Top tech predictions 2026: The lighthouse view

This time of the year feels like sitting in front of a runway. Or inside a room with the best view in a lighthouse. Don’t worry- not the ones where airplanes take off or ships collide. More like a fashion runway. And yet it feels strange because the new-and-cool designs that are walking towards you seem eerily-familiar. Maybe that’s the point of it all. It’s not exactly haute-couture. But pret-a-porter. Specially because a lot of it is from AI’s atelier. This year would make everything wearable, affordable and fit-table (if that’s a word by now).

AI-in new shoes

To start with, AI would catwalk its way from generic lanes to specific enterprise ones and with agentic as the dominant colour in vogue.

As per Forrester’s State of Customer Obsession Survey 2025, 76 per cent of respondents plan to adopt Generative AI for visual content and 78 per cent for language, making it a core enabler for personalised experiences, automated content creation, and conversational interfaces, tells Biswajeet Mahapatra, principal analyst at Forrester from his gaze so far.

Octavian Tanase, Chief Product Officer at Hitachi Vantara magnifies the part of agentic AI here. “It will mark the shift from experimentation to operational reality. Unlike generative AI assistants, agentic systems act autonomously within defined guardrails, making decisions, executing tasks and optimising workflows in real time. This moves AI from a productivity enhancer to a digital workforce embedded into core business processes. The real disruption lies in ROI clarity, when AI can operate and adapt inside workflows, organisations can finally link AI investments to measurable outcomes such as faster cycles, lower costs, and improved resilience.”

As we move into 2026, three technologies stand out as true disruptors not because of hype, but because they fundamentally change how enterprises operate, create value and manage risk.

- Octavian Tanase, Chief Product Officer at Hitachi Vantara

2026 will be a defining year for Indian enterprises as AI moves from pilots to full scale production, augurs Mayank Baid, Regional Vice President, Regional Vice President, India and South Asia, Cloudera. “Organisations of all sizes are realising that the success of AI depends on having a strong data foundation. The rise of AI silos is already demonstrating that isolated experimentations cannot deliver consistency, governance, or control required to scale. Real progress will come from unifying data environments and enabling AI agents to operate in real-time, governed information, making automation context-aware, explainable, and secure.”

As regulations evolve and cyber threats intensify, Private AI will become indispensable, especially for sectors where trust and compliance are paramount. But technology alone is not enough.

- Mayank Baid, Regional Vice President, Regional Vice President, India and South Asia, Cloudera

Siddhartha Tipnis, Partner and Technology Sector Leader, Deloitte India echoes that direction. “Agentic ways of working will drive a reimagination of business processes, infusing agentic capabilities to complete complex tasks, elevate user experience, augment human touch, and enable AI systems to become trusted collaborators that coexist with humans.”

AI compute will continue its rapid growth, with a strong focus on modern data centres that unite CPUs, GPUs, and new architectures to power breakthroughs in research, financial modelling, and complex simulations.

- Siddhartha Tipni, Partner and Technology Sector Leader, Deloitte India

Amit Agrawal, President, Techno Digital also adds that as AI becomes the dominant enterprise workload heading into 2026, Indian enterprises are re-architecting their digital foundations as AI becomes the dominant workload of 2025. What we are witnessing is a decisive shift in compute placement where performance, latency, and data sovereignty are forcing workloads to move closer to the point of creation.”

Hybrid cloud-and-edge operating models are no longer experiments; they are becoming the architectural default.

- Amit Agrawal, President, Techno Digital

Prasanth Krishnan, Principal Sales Engineer, UiPath outlines three key changes ahead. “First is agentic AI, where systems can reason, plan, and act within defined guardrails, helping organisations reduce friction in complex environments. Second is agentic automation workflows, which combine AI agents, automation, and business rules to manage end-to-end processes that adapt in real time. This delivers the reliability and ROI, leaders expect from AI investments.”

The technologies generating the most excitement next year are those that finally move AI from insight to action.

- Prasanth Krishnan, Principal Sales Engineer, UiPath

As he explains further, third, and the most disruptive, is enterprise orchestration, the control layer that coordinates people, bots, and AI at scale, ensuring work doesn’t fragment and decisions are aligned across the business.

We’re past the co-pilot era. Enterprises are waking up to a hard truth: sovereign deployment isn’t a compliance checkbox, it’s your moat. The moment your AI logic, your data, your improvement cycles live in someone else’s environment, you’re training their models and funding your competitor’s advantage. By 2026, Chairmen won’t ask ‘should we do AI’—they’ll ask ‘do we own the OS, own the agent, own the outcome, or are we just licensing our future from someone else’s cloud?’ Private AI isn’t a trend. It’s the control plane for building an advantage that actually compounds.

- Raj K Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder & CEO, KOGO AI

Also- data-centric infrastructure will become the core competitive differentiator. “As models and compute become increasingly commoditised, proprietary, high-quality and trusted data will determine who leads and who lags. Enterprises that can connect, govern and activate their data across edge, core and cloud environments will move faster and make better decisions. This demands moving away from legacy data silos and building infrastructure optimised for AI pipelines, low latency and continuous inference. In 2026, data quality, placement, continuous accessibility and trust will matter more than model size.” Tanase elucidates.

