By the end of 2025, it was clear that the industry hadn’t just sped up; it recalibrated. Momentum without direction created noise without progress. AI, talent, and delivery models evolved faster than ever, but companies were challenged to determine what truly mattered, what to ignore, and how to turn complexity into measurable outcomes.
At Coherent Solutions, 2025 was a year of clarity as much as speed. Markets shifted overnight, and AI evolved from a prototype to a dependable teammate. For us, the biggest lesson wasn’t about acceleration; it was about direction. Why? Because momentum only matters when it’s guided by intent.
Igor Epshteyn
CEO
Coherent Solutions
We’re not chasing trends. We’re building capability.
Our understanding of momentum and intent shaped how we approached the second half of 2025 and how we prepared for 2026. To guide Coherent Solution’s direction in the new year, we gathered perspectives and forecasts from our leadership team and seven company experts across technology, data, AI, UX, engineering, delivery, strategy, and culture. We’re excited to share those insights with you.
A year that rewired how industries operate
Before looking ahead, it’s worth reflecting on what 2025 really represented. It was a year of redefinition. Organizations didn’t just move faster; they fundamentally changed how they built, scaled, hired, and made decisions. Speed alone was no longer a meaningful advantage. What mattered instead was clarity of value, ownership, and outcomes.
AI crossed a critical threshold. It moved from a promising trend to a dependable layer of infrastructure, quietly embedded into daily operational workflows.
Max Belov
CTO
Coherent Solutions
AI stopped being a novelty; it became a tool people expect to deliver real results, not promises.
As adoption scaled, an expected limitation surfaced. Off-the-shelf tools could deliver speed and convenience, but not differentiation. Competitive advantage shifted toward custom workflows, proprietary data, and solutions aligned with specific business goals. Innovation became less about access to technology and more about intentional application.
Multi-shore delivery followed a similar path and became a stabilizing force. Distributed teams enabled organizations to scale intelligently and balance cost, expertise, and continuity across time zones. Behind the scenes, these small changes signaled a broader shift in mindset.
Anton Cheplyukov
AI Practice Lead
Coherent Solutions
Outcome replaced novelty. The market shifted from ‘show me something impressive’ to ‘show me something measurable.
The era of “build fast” gave way to “build with measurable ROI.” Speed still matters, but it is no longer the primary indicator of success. Value is the metric.
Defining success in 2025
As value shifted to the forefront of digital engineering, enterprises moved beyond exploratory proofs of concept and focused on systems designed to operate under real conditions.
Security, risk, and operational requirements influenced architecture from the start. Observability, reliability engineering, and disciplined delivery practices moved closer to the center of the development process. Architecture became a strategic concern, refined throughout delivery rather than deferred.
Michael Sagalovich
DevOps Practice Lead
Coherent Solutions
User interfaces got simpler, but the systems behind them became more complex than ever.
Clients began asking for more than prototypes — they wanted platforms built to evolve, withstand scrutiny, and support sustained growth.
Yury Zhukovsky
Data and Analytics, Global Practice Lead
Coherent Solutions
In 2025, the hype of new technologies fell quiet and the real work of integrating these technologies in a meaningful fashion began.
Decision-making became more deliberate. Projects moved forward when outcomes could be forecasted, justified, and measured. In 2025, confidence in results, powered by data-driven insights and analytics, informed high-level business strategy.
How Coherent Solutions made sense of the shift
To understand the major shifts that occurred in 2025, we stepped back and looked at the year through four different lenses: engineering, delivery and partnership, AI and data, and people and culture. Each lens tells its own story, and together they reflect a system-wide shift in how organizations build, collaborate, and measure value.
Looking at the year through these lenses gave us clarity for 2026: what to carry forward, what to rethink, and where the biggest opportunities are beginning to take shape.
Engineering: Highs and lows of AI copilots
In 2025, AI copilots accelerated daily workflows, providing crucial coding support and task automation, but they also demanded new forms of discipline—both upfront, in setting constraints and context, and downstream, in rigorously reviewing and validating their output. Engineers had to think holistically— considering how their individual projects interacted and integrated into larger systems, and how those systems behaved, scaled, and evolved under real-world conditions.
Igor Epshteyn
CEO
Coherent Solutions
As AI copilots automate low-level tasks, the pressure for teams moves upstream from coding to high-level project clarity.
Architecture has evolved from a short-term technical choice about system design into a long-term investment that determines scalability, cost, and adaptability over time. Documentation, once easy to deprioritize, became essential for providing continuity in environments where human and AI contributions intersect. Observability and reliability engineering stepped forward as guardrails for systems operating with greater autonomy.
Max Belov
CTO
Coherent Solutions
The future belongs to teams that move fast with discipline, not to those waiting for perfect clarity.
Clients' expectations regarding technical roles evolved as well. Technical expertise is still critical, but engineers are now expected to think in terms of business impact, while also challenging assumptions and taking ownership of outcomes, rather than just tasks.
Delivery and partnership: Collaboration took on a new role
If engineering matured in 2025, delivery transformed.
The most significant shift wasn’t a new framework or methodology; it was a change in mindset. Clients expected more than on-time delivery. Delivery teams needed to act as navigators — aligning vision, bridging communication, and providing clarity to ensure predictable outputs and prevent long-term issues like tech debt.
Igor Epshteyn
CEO
Coherent Solutions
Delivery is evolving from a function into a form of leadership. Delivery teams are responsible for more than just timelines; they create foundational stability for the long-term health of development lifecycles.
The traditional vendor–client relationship where vendors delivered predefined solutions and clients acted mainly as purchasersv continued to give way to more collaborative partnerships. In its place, vendors and clients are focused onlong-term, strategic collaboration and cultivating in-depth knowledge of the client’s evolving business goals to build truly impactful products.
AI and data: AI became practical
Anton Cheplyukov
AI Practice Lead
Coherent Solutions
In 2025, AI shifted from a supplementary tool to a deeply integrated component of engineering workflows, influencing design, development, and operations.
In 2025, AI evolved from a bench player to a starting teammate.
Companies are looking to invest in more than splashy demos andvisionary concepts. Instead, they want everyday tools to support the workflows quietly powering businesses. This shift also revealed that meaningful AI integration depends on strong data foundations.
Igor Epshteyn
CEO
Coherent Solutions
AI adoption is not the ultimate goal. It’s the launchpad helping us deliver more value—faster, smarter, and more efficiently.
Clean data pipelines, transparent governance, responsible usage frameworks, and strategic integration enable AI to become an operational backbone, not just an accessory.
And, as AI matured, so did our expectations. Companies don’t just ask where they can use AI, but instead they consider how to integrate the technology responsibly, sustainably, and at scale.
With 2025’s shift to a more intentional application of AI, companies are laying the groundwork for more autonomous workflows, multimodal intelligence, standardized governance, and a new era of enterprise AI where models and humans collaborate seamlessly.
Katya Sevruk
UX Design Practice Lead
Coherent Solutions
AI can accelerate work, but only human insight makes products meaningful.
People and culture: Individual investment and upskilling
While clients looked for ways to use AI intentionally throughout their organizations, they also focused on building AI expertise across teams. At a high level, companies considered how employees and teams used and interacted with AI. They invested heavily in establishing foundational AI knowledge and boosting existing skillsets.
In addition to upskilling, clients used the technology shifts to help employees and teams reskill. While AI automated certain low-level tasks, freeing up time and energy, it also created new opportunities and needs. Whether it was a new role in security or an evolution in data science, companies and employees grabbed the chance to pivot and learn entirely different skillsets. And, as existing teams combined to address new technical needs, hybrid skillsets developed. The result? Companies are moving into 2026 with stronger, more unified teams. Overall, these shifts can lead to more curiosity and adaptability, and a stronger belief that excellence isn’t defined by speed, but by intention and craft.
Katya Sevruk
UX Design Practice Lead
Coherent Solutions
Functionality is no longer a differentiator, connection is.
Looking ahead: Coherent Solutions experts’ 2026 predictions
2025 changed how organizations thought about speed, value, and scalability. In 2026, we believe there will be massive shifts in how they execute each of those concepts.
Below, our experts shared their predictions for 2026. While their vantage points differ, one thing is clear—the year ahead will be defined by practical execution, not promise.
Max Belov, CTO
When hype fades, discipline wins
For Max, the story of 2025 was not about spectacular technological breakthroughs. Instead, wasthe moment AI quietly crossed the line from novelty to expectation. Over the year, incremental improvements in models and workflows accumulated, transforming AI into a practical tool. But with that maturity came tension; expectations rose faster than engineering's reality.
Looking ahead, Max, who has worked in software development for 30 years, is confident that groundbreaking inventions won’t define 2026. Instead, the year will be defined by how well organizations execute existing technology use. Agentic architectures will mature, governance will finally catch up to the speed and autonomy of AI-driven systems, and companies will need to turn their ambitious business goals into operational reality. For him, the defining challenge of 2026 is simple: execution over excitement.
