Tariffs will continue to impact revenue recognition in 2026.
Rising tariffs in 2025 pushed companies to rethink how they apply revenue recognition, and those and other external pressures will continue in 2026. While ASC 606 hasn’t changed, cost volatility from shifting tariff policies made it harder to keep revenue calculations predictable. Companies faced frequent repricing, new surcharges, and supply-chain delays that affected transaction prices, performance obligations, and revenue timing. These are trends that will continue into next year.
A major development was the rise of tariff-related surcharges, which introduced new forms of variable consideration. In 2026, these fees will become more dynamic, forcing companies to continually determine whether pricing shifts trigger contract modifications. This means more real-time adjustments, more catch-up entries, and greater compliance pressure.
Ultimately, 2026 will demand automation. Tariff impacts are moving too fast for manual processes, so companies will increasingly adopt systems that are agile and allow for flexibility given the dynamism of businesses today.
The role of the CFO will continue to evolve from gatekeeper to growth architect.
Today’s CFOs are no longer the company gatekeepers, tasked with balancing the books, controlling costs and ensuring compliance. The role has quickly evolved as the business environment grows more complex and demands new monetisation approaches.
To close the gap between strategy and execution, CFOs must embrace a new mandate: operational agility as a foundation for financial leadership. Operational agility is the ability to adapt quickly to market, customer and technology changes. This matters for financial leadership because it leads to faster decision-making, real-time revenue insights and better alignment between pricing strategy and execution.
In 2026, the role of the CFO will continue to evolve from gatekeeper to growth architect. With pricing, packaging and monetisation strategies becoming more complex, especially in the age of AI and usage-based business models, finance leaders must drive transformation, not just oversee it. However, many CFOs remain hamstrung by legacy systems and manual processes that can’t support rapid innovation. It’s time for a new mandate: operational agility as a prerequisite for financial leadership.
– Dan Miller, CFO, RightRev
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China Plus One shifts spending to greenfield deployment
Accelerated by geopolitical pressures and trade tariffs, multinationals are diversifying supply chains into markets such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and India. In 2026, this will trigger a wave of greenfield network demand focused on securing stable, high-performance connectivity for mission-critical operations instead of cost-cutting.
AI ambitions face a back-to-basics reckoning
While C-suites demand tangible ROI from AI, many organisations are limited by legacy infrastructure and fragmented networks. In 2026, AI will become the key driver for network consolidation, requiring CIOs to unify disparate environments to build the consistent, observable foundations needed for AI at scale.
Data sovereignty ends the one-size-fits-all cloud strategy
Stricter regulations, including India’s DPDPA and Vietnam’s PDPL, are pushing enterprises toward hybrid and in-country architectures. Regulatory compliance will require intentional fragmentation of global IT footprints as organisations localise data and adapt cloud strategies to regional rules.
Building a resilient foundation for the future
To navigate APAC’s fragmented digital environment, organisations will need multi-layered connectivity in emerging hubs, network consolidation for AI readiness, and partners capable of managing country-specific regulatory requirements. In 2026, architecture will be defined not by cloud features but by where infrastructure is located.
– Expereo
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Resiliency as not just an IT choice, but foundational for success
Resilience begins with freedom of choice. The rise of digital sovereignty regulations, particularly with the precedent that is emerging from the EU, means APAC businesses must carefully and proactively consider how to maintain control over their data and technology platforms from the outset, instead of reacting to being locked in when it’s too late. On top of the ethical considerations, there is a pragmatic one too: of governance and cost control. Choosing flexible, open options prevents organisations from being locked into enormous migration costs or becoming vulnerable to huge price increases from a single vendor.
The Edge Of Tomorrow is a great movie, but the edge is already here
In the last ten years or so, there has been an explosion in the number of end-point devices and the infrastructure components needed to support those systems. In other words, migration to the Edge, distributing computing power and data closer to customers, devices, and operations, is already here and it’s continuing to grow. Whether it’s smart factories, retail kiosks, remote healthcare, or a multitude of other specialised functions, organisations are creating and acting on data everywhere. Containerisation is the clear strategy for not only evolving these applications quickly, but also deploying and managing the required infrastructure at scale. The business imperative here is clear: if you can’t securely manage and unify these thousands of new data points, you lose control, efficiency, and competitive advantage.
– Peter Lees, Head of Solution Architecture in Asia-Pacific, SUSE
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AI going mainstream will create distributed, high-volume workloads across the Asia-Pacific.
Generative AI has moved from hype to everyday use for both enterprises and individuals, with enterprises integrating AI into content generation, customer interactions, automation, analytics, and decision support. This expansion is driving demand for high-density compute, distributed data access, and hybrid cloud architectures.
By 2026, Asia-Pacific’s growing data centre footprint will require networks that can adapt to shifting AI workloads, making elastic, programmable connectivity the need of the hour. The ability to dynamically route traffic, allocate bandwidth, and maintain performance across clouds, edge, edge nodes, and colocation facilities will become a baseline expectation to allow AI to scale without bottlenecks.
Subsea strengths will establish the Asia-Pacific as a global data backbone, creating a stronger demand for private, security-embedded networks.
Singapore already handles over 99% of its international telecom traffic via 26 submarine cables. What’s more, the government has committed to doubling its subsea cable landing capacity over the next decade to support data‑intensive, AI-driven applications. Newly launched high‑capacity systems, like the 10,500 km SJC2 cable with 126 Tb/s capacity, are strengthening connectivity links across Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and beyond.
By 2026, this dense subsea mesh will naturally raise expectations for private, isolated pathways and security-baked infrastructure. Growing AI-led and cross-border workloads will reinforce this direction. As subsea expansion accelerates, enterprises will increasingly look for zero-trust-aligned, resilient connectivity across APAC.
Data centre dominance will position APAC as a regional hub for complex, high-density workloads.
According to Moody’s, APAC will account for approximately 40% of global data centre capacity by 2030, driven by cloud expansion, AI training needs, and rising digital sovereignty requirements.
By 2026, this expanding footprint will shift more global workloads into APAC, increasing expectations for low-latency inter-DC corridors, secure high-capacity cross-border routes, and distributed edge locations that bring compute closer to users.
Satellite internet becoming mainstream will expand connectivity and reshape demand patterns across APAC.
Satellite solutions are moving from niche to widely adopted, complementing fiber for last-mile, rural, maritime, and backup use cases. This shift will accelerate internet penetration across developing markets, unlocking new user bases and creating fresh demand for cloud, content, and digital services.
By 2026, enterprises will increasingly integrate satellite connectivity into their resiliency strategies, combining terrestrial networks with satellite failover to meet uptime expectations. Governments will also prioritise hybrid satellite-fiber models to bridge digital gaps faster, making multi-path connectivity a core feature of APAC’s evolving network landscape.
