By Usama Fayyad, senior vice provost for AI and data strategy and senior advisor to the president at Northeastern University
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3. The build-up of unsustainable “Technical Debt” created by LLM prompts, vibe coding, and RAG pipelines. 2026 will witness an inflection: the mess that has been building up as AI custom solutions are developed will be recognized as serious liabilities in organizations. When programming languages first emerged, organizations rushed to leverage computers and, in the process, created substantial technical debt and “legacy” systems that are expensive to deal with. A similar rush is now happening with natural language “prompt engineering”, vibe coding, and the uncontrolled evolution of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipelines to deal with the inability to retrain LLMs on new data. The messy developments lead to technical debt accumulating so much faster -- without having a new way of software and systems engineering to help us approach it systematically. ...
10. AI Safety will grow as a major priority and an active field of R&D, learning, and practice - from its infancy to necessity (like vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic). ...
See the full story here: https://usamafayyad.substack.com/p/ai-predictions-for-2026-my-view-on