Anton Cheplyukov, AI Practice Lead
From experiments to embedded intelligence
Anton, an AI pioneer at Coherent Solutions , saw 2025 as the year when AI became embedded in the day-to-day fabric of work. Teams stopped experimenting and began integrating copilots into real workflows—automating planning, refactoring tasks, coordinating tools, and managing handoffs. The day-to-day use helped teams develop operational patterns, and with that shift came higher expectations for safety, reliability, and transparency.
Looking ahead, he believes that successful organizations will treat AI as a production capability, not a playground. Trustworthy, explainable assistants, domain-specific copilots, and agentic automation will define 2026, and the best-positioned teams will be the ones that operationalize fast and scale with intention.
Katya Sevruk, UX Design Practice Lead
The importance of human-centered design
To Katya, our key expert in customer experience, 2025 repeated a classic, but always intriguing observation—the faster technology evolves, the more essential human-centered design becomes. AI can draft, organize, and accelerate countless tasks, but these advances work best when integrated into products that are human-centric in design. Truly successful products and customer experiences begin with a conversation around people’s needs, contexts, and behaviors, and then considers how to leverage technology to complement them.
Katya believes that 2026 will belong to organizations with products that quietly remove friction, understand context, and feel human in a world increasingly optimized for automation. For her, design remains the bridge between technology’s potential and people’s lived experience.
Michael Sagalovich, DevOps Practice Lead
The complexity behind simplicity
Michael saw 2025 as a turning point in how organizations build and operate modern digital ecosystems. AI became reliable enough to automate entire workflows, and people began trusting it almost by default, sometimes more than they should. On the surface, interfaces grew cleaner and simpler, while backend systems ballooned in complexity.
In 2026, Michael believes the defining challenge will be maintaining an invisible equilibrium. Systems must be robust, integrated, and nearly frictionless for users, while simultaneously reinforced with stronger monitoring, security, and governance than ever before. The future will reward teams who can streamline complex backend systems without sacrificing frontend performance or speed.
Yury Zhukovsky, Data and Analytics, Global Practice Lead
Yury described 2025 as the year the GenAI landscape finally gained some guardrails. Excitement around the technology didn’t vanish, but companies, goverments, and industry leaders began to consider the real risks and benefits of GenAI use, and how to protect individual users and organizations. Overall, Yury appreciated seeing fewer leaders mesmerized by the illusion of “magic AI.”
Looking ahead, Yury expects organizations across industries to start building internal programs, guardrails, and intentional usage parameters for GenAI. In 2026, the most successful teams will thoughtfully consider where GenAI can be used in their organization, along with the potential risks and impact to their larger business goals.
Igor Epshteyn, CEO
AI as fabric, not a feature
We shift gears in this section and where the other experts talked about broader industry shifts, we're drilling down into Coherent-specific observations. I think we need to tweak the language to create a bridge for the reader. In 2025, Coherent Solutions strategically shifted AI from a promising capability to a foundational layer across the company’s work. Rather than positioning Coherent Solutions as an “AI only” provider, the focus shifted to embedding AI across four pillars of digital value creation: product design, data, platform development, and automation. AI became a shared layer across the pillars—powering decision making, accelerating delivery, and improving outcomes without replacing human expertise.
Another major company milestone in 2025 was the launch of Norm, a dedicated product design brand. By engaging clients earlier at the vision and concept stage, Coherent Solutions strengthened long-term partnerships and positioned itself as a strategic contributor to business success, not just a delivery partner.
Igor also highlighted a deeper transformation in how software was built. As AI-driven tools reshape the software development lifecycle, the company made an intentional shift from manual execution towards clearer business definitions, stronger use cases, and continuous iteration. In each project, development became less about writing lines of code and more about understanding the client’s problem deeply.
In 2026, Igor forecasts continuity rather than disruption for Coherent Solutions. The company’s priorities remain steady: deepen AI adoption, mature digital value pillars, expand vertical focus (starting with health and fitness), and continue evolving branding and market presence. For Coherent Solutions, it’s key to stay the course, embrace AI pragmatically, and integrate it into every layer of operation.
A clear path forward
Igor Epshteyn
CEO
Coherent Solutions
We’re not chasing trends. We’re building capability.
2025 strengthened our engineering approach, sharpening how we adopt AI and reinforcing our commitment to delivering digital platforms that excel in real-world use cases.
Last year, we sharpened our focus, reinforced our foundations, and deepened our understanding of what truly matters when technology, people, and purpose intersect. The year helped us understand how fast we can move, and why we choose the paths we take.
2026 will be a year defined by possibility, not by uncertainty. A year to move with clarity, confidence, and intention. A year to build smarter, collaborate deeper, and turn momentum into a measurable impact.
At Coherent Solutions, we stay ahead of technology shifts and focus on implementing them where they create real, measurable business value.
SHARE ARTICLE