– Amajit Gupta, MD & Group CEO, Lightstorm
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Fraud as a competitive edge
In 2026, companies that treat fraud prevention as a strategic competitive advantage rather than just a compliance requirement will be able to grow more efficiently and outperform competitors. By integrating systems across onboarding, account protection, transaction monitoring and identity verification, businesses can share and leverage data throughout the entire customer journey to gain a holistic, real-time view of risk.
This will empower organisations to offer more attractive customer incentives, speed up onboarding processes, and provide greater value. The companies that excel at weaving advanced security into their operations will be able to take more calculated risks and will consistently gain an edge over competitors who view fraud prevention as merely an operational concern.
– George Pace, Sr. Manager Product Marketing, SEON
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In 2026, enterprises will move decisively from AI pilots to AI at scale, not as side projects but as part of a converged digital stack that is simple, integrated, and efficient. In this transition, connectivity, AI, and cybersecurity will increasingly come together as one end-to-end proposition rather than three fragmented decisions. Connectivity will remain fundamental, but it will be treated as hygiene; the real transformation will be how intelligently organisations run their AI layer on top of their networks and data, and how deeply trust and security are built into that fabric. As core workflows, from citizen services and payments to logistics and manufacturing, go fully digital, enterprises will expect platforms where high-capacity connectivity, AI-led intelligence, and always-on cyber resilience are architected as one stack. Cybersecurity will sit at the backbone of every digital economy, with AI playing a pivotal role in preventing, detecting, and responding to threats in real time.
In this context, enterprises will look for partners who can provide holistic assurance across the stack, from the underlying global network to the AI-powered controls that keep it safe. They will expect integrated environments that combine high-performance connectivity, cloud capabilities, sustainable data centres, and zero-trust security, with intelligence and security embedded by design. This includes the use of AI for predictive maintenance, energy optimisation in data centres, and the application of advanced analytics on network traffic to detect fraud before it reaches end users, enabling organisations to operate on a reliable and future-ready digital foundation.
– Sharat Sinha, CEO – Airtel Business
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Resilience becomes the new compliance
Resilience will evolve from an IT goal to a board-level business imperative, driven by tightening regulatory frameworks like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), whose principles are inspiring a new wave of regulatory changes in other regions. As IDC notes, initiatives like the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Technology Risk Management guidelines, Australia’s CPS 230, and new incident disclosure rules in India reflect this shift. Additionally, the advent of the DPDP Act in India is reshaping how organisations approach compliance.
Organisations will be required to demonstrate verifiable resilience across their digital backbone, particularly in core DNS, identity, and certificate management systems, as auditors and regulators link uptime and recoverability to financial stability. This shift will usher in an era of policy-driven resilience, where compliance isn’t just about avoiding downtime, but proving that every component of digital trust can withstand disruption by design.
Automation strategies evolve as certificate lifespans shrink
With browsers and operating systems enforcing a 47-day maximum TLS certificate validity, organisations will have to fully automate certificate lifecycle management. Manual renewals can’t keep pace, doubling the workload and risk, driving industry-wide focus on discovery, issuance, and renewal automation.
– James Cook, Group Vice President Sales APJ at DigiCert
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In 2026, data sovereignty emerges as the next frontier of resilience
In 2026, data sovereignty will evolve from a compliance checkbox into a boardroom priority. As governments tighten data localisation laws and trade relationships reshape digital borders, organisations in APJ must gain clear visibility into where their data resides, who controls it, and how easily it can move when markets shift.
Forward-looking businesses will map their digital supply chains, ensuring applications and assets can move across jurisdictions with minimal friction. With rising geopolitical volatility, 2026 is expected to bring tighter and more fragmented supply chains, making such agility even more essential. Organisations that can pivot between sovereign, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments will be best equipped to navigate geopolitical uncertainty and supply chain constraints while maintaining business continuity. Treating data sovereignty as strategy, not policy, will define resilience.
In 2026, subscription becomes the language of flexibility
In 2026, subscription overtakes ownership as the dominant model for how organisations fund and deploy AI and digital infrastructure. Faced with economic uncertainty, rapid AI capability changes, and unpredictable compute demand, enterprises will no longer commit to large capex-based or multi-year infrastructure bets.
Instead, they will construct modular, subscription-driven stacks where compute, AI models, storage, cybersecurity, and even industry-specific capabilities can be scaled up or down monthly. This shift allows organisations to redirect workloads, budgets, and markets at the pace of change, making subscription-based architecture a core enabler of resilience and growth.
In 2026, the C-suite will make diversification mandatory across supply chains, cloud, and GTM
In 2026, diversification becomes a non-negotiable priority for APJ leadership. Escalating geopolitical tension, concentrated digital infrastructure risk, and rising regulatory fragmentation push enterprises to abandon single-market and single-provider dependencies.
C-suites will actively redesign their operating models around multi-market supply chains, multi-cloud and multi-AI-provider architectures, and multi-channel GTM strategies. The goal is explicit: reduce vulnerability to regional shocks while positioning the business to capture growth across both emerging and mature APJ economies.
By broadening their operational, digital, and commercial footprints, APJ enterprises will replace the old “optimise for efficiency” playbook with a new one built on structural resilience.
In 2026, energy will decide who wins the AI race
2026 will be the year the region’s AI ambitions collide with its energy realities. As generative AI workloads surge and national grids strain under unprecedented demand, power, not performance, will become the ultimate constraint on innovation.
Across APJ, organisations will be forced to re-engineer their infrastructure around energy efficiency. The shift from spinning disk to flash will accelerate, driven not just by performance gains but by necessity. Data centers will evolve into energy-aware ecosystems, where every watt counts, and technologies like modular design, advanced cooling, and intelligent workload placement will define competitiveness.
In 2026, the winners won’t just be those who scale AI, but those who can sustain it. Energy will emerge as the new currency of digital progress, reshaping how businesses design, deploy, and differentiate their technology strategies.
– Nathan Hall, General Manager and VP of Asia-Pacific and Japan at Pure Storage
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Real-time financial intelligence across industries
Prediction 1: 2026 will bring us a step closer to achieving a system of financial intelligence across and within industries. Organisations across multiple sectors will recognise a need for more cohesive financial intelligence approaches that eliminate data silos, connect cloud costs to business value, and democratise financial insight for every user. Instead of juggling disconnected, complicated dashboards, teams will begin to expect unified insights that tie spending to performance, efficiency and outcomes, driven by artificial intelligence.