Only 16 months after Crowdstrike brought the digital world to a standstill, and a month after the global AWS outage, this week another key player in the Cybersecurity space, Cloudflare, suffered a global outage causing error messages to plague websites across the globe, including Spotify, ChatGPT, X, and Open AI. With global outages becoming more common, observability is no longer an engineering tool––it is business-critical practice.

- Rob Newell, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan at New Relic

Cloud- Back at the Tailor

Then there is sovereignty doing a pose 28 of sorts.

Tanase weighs in that sovereign and sustainable infrastructure will move firmly into the mainstream. Governments and regulated industries are increasingly treating AI and data as strategic assets, driving demand for sovereign clouds, localised control, and compliant hybrid architectures. At the same time, the rapid growth of AI workloads is forcing a rethink of power efficiency and data-center design as energy and cooling constraints become real business limits. The convergence of sovereignty, resilience, and sustainability will redefine infrastructure decisions, turning them into strategic levers for competitiveness rather than back-end IT choices.

We are moving past the novelty phase of Generative AI into the utility phase of Agentic AI. As a result, I anticipate seeing more and more CISOs shift their mindset from buying AI tools to building their own to fit their unique organisational needs. Next year, resilience will bubble up as a critical business objective. Global-scale outages, such as those experienced by Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike, have highlighted just how damaging downtime is to both the bottom line and brand reputation. As a result, the focus will expand beyond avoiding an outage to include ensuring operations can be restored before it goes viral on Twitter. This is also an overlooked issue that may bubble up next year and take over mindshare.”

- Bob Huber, Chief Security Officer, Tenable

IoT and Edge, More Confident, More Edgy

IoT will not miss its chance to do the S-pose this time.

Mahapatra reveals that IoT security (76 per cent) and Edge intelligence (69 per cent) indicate a strong focus on securing connected ecosystems and enabling real-time analytics and autonomous operations at the edge.

With nearly 95% of global AI initiatives still struggling to demonstrate tangible ROI, it’s becoming clear that simply experimenting with AI isn’t enough. The next phase of adoption will be defined by trusted execution, where governance, integration, security, and contextual understanding become the foundation, not the afterthought.

- Suhail Gulzar, Senior Manager Solutions Engineering, Neo4j

Advances in decentralised cloud infrastructure, edge inference, and real-time IoT analytics are collapsing the distance between data and decision-making, Agrawal points out. “As a result, industries like smart manufacturing, logistics, telecommunications, and modern retail are achieving millisecond-level responsiveness, autonomous operations, and unprecedented continuity across distributed environments.”

Quantum and everything-R: peeking from the curtains

And, while it may still not be show-stopper yet, quantum is still going to tantalise everyone’s expectations from the shadows.

We may still be some months/years away from cracking Quantum in its full force and yet it’s the right time to get ready for quantum-resistant solution. Paul Smith, Global Portfolio Director, Cybersecurity, Honeywell opines that cybersecurity will see new challenges and need for quantum-ready capabilities when quantum-resistant cryptography would become a real thing.

Cybersecurity solutions have to get readiness for the new age of quantum-resistance cryptography.

- Paul Smith, Global Portfolio Director, Cybersecurity, Honeywell

Quantum security (61 per cent) highlights growing awareness of post-quantum threats and the need for future-proof encryption, as Mahapatra observes. “These technologies will redefine enterprise strategies by combining intelligence, security, and immersive experiences to drive innovation and competitiveness in 2026.”

Extended Reality (61 per cent) is gaining traction for immersive collaboration, training, and customer engagement in enterprise environments, Mahapatra adds.

2026 isn’t the year to still be pondering future-proofing; it’s the year to act. Clinging to proprietary, single-vendor tech isn’t just a financial risk, it has long-term ramifications and can even pose an existential threat to your business. Resilience is key to progress. The drumbeat of digital sovereignty, echoing loudly from precedents like the EU, means enterprises must secure control of data and platform proactively.

- Peter Lees, Head of Solution Architecture in Asia Pacific, SUSE

Malfunctions?

This would be also be a year for setting guardrails and walking carefully around slippery edge.

New changes raise the bar on governance, trust, and infrastructure, as autonomous systems require reliable data, secure environments, and explainability by design, Tanase cautions.

Baid adds that building AI-literate, ethically grounded teams will be critical to sustaining trust and reducing risk. “With economic pressures sharpening the focus on ROI, enterprises must invest where AI meaningfully advances outcomes. Organisations that embed AI deeply into their data fabric with strong governance will lead India’s digital future.”

And as AI proliferates, AI privacy and trust will become paramount, driving the emergence of safety-net guardrail technologies that ensure data and compute integrity and confidentiality, and apply the appropriate brakes as AI adoption accelerates, Tipnis also warns.

Here they are-the new tech-forces ready to strut and leave their sass on IT wallets and AI wardrobes next. Make sure you are in the front row seat of this 2026 runway.

pratimah@cybermedia.co.in