As we plunge into the new year, LitePoint scouted three wireless trends in various stages of maturity: the rise of AI wearables, the awaited arrival of Wi-Fi 8 silicon, and early spadework required to seed 6G cellular networks. In their own way, each is enabling the future of AI communications by moving actionable intelligence closer to the user, shoring up wireless data security and privacy, and expanding global access to a new swath of frequency bands. 

Here’s how we see these forces shaping up over the next 12 months, and why, for wireless design and test engineers, the coming year is more about preparation than promotion.

AI Wearables Trend from Geek to Chic

AI wearables are a relatively small but high-growth segment. Grand View Research found that the on-device AI category – where tasks are run locally without heavy cloud support – accounted for about 10 percent of the $84 billion wearables market in 2024, the last period for which full-year data is available. Look for acceleration this year as on-device AI rides a 27.8 percent CAGR wave through 2030 – twice that of the total wearables segment.

The growing interest in AI wearables isn’t due to any breakthrough in bleeding-edge wireless technology. Rather than demanding more gigabits per second, consumers want lower latency, hands-free content capture, intelligent personal assistance, detailed health insights and enhanced security.

These features define an expanding universe of AI wearables that includes smart watches, rings, fitness trackers and eyewear. In a sign that form is now driving function, AI devices not only need to operate for days on small batteries they have to fit comfortably on the face or body and be stylish enough to wear in public. 

Where AI performance meets sophisticated design, expect wireless engineers to open new frontiers for the efficient integration of radios, sensors, processors and memory in millimeter-sized packages. For test, AI wearables create challenges both familiar and new:

• Highly integrated multi-radio design (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UWB, cellular) in tight spaces
• Aggressive power budgets that demand careful RF optimization
• On-body propagation effects that don’t exist in other electronic designs
• New durability concerns: AI-enabled garments must weather everyday use, including washing cycles, without RF signal degradation.

Ensuring reliability requires test methodologies that replicate true on-body conditions, validate coexistence under load and measure the performance impact of AI workloads on battery life and RF behavior. The rise of AI wearables isn’t just a new device trend; it’s a new paradigm for wireless validation.

Wi-Fi 8: The Quiet Enabler of Next-Gen AI

While AI wearables is a trend consumers will touch in 2026, the transition to Wi-Fi 8 has a more ephemeral quality. Throughout 2025, Wi-Fi 8 existed largely in chipset labs. In 2026, those early silicon samples will move into the hands of access point vendors, IoT designers and smartphone makers. Commercial products won’t reach shelves this year in any meaningful volume, but the design and development phase will be in full swing.

Wi-Fi 8 isn’t designed to be a dramatic technological leap. Instead, it focuses on the foundational requirements of rich AI experiences:

Reliable Access to Data: Whether you’re wearing smart glasses in an airport or managing industrial robots, AI experiences break down quickly when data transfers become unpredictable. Wi-Fi 8 targets greater reliability under congestion and interference – conditions increasingly common in RF-dense environments.

Lower Latency: Many emerging AI applications are latency-sensitive, from real-time translation to predictive navigation and contextual assistance. Even modest reductions in round-trip delays can make AI feel more immediate, personal and trustworthy.Security and Privacy: AI depends on deeply personal data: biometrics, voice patterns, behavior trails. Some processing can stay on-device, but cloud inference remains essential, meaning data must move securely between the device and network.

Robustness equates to signal integrity and resilience while reliability indicates the probability of successful transmission

Together, these pillars make Wi-Fi 8 an AI-enabling technology, even if the connection isn’t always palpable. For test teams, this translates into new performance criteria: measuring latency under load, validating advanced features, assessing coexistence in mixed-radio environments and stress-testing devices in conditions that mimic real-world Wi-Fi.

Companies like LitePoint that have worked closely with early Wi-Fi 8 chipset developers will be best positioned to help device makers navigate the transition. Much of 2026 will be spent translating new silicon capabilities into robust, production-ready products capable of supporting next-generation AI workloads.

6G in 2026: Pre-Spec, But Busy

If Wi-Fi 8 is closing in on its commercial debut, 6G is still playing the pre-spec long game, with most roadmaps pointing to 2030 for initial market deployments. But that doesn’t mean the industry is idle. Behind closed doors it’s grappling with two big challenges.

The first is reconciling the unrealized promise of 5G cellular. 5G was marketed as a transformative platform enabled by heterogeneous networks, network slicing and ultra-reliable low-latency communications. What materialized, mostly, was faster 4G. The majority of global networks remain non-standalone, anchored in 4G cores, while private networks exist primarily as niche deployments. And carriers have not yet realized significant new revenue streams from 5G. These lessons loom large for 6G.

The second reality stems from an emerging hypothesis that 6G will be driven less by speed and more by distributed intelligence. This includes AI embedded throughout the network, massive sensor fabrics and new architectural models such as AI-RAN. The industry is still in exploration mode, evaluating which of these use cases genuinely require new spectrum, new waveforms or new topologies.

6G Spectrum: The FR3 Frontier

Much of the early 6G buzz in 2026 centers on FR3 spectrum (~7-24 GHz), sometimes called the “middle child” between today’s sub-7 GHz cellular bands and millimeter-wave FR2. Below ~16 GHz, FR3 behaves like traditional sub-6 GHz and can use existing packaging and antenna techniques. Above that, it becomes more like FR2, requiring complex antenna arrays and more specialized integration.

But unlike FR2 during 5G development, FR3 is not a clean slate. It’s a patchwork of incumbents that includes satellite systems, weather radar and point-to-point radio links. The 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference deferred major decisions that the WRC-27 confab will have to make to determine how spectrum can be harmonized globally.

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06425

In the absence of ratified standards, engineers need flexible test platforms capable of exploring candidate bands, characterizing new modulation techniques, pushing higher-order MIMO concepts and validating performance in contested, fragmented spectrum. The ability to measure what’s possible – before regulators and standards bodies decide what’s permissible – may be what keeps 6G momentum chugging along.

Portending a Year of Preparation

Across AI wearables, Wi-Fi 8 and early 6G work, a common narrative emerges: 2026 is not the year everything changes, but the year we prepare for everything that will.

AI wearables are redefining human-device interaction for the first time since the smartphone. Wi-Fi 8 development will give AI devices the reliability, latency and security they require. And 6G experimentation will lay the engineering and spectrum groundwork for the next era of network intelligence.

For wireless engineers and test teams, 2026 is a pivotal year. It’s when we refine the methods needed to validate devices worn on the body, characterize Wi-Fi 8 in chaotic real-world conditions and explore 6G candidate bands long before they become standardized. The work done now will determine how fast the industry can translate today’s AI ambitions into tomorrow’s reality.