The evolution of FinOps into a core business capability
Prediction 2: As AI capabilities develop further, FinOps will simultaneously go under a noticeable evolution: one that shifts the practice from a manual, report-driven specialty into an automated, AI-powered capability that delivers real-time intelligence directly to engineers, product teams and business leaders. AI will surface optimisation opportunities, forecast cost impacts, and embed financial context into everyday decisions. With this forecast in mind, FinOps will transform from a specialised practice into a core business capability and evolve from a “back-of-house” function into a foundational discipline that empowers teams to become stewards of smarter, data-informed decisions.
Shared accountability for tech and finance performance
Prediction 3: Shared accountability for business performance, cloud and technology spend will lead to even greater collaboration among CFOs and CIOs, reverberating across organisations. Instead of operating in separate sectors, FinOps will become the connective tissue that enables these key leaders to work together cohesively, not just to manage budgets, but jointly optimise value. Beyond the senior-most level, we’ll also see people within organisations take on greater accountability for financial implications of tech performance – from the CIO role all the way to individual engineers.
FinOps market consolidation and integrated platforms
Prediction 4: The consolidation of the FinOps market will accelerate. The FinOps landscape will undergo a significant shakeout as organisations shift toward integrated platforms instead of individual tools, driving major consolidation across the ecosystem. The current tooling market is crowded, with more than 80 vendors offering overlapping capabilities. In 2026, organisations will shift toward consolidated tooling rather than multiple overlapping products, sparking a shift toward end-to-end platforms that combine cost management with forecasting, automation, optimisation and engineering workflows, serving as one-stop-shops to simplify solutions for consumers.
– Ajay Patel, General Manager, Apptio and IT Automation, IBM
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ASEAN’s critical IoT shift: From fragmented to unified ecosystems
- ASEAN is transitioning from a fragmented landscape into a unified, interoperable, and data-centric IoT ecosystem, as established in the recent Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity (MPAC) 2025. The region must shift its focus from isolated national or sectoral projects to a coordinated regional approach — that’s what will unlock cross-border data value, build trust, and accelerate innovation at scale.
- Takeaway: Enterprises that continue with siloed deployments risk missing out on cross-border efficiencies. For multi-country IoT deployments, aligning with industry-recognised standards such as SGP.32 for eSIM/eUICC remote provisioning will help ensure easier switching across providers, smoother regional roll-out, and greater long-term flexibility.
The most transformative AI-enabled IoT use case
- The use of Cellular IoT connectivity in the Supply Chain and Logistics sector continues to record strong year-on-year growth across the region, and AI-enabled IoT adoption is set to accelerate further over the next year. Real-time shipment tracking, fleet management, AI-driven in-vehicle safety systems, and predictive maintenance powered by IoT sensors are already being deployed, with adoption rising across markets. This evolution is expected to deliver some of the largest operational and productivity gains for ASEAN enterprises in 2026.
- Takeaway: Companies must ensure IoT systems are AI-ready, with reliable, consistent data, to fully leverage predictive insights and real-time operational intelligence.
– Syed Natashrul, Head of APAC, Wireless Logic
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2026 will see resilience become the new innovation. Technology investment will be judged less by how ambitious it is and more by how reliable it is. Companies will divert greater effort and resources into strengthening their infrastructure, reducing energy use, and ensuring business continuity through any disruption. The language of growth will shift from “scale at any cost” to “operate with total confidence.” 2026 will see progress measured not only in speed, but in steadiness and the ability to deliver value without interruption.
– Jason Baden, Regional VP, A/NZ at F5
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Contextual Intelligence sets new standard for CX in 2026
If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that customer expectations are anything but static – especially in Asia-Pacific. Each year raises the bar for great service, and 2026 marks a new frontier in the ongoing quest for the customer experience (CX) holy grail. The evolving interplay between innovation and business ambition keeps pushing the boundaries of great CX in APAC.
The holy grail – service that truly knows, remembers, and responds to individuals – has long been just out of reach. Now, as advanced AI, real-time data, and seamless infrastructure converge, this aspiration is fast becoming reality for APAC organisations. In 2026, contextual intelligence will define great service: anticipating needs, adapting in the moment, and building genuine relationships at scale.
As this new standard takes hold, five trends are emerging as the defining features of CX in 2026:
- Memory-rich AI powers personalisation: Customers will expect brands to remember their preferences and history, picking up every conversation where it last ended. In APAC’s hyper-connected marketplaces, failure to do this signals a lack of genuine recognition and care.
- Instant resolution becomes the baseline: AI and self-service will make fast, accurate solutions the standard across all interactions. Brands that can’t deliver speedy resolutions – right away and on the first try – will risk losing customers’ patience and loyalty.
- Multimodal support replaces channel boundaries: Customers will seamlessly use voice, text, images, or video within a single exchange, never needing to switch channels, restart or lose context. Whether sending a photo or switching to a video call, they’ll expect AI to handle all inputs together, in real time.
- Promptable analytics empower every team: Real-time, actionable data will be at the fingertips of front-line staff and decision makers alike, enabling smarter, agile responses to customer needs, as situations evolve.
- Transparency earns trust and loyalty: Customers will demand plain-language explanations for automated decisions, not just outcomes. Open, accessible communication about how AI works will be essential in building long-lasting trust.
Together, these trends signal a transformative moment for CX in APAC. Those who invest in contextual intelligence now will earn stronger loyalty, achieve true differentiation, and unlock sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive market.
– Mitch Young, Senior Vice President, APAC, Zendesk
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- AI excels in knowledge, but humans bring the wisdom.
The ubiquity of AI means knowledge is now democratised – available to everyone at the push of a button. In 2026, the unique value proposition of the human worker won’t be the knowledge they have, but their ability to provide wisdom. While AI now gives us on-demand information that once took days to uncover, Workday’s research shows that employees still want humans firmly in the driver’s seat. They trust AI as a collaborator – not a decision-maker – and still expect human leadership, judgement, and empathy. The real opportunity ahead is to deepen those soft skills such as critical thinking and interpersonal connection so that human accountability remains at the core of every AI-enabled decision.
- AI upskilling will be about measuring real workforce growth, not just adoption.
The question is no longer how many AI tools an organisation deploys, but whether employees are gaining new capabilities because of them. HR success will be defined by tangible outcomes like faster skill development, stronger internal mobility, and higher-quality performance, rather than AI usage metrics. This requires leaders to set a clear vision for how AI accelerates people’s growth, and employees to use AI to elevate the quality of their work, not just generate generic output. Ultimately, the benchmark for AI is simple: are employees gaining new capabilities, confidence and opportunities that they would not have had otherwise? In 2026, the competitive advantage will go to organisations that use AI to grow their people, not just productivity.
- Finance sees big potential with AI closing the talent gap.
In 2026, AI will become a force multiplier for finance teams, helping close the industry’s persistent talent gap. From automated reporting to smarter fraud detection, we’re already witnessing how AI removes manual, tedious processes and frees up time for finance professionals to take on more value-adding roles. The opportunity ahead is clear: to combine a revitalised talent pipeline with AI-driven augmentation, so finance teams can move faster into the strategic, high-value partner the business increasingly needs.
– Jess O’Reilly, General Manager, ASEAN, Workday
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- AI-assisted software development will drive workforce recalibration in APJ
Following widespread tech sector layoffs, 2026 will mark a recalibration of the region’s digital workforce. As AI lowers the barriers to entry in coding, software development is becoming more accessible to professionals beyond traditional engineering backgrounds. AI-assisted tools can now generate, test, and refine code through natural language prompts – allowing individuals with minimal coding experience to upskill quickly and contribute to digital product creation.
This democratisation of software development presents a major economic opportunity for APJ, where countries such as India, China, and Indonesia are investing heavily in digital skilling and innovation ecosystems. With this, we’ll also see more of a focus from the volume of AI-generated code to the verification of its output. By 2026, the ability to collaborate with AI in software development, rather than compete against it, and focus on verifying its output, will be a defining skill for employability and growth in the region’s evolving tech economy. - Markets that encourage responsible AI will drive APJ’s next wave of innovation
In 2026, APJ markets that prioritise responsible AI will set the pace for innovation. Governments such as Singapore, India, and Australia have begun introducing regulatory sandboxes and governance frameworks that create room for safe experimentation while maintaining strong security standards. Enterprises will use these environments to modernise legacy systems, boost developer productivity, and integrate AI more securely across workflows.
In Southeast Asia — where micro, small and medium enterprises constitute the majority of businesses, and may lack in-house technical teams — AI-assisted development tools will allow staff and business owners to build simple apps and automate processes themselves. Markets that make it safe and simple for these new builders to experiment will capture a disproportionate share of AI-driven productivity and new digital services.
– Marcus Low, Vice President and Managing Director, Asia-Pacific and Japan, Sonar
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We have entered an era where technology increasingly addresses profound human challenges. From AI companions to quantum computing advancements, we are witnessing technology augment human capabilities in meaningful ways. In the coming years, using technology for positive impact will redefine the way we think about success – and ourselves.
Companionship is redefined for those who need it most
Loneliness has reached epidemic proportions, affecting one in six people worldwide and deemed a public health crisis by the World Health Organization. Social isolation increases death risk by 32%, comparable to smoking, while loneliness increases dementia risk by 31%. As MIT researcher Kate Darling discovered, we’re biologically hardwired to project intent and life onto autonomous movement, which is why people tend to treat robots more like animals than devices. At Amazon, our Astro team has documented people building relationships with robots. Rather than replacing human caregivers, these robots create a collaborative model where technology and people work together to combat the loneliness epidemic.
The dawn of the renaissance developer
As generative AI reshapes how we build software, a familiar trope has reemerged — that developers will become obsolete. But this is not the end of the developer; it’s the dawn of the renaissance developer. Generative AI lets us generate code in seconds, but it doesn’t sit in budget meetings where leadership debates cost versus performance. The core attributes of great developers remain constant. Creativity, curiosity, and systems thinking have defined the craft throughout every technological revolution. Developers who thrive in this AI-augmented world must become polymaths who understand that systems are living, dynamic environments.
Quantum-safe becomes the only safe
Personal data, financial records, and state secrets are already being harvested by adversaries betting on quantum’s arrival to decrypt later. Advances in error correction have compressed timelines, and the window for proactive defense is closing. Organisations need to act on three fronts: deploying post-quantum cryptography now, planning to update physical infrastructure, and developing quantum-ready talent.
Defense technology changes the world
Military investment in technology is surging by governments and the private sector. Innovation has accelerated and software updates for autonomous systems happen weekly, not annually. Algorithms learn from real-world data and improve overnight. Civilian organisations will be able to take advantage of these advances in defense technology and apply them to critical problems: from disaster response and food security to health care access in remote regions.
Personalised learning meets infinite curiosity
Every student deserves an educator who engages their curiosity and nurtures creativity. But for most of human history only the wealthy could afford a personal tutor. That’s about to change.
AI-powered personalised tutoring changes education. Khan Academy’s Khanmigo reached 1.4 million students in its first year. According to a UK survey, the proportion of students using any AI tool jumped from 66% last year to 92% this year. Teachers are not going away. What’s changing is what teachers do. AI is freeing them from administrative tasks while enabling more creative and individualised education.
– Dr Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon
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Agents move from hype to platform
By 2026, AI agents will stop being demos and start behaving like real teammates. They will run workflows, surface anomalies, and drive decisions end to end. The real unlock is the foundation underneath: clean, connected, AI-ready data and open protocols like MCP that let LLMs understand a company’s context rather than hallucinate around it. This is where AI shifts from efficiency to growth.
Data quality becomes a competitive moat again
We spent a decade collecting everything. The next decade belongs to companies that can govern, structure, and activate their data with clarity. Metadata, lineage, and discoverability become strategic assets because AI without clean data is just a confident intern.
Creativity becomes technical and technology becomes creative
Generative tools collapse the wall between creative and analytical work. Marketers and product teams combine human insight with agent-driven exploration. They generate ideas, validate them quickly, and ship faster than before. It is the combination of human judgment and machine iteration that wins.
– Inna Weiner, VP of Product, Data & AI, AppsFlyer
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The end of the mono cloud dividend: boards prioritise resilience over cost
The traditional SaaS model — defined by static features and centralised data silos — is nearing its end. Enterprises are now demanding AI-native, real-time, context-aware services. 2026 will accelerate the shift from “application consumption” to AI-as-a-Service. Organisations will prioritise deploying domain-tuned models at the edge, keeping sensitive data local, and paying for intelligence over software seats. While SaaS won’t disappear, its dominance ends as AI agents become the primary interface for enterprise workflows.
The premature death of SaaS and the rise of AI as a service
The old way of buying software (SaaS) meant paying a monthly fee for every employee (“seats”) to use a set of fixed features, with all their data locked in a central silo. That model is breaking. In 2026, the focus will shift to AI-as-a-Service. Companies will demand software that is smart, real-time, and customised. They will pay for the actual intelligence and insights the AI provides, not the right to use the program. This move pushes smart AI assistants to the forefront and requires keeping sensitive data secure and close to home. While SaaS won’t disappear, its dominance will end as AI agents become the primary interface for enterprise workflows.
Industrial AI goes mainstream — transforming OT, IoT connectivity, and zero trust
Think of old factories and power plants (Operational Technology or OT) like a house alarm — they only react after something breaks. In 2026, Industrial AI changes that. AI models will constantly run the show, tuning machines and optimising systems in real-time, moving from watching to driving operations. This sudden level of automation requires a huge security upgrade. Since you can’t install security software on every single robot or sensor (the IoT devices), security needs to become invisible. We’ll see a massive switch to a new security model called ‘agentless zero trust,’ which checks the identity of every machine interaction instantly and automatically, making the whole network fabric the trusted security guard for automated equipment.
– Kenneth Lai, VP, ASEAN, Cloudflare
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If 2024 was the year of AI hype, and 2025 was the year of aggressive adoption, 2026 looks to be where organisations face reality on what it really means to be AI-ready. The Asia Pacific (APAC) region has taken the lead in the global AI race, with Forrester noting that 26% of APAC firms are investing more aggressively in generative AI, versus their counterparts in North America at just 19%. The same report also calls out that the CEO is now taking ownership of AI strategy; 33% of CEOs in APAC are already doing so.
Despite this momentum in adoption, readiness is lagging. Companies are building AI into their offerings and solutions, but their data systems cannot keep up. In 2026, the winners will not be the companies with the smartest models, but the ones with the most fluid yet unified data. The ability to modernise data infrastructure with discipline is not just a matter for IT teams to consider, but a prerequisite for deploying AI at scale and safely while boosting cyber resilience and overall organisational performance.
Here is how this maturity will manifest in 2026:
- Disaggregation becomes standard practice
Disaggregation has become foundational for data-intensive workloads, but 2026 will see it reach new scale and precision. Enterprises will increasingly decouple how they scale capacity from how they scale performance, delivering optimal speed for AI and analytics while controlling storage growth.
Leaders will also look to architectures that allow them to scale performance for AI workloads, but independently of capacity for archival matters. Solutions like NetApp AFX enable this flexibility without overprovisioning, extending the value of existing systems like AFF and ASA while powering next-generation workloads.
- Intelligent consumption and no-copy migration accelerate modernisation
Modernisation will be measured by speed to adapt, not spend to build. APAC organisations that are facing tighter scrutiny on AI ROI will pivot to consumption-based models that allow them to treat storage as a utility, with the ability to scale up and down as the situation demands.
- Unified, single-namespace access at scale
Datasets are outgrowing single data centres. As sovereign AI and edge computing deployments grow across APAC, data is becoming more distributed. Yet organisations must maintain unified access without compromising security. In 2026, a seamless, single-namespace view spanning on-premises and multicloud locations will be essential, with protection embedded directly at the data layer. This ensures that apps and users can access the same data without disruption, while assuring businesses that their data is secure by design. Intelligent data infrastructure will provide consistent metadata and performance tuning alongside global access controls and built-in protection. With these capabilities, organisations will be able to treat all data as one unified system, regardless of where it lives, and ensure it remains resilient against evolving threats.
– Dhruv Dhumatkar, Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific & Japan, NetApp
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Data agility becomes the new competitive edge
In APAC, the conversation is fundamentally shifting. It’s no longer enough to just “Listen, Understand, and Act” on customer data. The new competitive edge is data agility, which means moving from simply ingesting data to processing rich context, decoding digital body language at scale. The most successful brands will treat AI not as a tool for simple content generation, but as intelligent, autonomous agents that are fed by first-party context, guided by brand strategy, and act as a co-pilot. This frees the marketer to be the conductor, focusing their human creativity and empathy on driving real business impact.
Trust and transparency become part of the product
Cybersecurity in marketing will move from a background concern to a frontline customer experience issue. As breaches become a constant, and regulation rises and intensifies, customers in our region are increasingly asking: “Do I trust this brand with my data?”
Brands must leverage their first-party data and strong governance not merely as defense, but as a technical foundation that fuels transparency, explaining how data powers meaningful, personalised experiences while leaving customers in control. By mastering this complexity and building trust through clear execution, forward-looking brands can successfully convert security from a necessary cost center into a powerful competitive differentiator.
– Shahid Nizami, Vice President for APAC and GCC, Braze
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From Experimentation to the AI-driven Resilience
The most visible shift is in AI assistants powering customer engagement, operations, and even cyber response. But these systems are only as trustworthy as the data they learn from. In 2026, AI integrity will become a central pillar of resilience with the ability to trace, verify, and restore the truth in machine learning models.
What’s emerging next is the use of conversational interfaces to run resilience itself. Instead of navigating dashboards and scripts, teams will ask – in natural language – to protect a workload, check a policy, or validate recovery readiness across SaaS, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. Resilience begins to feel like an always-on, conversational control layer over critical services.
Cloud Sovereignty as Strategy, not Box-ticking
Architectures are becoming sovereignty-aware by default, with encryption, access policies, and compliance rules moving with the data – across borders and clouds. When sovereignty is built into design, compliance becomes a competitive advantage. In 2026, this combination of sovereignty and freedom of choice will allow organisations to innovate confidently within trusted boundaries.
Identity Moves to the Centre of Recovery
As digital ecosystems become borderless, identity is replacing infrastructure as the perimeter of security. In Singapore, phishing attempts surged by about 49% to more than 6,100 cases in 2024, with banking, government, and e-commerce among the most spoofed sectors; a reminder that most attacks now begin with stolen or abused identities.
IDC anticipates that by 2026, cyber-resilient organisations will merge identity, data, and recovery policies into one continuous security fabric. Continuity is incomplete if identities remain corrupted. The ability to restore verified user integrity – not just restore systems – will become a cornerstone of operational assurance.
Data Rooms Turns Protection into AI-ready Fuel
In 2026, enterprises will recognise that AI initiatives stall not from lack of data, but from the inability to safely access and prepare the data they already have. Across APAC, multiple surveys show that data quality, security, and governance – not enthusiasm for AI – are the primary bottlenecks to scaling projects beyond pilots, with many organisations citing fragmented data estates and compliance concerns as the main reasons initiatives slow or stall.
Historical data will be reframed from “backup insurance” to a strategic intelligence asset, if activated responsibly.
This will accelerate the rise of sovereign, resilience-aware data rooms – secure environments that connect governed backup data directly to AI platforms and data lakes without risky, ad-hoc workflows.
Quantum Readiness and New Metrics for Clean Recovery
Data protected under today’s algorithms (RSA, ECC) may be vulnerable within a decade. Forward-looking enterprises are beginning crypto-inventory audits, deploying quantum-safe algorithms, and redesigning backup and recovery systems with cryptographic agility – for example, trialling QKD and PQC over quantum-safe national networks, or working with telcos that now offer quantum-safe national networks.
Quantum readiness of the future is about ensuring that sovereignty, encryption, and recovery will still hold when quantum attacks inevitably occur. For heavily regulated sectors and high-IP manufacturers, that means treating crypto-agility as part of core resilience architecture today.
– Martin Creighan, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Commvault
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Key drivers shaping the Asia Pacific technology landscape in 2026
The following trends highlight the shifting priorities for CIOs and enterprise leaders as they navigate the region’s evolving digital geography:
- ‘China Plus One’ shifts spending to greenfield deployment: Accelerated by geopolitical pressures and trade tariffs, multinationals are aggressively diversifying supply chains into markets like Vietnam, Malaysia, and India. In 2026, this will trigger
a massive wave of greenfield network demand. Unlike in mature markets, the priority in these emerging hubs will shift from cost-cutting to securing stable, high-performance connectivity for mission-critical operations, such as semiconductor manufacturing.
- AI ambitions face a ‘back-to-basics’ reckoning: While the C-suite demands tangible ROI from AI, many enterprises are finding their strategies stalled by legacy infrastructure and fragmented networks. In 2026, AI will become the primary business case
for network consolidation. CIOs will be forced to unify disparate networks to create the consistent, observable foundation required to scale AI from pilot programs to business-wide advantages.
- Data sovereignty ends the ‘one-size-fits-all’ cloud strategy: As enterprises move mission-critical applications to the cloud, they face regulatory roadblocks that threaten “global-first” transformation projects. With strictly enforced regulations—such
as India’s DPDPA and Vietnam’s PDPL, which takes full effect on January 1, 2026—enterprises will be forced toward “geopatriation”. This will require the adoption of hybrid, in-country architectures, intentionally fragmenting global IT footprints to ensure
compliance.
Building a resilient foundation for the future
These trends demonstrate that navigating APAC in 2026 requires more than just connectivity; it requires a strategic overhaul of digital infrastructure to handle fragmentation and compliance. In this evolving landscape, businesses need the following:
- Secure multi-layered connectivity in emerging hubs: To mitigate the risks of physical cable unreliability in markets like Vietnam, enterprises must manage a complex blend of last-mile technologies. Integrating fiber, 5G, and satellite connectivity will
be essential to guarantee uptime and protect revenue in these new manufacturing centers.
- Prioritise network consolidation for AI readiness: CIOs must prioritize building a controllable network foundation. Those who unify their locally managed, fragmented networks will be the only ones capable of successfully deploying AI at scale.
- Partner for regulatory navigation: Failure to comply with local data laws is now a direct barrier to market access. Organizations must establish partnerships with providers who can navigate the regulatory intricacies of specific markets, ensuring that
“geopatriation” strategies do not derail global operations.
– Eric Wong, President of Asia Pacific, Expereo
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The enterprise technology story of 2026 is the rise of hybrid, distributed architectures. Customers from Bengaluru to Seoul are embracing hybrid AI models – blending public cloud, edge, and on‑premises environments in the same workflow. This shift is driven by data sovereignty, latency, cost predictability, and sustainability. Training may occur in a core data center, while real‑time inference runs at the edge, closer to where data is generated. The result is “right‑sized” infrastructure that scales with demand and reflects the diversity of APAC markets. In the year ahead, hybrid AI will no longer be an option but rather, the default architecture for enterprise technology.
– Sumir Bhatia, President, Asia Pacific, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo
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Using tech for agility will no longer be enough. In 2026, more boardrooms will pursue optionality: the ability to adapt, pivot, and succeed with a choice of approaches without disrupting business continuity. As global geopolitical movements continue to drive volatility across APAC stretching into 2026, businesses will increasingly look at how they can reshore, choose vendors, and adaptively reroute their supply chains to navigate uncertainties.
Enterprises will double down on technologies that enable them to anticipate change and act dynamically. For example, data streaming can provide continuously flowing context, allowing true strategic options for businesses before disruptive change occurs. Confluent’s research conducted earlier this year found that more than one in two (62%) of companies in APAC have already adopted data streaming, with almost a quarter more (24%) having their systems in pre-production. This will only increase in 2026.
However, the reality is that many firms still struggle with siloed systems. Our Data Streaming Report found 67% of APAC businesses felt that data spread across separate silos was a major or frequent challenge.
This is why I believe organisations that will succeed in 2026 will be ones that “eat their data vegetables”: doing the hard but necessary work to address these challenges by fixing data pipelines, facilitating data integration and governance. That difference in readiness is what will set businesses up for scale and sustained advantage.
– Nick Dearden, Field Chief Technology Officer, Confluent
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In 2026, we believe that digital transformation will accelerate to new heights, driven by advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital Threads, Cloud, and the Industrial Metaverse – bringing new opportunities to engineering-intensive industries and redefining how teams collaborate, innovate, and build.
A recent IDC infobrief found that 40% of APAC organisations already use AI agents, with over 50% planning to implement them within the next year. This shows how AI is moving from experimentation to large-scale implementation. We do not see these innovations replacing engineers, but rather, empowering them to think faster, explore further, and solve problems with greater confidence. We expect AI to democratize expertise, making advanced engineering capabilities even more accessible to broader teams and improving consistency across global operations.
The digital thread is also evolving from a set of disjointed solutions into an interconnected system that connects data, processes, and decisions across every discipline and lifecycle. This evolution will only intensify and empower businesses with real-time continuity, which is increasingly critical as products become more multi-domain and software-defined. As organizations implement new technologies to strengthen the digital thread in 2026, they must ensure they deliver clarity instead of friction and complexity, so teams have the right conditions to innovate with confidence.
One way organisations can better realize the tangible value of digital threads is by leveraging cloud-native platforms, which are essential for accelerating innovation cycles and lowering the barriers to advanced engineering capabilities.
For example, Thanakorn Vegetable Oil Products (TVOP), a leader in Thailand’s edible oil industry, implemented Siemens’ cloud-native AX4-based Transportation Management System, which enabled it to streamline collaboration with internal teams and third-party logistics providers, reduce manual processes, and improve synchronization of inbound and outbound operations – all to achieve greater customer satisfaction. Approaches like these show how the cloud enables enterprises to power better digital threads and stay current and aligned, while innovating at the pace the market demands.
With the rise of 3D graphics collaboration tools, we also believe the Industrial Metaverse will emerge as a truly practical engineering environment. It enables teams to collaborate in immersive digital spaces and engage with high-fidelity digital twins – all before anything is physically built.
NEC’s recent work with robot 3D simulation is an example of this vision in action. Through digital twin and Industrial Metaverse technologies, NEC developed a robot teaching automation solution that helps manufacturers optimize operations, improve productivity, and transition to fact-driven management. As digital twin technology and AI advance in 2026, we expect to see even more manufacturers accelerate robot teaching, reduce setup time, and unlock higher levels of productivity and competitiveness.
