Top tech trends to watch in 2026

Bengaluru: From tech sovereignty to virtualisation and scaled adoption of AI, top tech companies have predicted technology trends in 2026, which will help businesses understand and accelerate Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption and also drive operational excellence.

Virtualisation

Pure Storage said the decade-long dominance of proprietary hypervisors will finally fracture. Pure Storage Head of Systems Engineering — India Sudharsan Aravamuthan predicts that virtualisation will no longer be a product; it will be a capability, embedded natively into cloud, container, and edge platforms. Lightweight hypervisors, open-source technologies, and cloud-native orchestration will replace heavyweight virtual machine sprawl. The winners will be those who see this not as an exodus, but as an evolution: moving from managing virtual machines to virtualising the entire stack — compute, storage, networks, and even AI workloads. By 2026, the infrastructure stack will become modular, programmable, and open, said Pure Storage.

Focus on scalability and real adoption

Dell Technologies Global Chief Technology Officer & Chief AI Officer John Roese and APJC President Peter Marrs in their technology trends have included focus on scalability and real adoption of AI. “Conversations are on very real adoption, and AI is creating a truly transformational opportunity,” said Marrs. Dell pointed out that Sandisk in Malaysia is a customer that the company is working with to deliver advanced AI solutions for smart manufacturing and product design, achieving up to 95% lights-out factory operation. Roese highlighted that the industry is now entering the autonomous agent era, where agentic AI is evolving from a helpful assistant to an integral manager of complex, long-running processes. “We expect that as people go on the agentic journey into 2026, they will be surprised by how much more agents do for them than they anticipated. Its very presence will bring value to make humans more efficient, and make the non-AI work, work better,” he noted.

Sovereign AI and governance

With the acceleration of AI development, there is a degree of volatility. According to Roese, the demand for robust governance frameworks and private, controlled AI environments will become undeniable, urging the industry to build on both internal and external AI guardrails that allow organisations to innovate safely and sustainably. “Last year, we predicted that ‘Agentic’ would be the word of 2025. This year, the word ‘Governance’ is going to play a much bigger role,” Roese said. Marrs added that sovereign AI is creating a new stream of the AI economy and ecosystem, driving economic transformation in this growing AI economy.

AI is eating software

Software has eaten the world, and now AI is eating software, said Capgemini in its tech trends. It said AI is reshaping the software development lifecycle across industries, shifting from writing code to expressing intent. After years of automation and DevOps-driven acceleration, AI is increasingly generating and maintaining software parts. From now on, developers will specify outcomes while AI generates and maintains components, shortening delivery cycles and improving quality. But governance and oversight remain critical to prevent hallucinations, security gaps, and silent errors. It added that in 2026, organisations will start rebuilding their applications and need to focus on reskilling their software development workforce in the near future. The new currency of expertise will instead lie in systems thinking, AI and agents’ orchestration, and managing complex, autonomous process and tool chains.

Cloud 3.0

Capgemini also termed Cloud 3.0 as one of the tech trends. Cloud is entering its next evolution, a phase where hybrid, private, multi-cloud and sovereign architectures are no longer niche, but fundamental to how AI runs at scale, to the point that it is becoming the operational backbone for AI and agentic workloads. "AI cannot scale and get the right performance on classical public cloud alone, pushing adoption of all other models of cloud," it said. While hybrid platforms will become mainstream, organisations will redesign architectures for performance, portability, sovereignty, and strategic autonomy to secure business continuity. Cloud 3.0 will increase the possibilities for organisations to tailor their cloud consumption to their various requirements notably in terms of redundancy of assets, criticality and latency. In the Cloud 3.0 era, organisations will need to ensure they are equipped with the right skills, agile governance and adaptive mindset that enable confident operations across diverse cloud environments, Capgemini said.

Multiagent Systems

Multiagent Systems (MAS) are collections of AI agents that interact to achieve individual or shared complex goals. Gartner said that agents may be delivered in a single environment or developed and deployed independently across distributed environments. “Adopting multiagent systems gives organisations a practical way to automate complex business processes, upskill teams, and create new ways for people and AI agents to work together,” said Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Gene Alvarez.

Preemptive Cybersecurity

Gartner also stressed on preemptive cybersecurity as organisations face an exponential rise in threats targeting networks, data, and connected systems. Gartner forecasts that by 2030, preemptive solutions will account for half of all security spending, as CIOs shift from reactive defence to proactive protection. Preemptive cybersecurity technologies use advanced AI and machine learning (ML) to anticipate and neutralise threats before they materialise.

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Predictions: 2026 & beyond