It’s Time Again for Our Annual Zumigo Predicts!

Another year, another look into whether the last round of predictions came true … or not. And then we look forward and give our best guesses for the year.

Starting with the most important predictions by Kevin Lee and Maya Ebrahimpour. Unfortunately, neither predictor did well:

• Neither Novak Djokovic nor Zheng Qinwen won the 2025 Australian Open
• Tiger Woods did not win the 2025 Masters
• Neither the USC Trojans Women’s basketball teamnor the UCLA Women’s basketball team won the 2025 NCAA Championship
• The UCLA Men’s basketball teamalso did not win the 2025 NCAA Championship
• The University of California, Berkeley (Cal) did not win the 2025 Big Game, breaking its 4-game winning streak
• And finally, while the Golden State Warriors made the 2025 NBA Playoffs, they reached the Western Conference Semifinals before being eliminated by the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Better luck next time, sports fans!

The other notable predictions include the increased adoption of passwordless authentication methods, especially with passkeys becoming mainstream. According to Bitwarden’s 2024 survey of 600 developers, two thirds have used passkeys to access work applications, and almost 90% have highly favorable or favorable attitude towards passkeys. Microsoft has introduced passkey support for Xbox and Copilot in 2024, and since then had seen nearly one million passkeys registered everyday. Snowflake announced the phasing out of password-only authentication starting September of 2025. Other big-tech companies that introduced passkeys include Google and Apple. For a list of companies that have implemented passkeys, refer to FIDO alliance’s directory.

As for Artificial Intelligence (AI) permeating our everyday lives, both as a consumer and as a worker, we are seeing more and more usage of AI platforms to help consumers shop; automate tasks; navigate and transport; develop content; provide daily personal assistance; and even more.

With that background, let’s see what our experts see for this coming year:

In topics of technology:

“The next frontier of identity security is the Autonomous Identity Verification, where artificial intelligence and machine learning don’t just validate a document or an aspect of the digital identity, but analyze the ‘connective tissue’ between billions of data points. We will start to see ID graphs that correlate the subtle yet complex behaviors cast by global fraud rings in real time, where the process becomes invisible for legitimate users because the system is busy intercepting multi-vector attacks before they even reach the front door.” – Chirag Bakshi, CEO

“While over the past few years, adoption of passkeys has increased primarily as a result of push from enterprises, 2026 will be the year of the passkey for consumers. Adoption will increase dramatically in the consumer space and will account for over 50% of sign-ins.” – Harish Manepalli, CTO

“In 2026, single security layers will become single points of failure making multi-layered defense mandatory for identity fraud prevention. Organizations must integrate phone intelligence, account & device intelligence, document verification, biometrics, and risk-based authentication to reduce false positives and improve customer experience while catching fraudsters at every step.” – Madhu Vudali, Vice President of Product Management

“We are seeing the lines blur between the personal identity and work identity in enterprise user authentication. When authentication is needed, we often receive security codes in our own mobile phones. In 2026, the agent identity and the personal identity will start to merge as well, following the rise of agents being used to assist in personal matters such as shopping and completing financial tasks.” – Yu-Ting Huang, Sr. Director of Marketing

In topics of business:

“I predict Tim Cook will resign or retire from Apple Inc. this year, after a successful major upgrade of AI in Siri.” – Robert Riggins, Strategic Account Manager

On a lighter note:

“One of the FIFA World Cup host nations—USA, Canada, or Mexico—will all get a “host-bump” and my bold prediction is that USMNT will get back to the semis for the first time since the 1930 inaugural World Cup.” – Madhu Vudali, Vice President of Product Management

“Tiger Woods will make a return to professional golf at some point this year, and play on the PGA Tour Champions. His son Charlie Woods will commit to Stanford University this year and play golf for them starting Fall 2027.” – Kevin Lee, Head of Talent Acquisition

“For this year’s Super Bowl, the Seahawks will win by a small margin. As for the FIFA World Cup, if it goes smoothly, the winner of the Cup will be a country from South America – betting on Brazil – as opposed to Europe.” – Yu-Ting Huang, Sr. Director of Marketing

*The above predictions are the personal opinions of the employees and are not representative of the entire company.

Yu-Ting Huang is Sr. Director of Marketing at Zumigo. Comment or questions? Find her at LinkedIn @yutinghuang.