2026 will be the year these technologies converge into a unified engineering ecosystem. Those that can transform complexity into a source of competitive advantage through intelligent, connected, cloud-enabled digital engineering will be best positioned to succeed.
– Alex Teo, Vice President & Managing Director of Southeast Asia, Siemens Digital Industries Software
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Data, not models, will define the next wave of enterprise AI
The AI story in 2026 won’t be about which Large Language Models (LLMs) is “best.” It will be the realisation that models are becoming interchangeable, and the real competitive edge lies in the data that fuels them. Enterprises will prioritise LLM portability so they can choose the right model for the right job, and they’ll invest even more in vector search, embeddings, and re-ranking to extract deeper value from their own data. Conversations across the market are already shifting in this direction, signalling a maturing view of what actually moves the needle in enterprise AI.
Modernisation will become a strategic response to ASEAN’s talent crunch
ASEAN’s digital transformation plans in 2026 will reach a critical turning point as the focus shifts to modernising legacy systems, not just maintaining them. Many leaders will realise that ambitious AI initiatives aren’t stalling due to technology limitations, but because legacy architectures cannot support the speed, scalability, and flexibility AI demands.
This recognition will redefine modernisation from just cleaning up technical debt to enabling workforce optimisation. By moving to modern, cloud-native architectures, enterprises can free their technical teams from the complexities of maintaining outdated systems and redeploy them toward innovation, AI adoption, and customer-facing projects.
Modernisation will also act as a hiring advantage in ASEAN’s increasingly competitive talent market. Developers seek organisations with modern tools, automation, and cloud-native infrastructure; environments where they can innovate and build, rather than maintain ageing systems. For enterprises, adopting these technologies will not only streamline operations but also help attract the best technical talent.
ASEAN enterprises will adopt bolder modernisation processes
In 2026, modernisation will shift from contained pilots to something far more ambitious. AI is putting real pressure on organisations to rethink how their systems are built, and leaders are realising that they cannot unlock meaningful value from AI while operating with rigid or outdated core architectures reliant on fragmented integration methods.
Instead of running isolated experiments, more enterprises are beginning to modernise entire stacks – from data, applications, and infrastructure. The goal is no longer to “try something new,” but to remove the blockers that make AI adoption slow and risky.
– Thorsten Walther, Managing Director, CXO Advisory Asia at MongoDB
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The Asia Pacific remains the fastest-growing region in the world, with the IMF projecting a 60% contribution to global growth in 2025. In this context, the IT channel sees a unique opportunity in capitalizing on high-growth technologies such as AI, cybersecurity, and data analytics. Distributors, serving as ecosystem orchestrators, are delivering differentiated value by fast-tracking enablement that helps partners to adopt these technologies, simplifying complexity, and setting the stage for exponential growth across the region. Here’s how 2026 will pan out, based on trends observed in the fourth edition of our Direction of Technology report, which surveyed over 1,000 partners across 40 countries:
- AI will be pivotal for market leadership: Partners across APJ collectively agree that AI is vital to market domination, with 75.8% seeing opportunity in AI infrastructure & cloud and 70.9% in AI-led automation and data management. With AI and GenAI spending in the Asia Pacific expected to reach $175 billion by 2028, the region is strategically positioned as a proving ground for real-world deployments, paving a clear route for differentiation in the new year.
- Cybersecurity remains fundamental to growth: With 73.4% of partners offering or planning to offer at least one cybersecurity solution, investing in cybersecurity will be critical to ensure market relevance. Data and privacy (81%), network security (78%), and cloud/app security (77%) have emerged as key priority areas as organizations seek comprehensive protection across AI, cloud, and data ecosystems.
- Shift to services will continue: Service-based frameworks are seeing significant traction among partners in APJ, with 83% offering consulting or professional services and 78% providing managed services. These are increasingly attractive to partners as they create a consultative platform, driving higher attach rates and profitability. In the coming years, this shift will be critical for partners to build and maintain market
momentum, improve end-customer relationships, and monetize expertise throughout the IT ecosystem.
- Foundational technologies are here to stay: Partners in APJ continue to see high demand for hardware and endpoint devices, despite high-growth technology prioritization. Currently, 68.5% of partners continue to offer devices, and 57.6% provide hardware, above the global average. This sustained demand is driven by government regulations, data sovereignty requirements across countries, and the need for greater computational power. In 2026, sustained hardware and endpoint demand will anchor channel growth, reinforcing partners’ role as essential enablers of data security, hybrid work, and digital infrastructures.
- Proactively solving for skill gaps will be crucial: The top challenge for partners across APJ in 2026 will be addressing the skills shortage. The struggle to retain or attract talent in APJ remains high at 79.8%, limiting the ability to sell advanced AI and cybersecurity implementations and scale IT services. Distributors like Tech Data providing necessary training, enablement, and proof-of-concept support will be vital in reducing the talent gap while simultaneously accelerating technological adoption.
– Anand Chakravarthy, Vice-President Advanced Solutions – Asia Pacific & Japan, Tech Data
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Here are the top tech trends expected to reshape enterprises, including industrial manufacturing, in the region in 2026 and beyond:
- Greater focus on resilience and agility
Manufacturing is at the foundation of the ASEAN economy, with half of manufacturers in the region citing AI as the most critical trend in manufacturing today. The growth in edge AI in Thailand and Vietnam is expected to reduce manufacturing supply chain costs across Southeast Asia. Edge AI is also revolutionising processes across sectors such as government services, telemedicine, fintech, and agriculture.
As we head into 2026, resilience and agility have emerged as critical pillars for success in these sectors amid an uncertain global economy. Those who embrace technology to absorb geopolitical, cyber, and technological shocks will gain a competitive edge. For ASEAN enterprises that integrate agility into their DNA, disruptions will not be a question of survival but a catalyst for innovation and business growth.
- ERP: a strategic success factor
Migrating ERP systems to the cloud has been a deterrent for many companies, primarily due to the high initial cost. Despite this, many businesses are embedding automation and predictive analytics into ERP systems to optimise production. For instance, in Indonesia, SMEs have discovered that ERP-based processes have vastly improved operational efficiency and decision-making. Similarly, in Malaysia, retailers have been leveraging new technologies to transition to omnichannel models, meeting the demands of modern customers.
- Rise of generative and Agentic AI
Enterprise intelligence is shifting from experimentation to execution and decision-making, with generative and Agentic AI improving both operations and customer experiences. However, some disparities remain across ASEAN markets. According to a BCG report, 73% of employees across the region believe independent AI agents will be important in the next three to five years, and 77% indicate their businesses are already deploying or experimenting with them. There is optimism and eagerness to embrace AI as a growth enabler in emerging economies such as Indonesia and India, but progress remains slow in other developing markets.
- Zero-Trust security key to unlock business success
The ASEAN digital economy is booming. The World Economic Forum estimates that the region is the world’s fastest-growing Internet market, with 125,000 new users joining every day, driving growth in digital payments and e-commerce. Amid this accelerated digital growth, cyber threats – from ransomware to sophisticated AI-powered attacks – are larger than ever.
This is where a Zero-Trust security architecture plays a pivotal role by assuming that security breaches are continuously verified at every access point. This involves multi-layered security strategies that use AI-supported analytics, behavioural monitoring, and automated responses.
– Terry Smagh, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific and Japan, Infor
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Prediction 1: Regulatory compliance will drive governance
2026 is shaping up as the year organisations face a “truth test” on compliance. Governments worldwide are accelerating regulatory action, introducing new privacy frameworks modeled on GDPR but focused on AI risks, sector-specific mandates in healthcare, finance, and government, and stricter penalties for non-compliance.
Governance programs are evolving from reactive remediation to proactive, automated compliance. Continuous controls monitoring, automated lineage, policy-as-code, and risk scoring are no longer optional, they’re embedded into operational workflows. Organisations that adopt this approach will be the ones able to respond quickly to audits, ensure accountability, and maintain trust with customers and regulators alike.
Prediction 2: AI governance moves from theory to practice
AI adoption has far outpaced traditional governance frameworks, and 2026 is the year enterprises catch up. Governance now needs to cover model transparency, responsible AI guidelines, bias detection, ethical lifecycle control, and oversight of AI-generated data. Guardrails for Generative AI and LLM use are also becoming standard.
Organisations are responding by creating AI governance councils, maintaining ML model registries, and deploying AI governance platforms to ensure trust in automated decisions. It’s a shift from ad hoc oversight to structured, repeatable practices that support both innovation and compliance.
Prediction 3: Governance goes beyond IT
Data governance is no longer “owned” by IT. Business leaders are now co-owners of data decisions, stewards sit within Finance, HR, Sales, Supply Chain, and Operations, and cross-functional councils dictate priorities. Governance roles are embedded directly in domain teams, making it an enterprise-wide responsibility rather than a technology project.
This shift matters because when governance is integrated into day-to-day operations, data decisions are faster, more accurate, and more aligned with business outcomes. IT still provides tools and standards, but the accountability and decision-making now span the entire organisation.
Prediction 4: Data governance as a service explodes
Building and maintaining an internal data governance team remains challenging, especially for mid-sized enterprises. In response, DG as a service (DGaaS) is taking off. Expert providers now operate as the organisation’s governance function, delivering:
- End-to-end operating models
- Stewardship staffing
- Catalog and lineage management
- Policy frameworks
- Quality monitoring
- AI governance oversight
DGaaS accelerates maturity, lowers cost, and enables organisations to embed governance expertise without the overhead of building large internal teams.
Prediction 5: Data quality is back in the spotlight
Data quality has returned to the forefront. Organisations adopting analytics, AI, and automation now recognise that without trustworthy data, all downstream initiatives fail. In 2026, enterprises are investing in:
- Continuous quality monitoring
- ML-driven anomaly detection
- Data product SLAs
- Leadership-visible scorecards
- Root-cause analysis tied to ownership
Data quality is no longer just clean-up; it’s a value driver. Leaders are starting to treat clean, reliable data as an asset that powers both compliance and competitive advantage.
– Mary Hartwell, Global Practice Lead for Data Governance at Syniti, part of Capgemini
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Integrated and intelligent ecosystems will replace fragmented IT stacks
Enterprises are moving away from disconnected toolsets toward unified technology ecosystems that integrate devices, applications, identity, analytics, and support. With IT teams stretched thin and employee expectations rising, organisations will prioritise systems that “just work,” anticipate needs, and self-resolve issues. Intelligent automation will become foundational – streamlining updates, monitoring performance, and reducing operational friction. This shift will deliver more consistent digital experiences and enable employees to stay focused, without navigating complexity behind the scenes.
Circularity will become an operational imperative
Economic uncertainty, energy demands, and device proliferation will force enterprises to rethink technology lifecycle management. Circularity – renew, refurbish, redeploy – will become embedded into planning and procurement from the very beginning. Organisations will prioritise lifecycle strategies that reduce waste, extend asset longevity, stabilise costs, and simplify IT operations. Circular models will shift from merely sustainability-driven choices to mainstream operational levers.
– Jennifer Baile, Vice President, Global Services & Solutions, Greater Asia, HP Inc
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- AI-scale data movement will redefine what enterprises expect from their networks
In 2026, organisations will realise that AI’s impact is no longer confined to isolated use cases; it is reshaping how data is created, moved and consumed across regions. Workloads will become more bursty, more distributed and increasingly dependent on consistent low latency across multiple clouds. This will heighten the demand for instant, secure and reliable access to data anywhere it is needed, with full visibility of how it travels and where it resides.
As AI becomes woven into daily operations, enterprises will prioritise platforms that provide deterministic routing, jurisdictional control and interoperability across cloud, edge and data-centre environments. The shift toward this data-ready foundation will accelerate the move to programmable, on-demand network models where performance, sovereignty and resilience are built in from the start.
- Interoperability and sovereignty will become board-level priorities
In 2025, two things became clear and will increasingly impact decision-making in the next year – geopolitical complexity and deepening digitalisation are bringing sovereignty and interoperability to the forefront of business strategy. Organisations will need the ability to define where their data travels, align with regional regulations and ensure compliance across multiple jurisdictions – all without slowing innovation.
This will drive demand for open, API-integrated platforms that unify traditionally siloed environments, giving enterprises one view of their services, data flows and performance. Leaders will increasingly seek partners that operate securely at global scale while offering choice, flexibility and confidence that their networks can adapt as regulatory landscapes evolve. The businesses that thrive will be those that treat sovereignty as a design principle, not an afterthought.
- Programmable, on-demand networks will become the foundation for resilience
The complexity organisations face – from AI-driven transformation to tighter budgets and intensified digital operations, will make agility and resilience inseparable. In 2026, more enterprises will move away from fixed, provider-led models toward networks that work like the cloud: instantly available, scalable on demand and open by design.
Programmability will be essential. Enterprises will expect the ability to flex capacity in minutes, switch across data centres or cloud environments with minimal friction, and maintain stable performance even as data volumes grow. The shift will be guided by the outcomes customers repeatedly cite: stability, security, scalability, skills and sovereignty. As a result, the network will evolve into a true platform layer: one that supports AI, ensures predictability and provides the operational confidence organisations need in a fast-changing world.
– Rodney Kinchington, Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, Japan and Greater China, BT International
