We will introduce a unified Search and AI Prompting component that combines classic keyword search, semantic search, and lightweight AI prompting into a single reusable UI element. Within grids or other content-heavy components it will support:

• Intent-aware results – search that understands synonyms, related terms, and contextual relationships - for example, typing “vehicle” can also surface results for “car” or “automobile” when relevant.
• Keyword precision – exact symbol-by-symbol search.
• Inline AI Prompts - commands and suggestions triggered through natural language.

Developers can connect any LLM backend, configure templates, and tailor the user experience. This component improves discoverability, accelerates user workflows, and provides an AI-ready search and prompt surface optimized for performance and seamless integration across the suite.

The Chat component continues to evolve as our go-to interface for both human-to-human and human-to-AI communication. Following major updates in 2025, we’re further enhancing its UI/UX and expanding its feature set to deliver a smoother, more reliable messaging experience. Upcoming improvements include quality-of-life additions such as a scroll-to-bottom button, failed-message states, and many other usability features. These enhancements ensure the Chat component remains intuitive, modern, and ready for advanced conversational scenarios across your applications.

An AI-powered enhancement that streamlines data entry by transforming unstructured pasted content into structured form inputs. Users can copy text from emails, documents, or messages and paste it once, with the component intelligently mapping each piece to the correct fields based on context. This reduces manual typing, improves accuracy, and boosts efficiency. Smart Paste can be added to any form or other component with minimal setup and supports integration with any AI provider for content analysis. It offers a fast, context-aware paste experience that dramatically improves productivity.

We’re introducing PromptBox, a new component built for prompting and chat communication in AI-powered applications. Designed to support both simple and advanced prompt patterns, PromptBox offers structured input areas, inline guidance, prompt templates, and seamless integration with your AI backend of choice. Whether you’re building an AI assistant, semantic search experience, or automated workflow, PromptBox helps developers create consistent, high-quality prompts with ease. This component marks a key step in our vision to make Kendo UI for jQuery fully AI-ready and accelerate the development of intelligent applications.

Throughout the year we will deliver continuous updates to the Diagram component, introducing new editing capabilities, improved interactions, and refreshed visuals. Key additions include:

• Connector text support with flexible positioning
• Tooltips for nodes and connectors
• Shape and connector content text editing
• Floating toolbar enabling quick shape and connector editing and reshaping

The updates will also strengthen core diagramming behavior with improved connection points, refined connector logic, and enhanced shape interactions. These upgrades enable more straightforward, intuitive, and efficient end-user diagram operation.

We’re making Kendo UI for jQuery even more engaging and visually appealing. Upcoming updates include improved chart animations for smoother transitions, category highlighting for better data focus and readability, and theme-driven animation tokens to ensure consistent motion design across all themes. These enhancements will help you create charts that not only convey data clearly but also deliver a polished, modern user experience aligned with your application’s design.

A feature which provides ability to add icons to action buttons.

We’re introducing a more flexible and consistent way to manage component appearance across all Telerik & Kendo UI themes. Starting in Q1 2026, components will rely on theme-controlled defaults for key appearance options such as Fill Mode, Theme Color, Rounded Corners, and Size. This update gives you the best of both worlds—modern, theme-aligned designs out of the box, plus the flexibility to tailor components to your exact needs.

• Cleaner, theme-driven styling: Themes will define the default look and feel for a more cohesive design experience.
• Full customization remains: You can still override any default by explicitly setting component API options.
• Consistent behavior across themes: A unified system ensures predictable styling and easier maintenance.
• Clear hierarchy of control: Theme defaults → Component API overrides → Runtime customization.

We have just introduced the AI Coding Assistant - a productivity-boosting tool trained on the Kendo UI for jQuery component library. It generates production-ready, API-compliant code that follows best practices and reduces manual fixes.

Built on the powerful MCP standard, the assistant seamlessly integrates with modern editors to handle both quick guidance and complex, multi-step prompts - enabling a smarter, more flexible development workflow.

In 2026 and beyond, we’re making the assistant even faster, more reliable, and more intuitive - driven by user feedback and the latest AI advancements. This reflects our long-term commitment to integrating AI innovation into Kendo UI for jQuery, enabling developers to achieve more with less effort.

We are committed to staying current with the latest technologies, and with the official release of jQuery 4.0.0, Kendo UI for jQuery will fully support all its new features. This ensures that your applications can leverage the latest improvements and innovations in the jQuery ecosystem, providing you with cutting-edge tools and capabilities for building modern web applications. Support for jQuery 4 beta is already in place.

We closely monitor your suggestions, and based on your feedback, we will implement gradual improvements to our existing components. Keep an eye on future improvements to the Grid, Scheduler, Chart, TabStrip, Menu components, and many others.