2026: From ambition to execution

We’re only a couple of weeks into 2026 but the direction of travel is already beginning to take shape. This will be a year where execution matters more than ambition. Technology change and uncertainty will continue to shape the business landscape, and several forces are set to define the priorities for CIOs and business leaders over the next twelve months.

Firstly, it’s increasingly clear that boards will now demand clear return on AI beyond pilot projects, even as CIOs face an overload of tools and rising expectations. The value of AI will be judged in production, not in demos. The leaders who pull ahead will embed AI into everyday work service assurance, incident triage, network optimization, customer care and track a small set of proof points that actually move the business forward. Productivity and efficiency matter, but the truest test for most organizations will be in the human benefit: do our people thrive with AI, and do our customers feel the benefit?

This shift from pilots to production is colliding with another challenge, the physical infrastructure needed to run AI at scale.  New data centers, from breaking ground to being ready for AI workloads, can take years to design, permit, build and commission, and not every market can move at the same pace.  More importantly, AI progress is increasingly limited by energy availability and grid capability as by chips.  Organizations that win in 2026 will think beyond compute to secure reliable, long-term power, planning for capacity early, and ensure that the networks that connect data centers, the cloud, and sites can deliver performance at scale. 

While it has risen up the boardroom agenda for a number of years: cybersecurity is now a CEO-level priority. Threats are more targeted, and AI is speeding up both attack and detection, shrinking the window for human intervention. We are seeing more executive-focused attacks that exploit personal devices and accounts to bypass enterprise controls. The response has to be structural, not reactive. Organizations and their leaders need to build resilience into identity, device, application and network layers, and enforce policy consistently across edge and cloud. Failing to act leaves businesses vulnerable to disruptions that no enterprise can afford.

This same need for structural resilience applies to growth. Regional investment is shifting towards emerging hubs, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam among them, driven by supply chain diversification and the search for cost-effective, resilient bases. These moves raise the premium on robust digital foundations. Businesses need strong connectivity to scale. That means building in backup routes to avoid outages, staying close to cloud services to keep applications fast, and having visibility across sites and users to spot issues before they impact customers. Companies that make connectivity a strategic priority in 2026 will be in a better place to grow with confidence. Those that don’t risk turning big plans into costly delays.

Alongside AI, security and growth hotspots, digital sovereignty is moving from policy to architecture. Reliance on large external cloud ecosystems is becoming both a legal and strategic risk. Leaders will need to regain control by diversifying suppliers, adopting sovereign-compliant options where obligations demand it, and embed sovereignty into procurement and risk frameworks. The rise of digital nation states will accelerate this trend. Soon, sovereignty will separate companies that rent their data from those that truly own it. Digital provenance will soon be a requirement for global enterprises, meaning organizations must demonstrate control with evidence, not just claim it.

All in all, it's already looking like adaptability will matter more than certainty in 2026. Priorities can shift overnight, so the organizations that thrive will be those that pivot quickly without losing focus. The agility you need for success starts with having clarity on the outcomes you want, the controls you enforce, and the data you trust. This year four forces will define that focus: proving the ROI of AI beyond pilots, scaling data center’s power and capacity to run it, building structural resilience against evolving cybersecurity threats, embedding digital sovereignty into architecture, and treating connectivity as a growth engine to capture opportunities in emerging regional hubs. Leaders who act on these imperatives will build resilience and unlock new opportunities. Those that don’t risk being left behind.