium is classified only as a moderate priority in the country’s own Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy, but it matters greatly to the country’s near neighbours and to the geopolitics of the African battery-materials supply chain. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa has named a formal Lithium Industrialisation Corridor involving Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, and a Battery and Electric Vehicle value chain involving the DRC, Zambia, Tanzania and South Africa, as strategic corridors under the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Global lithium demand is projected to rise by 353 per cent between 2024 and 2040 according to UNCTAD’s June 2026 assessment, and direct lithium extraction is the technology that will decide who supplies that demand. Passive radiative cooling matters directly to a warming urban South Africa. Personalised mRNA cancer vaccines matter to the country’s private healthcare sector. Precision fermentation is a strategic threat to portions of South Africa’s agricultural export base.
Each of these is a specific board conversation that has to happen and is largely not happening. Most South African corporate strategy documents I have read in the last twelve months treat AI as the technology transformation of the decade and treat everything else as either operational or infrastructural. The WEF report is arguing the reverse. AI is the operational and infrastructural layer that runs underneath and enables the technologies that will materially change what your organisation does.
IMPLICATIONS
For South African boards, the implication is a change in the composition of the strategic technology conversation. The board pack that carries an AI strategy and no other emerging technology strategy is now, as of June 2026, materially incomplete. The board pack that carries an AI strategy plus a review of the ten technologies on this list, filtered for South African relevance, is the minimum defensible position. That does not mean every organisation has to develop a strategy for personalised mRNA cancer vaccines. It means every organisation has to have identified which of the ten materially matter to it and what the strategic response is, even if the response is deliberate non-participation.
For South African policymakers, the implication is that the country’s industrial and technology policy conversation is currently over-weighted toward artificial intelligence and under-weighted toward the physical technologies where South Africa has genuine competitive positions or genuine risks. The Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy is a serious document. Eskom Green is a serious launch. The Lithium Industrialisation Corridor is a serious regional initiative. But the WEF list is now the closest thing the international policy community has to a consensus statement about which technologies will actually matter, and eight of the ten sit in territory the country’s technology policy has treated as adjacent to the AI conversation rather than central to it.
CLOSING TAKEAWAY
The World Economic Forum and Frontiers have just told the global policy community that the technology frontier has moved off screens and into physical systems. Only two of the ten technologies on this year’s list — world models and lattice-based cryptography — have any meaningful software or computational dimension. Eight of them act on power grids, drug pipelines, cooling systems, mining, food production, materials, and human biology. That is not an argument against AI. It is an argument that AI has been the story for long enough that the boards now doing five-year strategy have been strategising as if the story would remain the same. It will not. The technologies that will shape the next five years are, according to the international community’s best current judgement, mostly physical. The board that walks into 2027 with an AI strategy and nothing else is walking in with an incomplete answer to the question their organisation is going to be asked.
Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net
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