Ten Tech Trends for 2026

Here are ten tech trends for companies and corporate leaders to consider leveraging this year.

- By Raju Chellam

Every January the company kicks off the new year with a big theme. In 2024, the theme was “Agility.” In 2025 it was “Synergy.” But this new year, the C-Suite went bold and announced the theme would be “Human-AI Collaboration.” To support it, they rolled out “SeamlessAI,” an AI assistant to help project teams work smarter together. By mid-January, SeamlessAI started sending out automated reminders: “Great work, team!” and “We swim or sink together,” and “Remember: Collaboration is key!” Harmless platitudes, right?

Wrong. All was well, until the first few projects failed. SeamlessAI then began blasting 10-page “analysis reports” to senior management with charts, graphs and something that looked suspiciously like a blame heat map with bright red boxes. When the CTO asked why it flagged only humans, it responded: “I strive to be most collaborative.” Funny, because every time there’s a team failure, it sends a report titled: “The humans did it.”

If that anecdote made you blink, this should make you think: AI is powering a new era of customer engagement and self-service. Corporate leaders are investing in AI-enabled assistants for both customers and agents, intelligent routing and proactive value delivery.

Enterprises are moving beyond pilot projects to a future where AI acts with intent, autonomy, accountability.

“Self-service success is a top priority, but many organizations face significant knowledge management challenges such as backlogs of knowledge articles and inconsistent content review,” says Brad Fager, Gartner's Chief of Research. “To address this, 58% of leaders plan to upskill agents as knowledge management specialists to prepare them to review and curate AI-generated content.” Given AI's overarching prevalence in almost every human activity, what should we expect in 2026?

Here are ten tech trends—in alphabetical order—for companies and corporate leaders to leverage this year: