Context on ECI Research’s latest AppDev market report

AI development has crossed a threshold. It no longer behaves like a feature you add on, but like infrastructure you build on, depend on, and later wish you had designed more carefully. 

That’s the core signal in ECI Research’s latest report, Orchestrating Intelligence and the Rise of AI-Native Application Development. It examines what happens once agents operate beyond the sandbox, when decisions persist and systems carry their own history forward.

RelationalAI appears in the report in the context of knowledge and decision grounding, which become harder to ignore once AI systems are expected to retain context and behave consistently over time. This same tension is showing up broadly in research heading into 2026, as attention shifts from model capability to system behavior under change. (Our own Nikolaos Vasiloglou has spoken to this shift as well, as systems move from stateless interaction to persistent decision-making. You can read his take here: here). 

The report captures a field settling into a new normal. Intelligence is readily available. The harder work now lives in the structures that support it and the discipline required to keep it dependable. 

What this signals for AI-native application development:

• Decision intelligence is moving into the core of agentic architectures
• Agentic AI is now a full-stack architectural concern, pulling governance, identity, and observability into application design.
• Application development is becoming the orchestration of intelligent systems, not just the delivery of features or code.
• Platform engineering has emerged as the critical enabler of AI-native scale, providing guardrails that balance innovation with control.
• Observability is evolving from reactive monitoring into a decision layer that informs and triggers action.
• In 2026, execution discipline will matter more than AI novelty, as advantage shifts from experimentation to operational excellence.

To read the full ECI Research report and their analysis of where AI-native application development is heading, you can access it here: