Gartner unveils top technology trends for 2026

Innovation is happening now

The market is unpredictable, and volatility may speed the trends up or slow them down, said Paulman. But they are undeniably happening.

"The pace of innovation is changing," they said. "The next wave of innovation isn't going to happen next year -- it's happening here this week."

The first major trend centers on AI-native development platforms, which team people and AI.

AI will join programmers, and each developer will work with an AI assistant making up a software creation team, Alvarez said. If an organization has 10 developers working on one project, they could be split into five teams of two developers partnered with AI, which can deliver five projects rather than one.

"This is also going to be the solution to the developer productivity problem," he said. "It's also going to help in bringing nontechnical developers or business users into the development teams, creating applications specific to an organization."

The trend of AI supercomputing platforms will provide these combined developer teams the resources they need for innovation, Paulman said. The supercomputing platforms will act like a GPS system for development, combining accelerators, orchestration and high-speed infrastructure to help developers develop in real time.

The speed and efficiency of these platforms will be useful for biotech firms to model vaccines and therapies in weeks instead of years, financial services companies to model risk portfolios to derisk the portfolio management process and energy companies to map extreme weather to optimize their grids.

The trend for modular multi-agent systems will handle specific tasks in an enterprise. Alvarez compared these agents to the pit crews of Formula 1 race teams, where the crew must work in concert together, but every member handles a specific task when the race car comes into the pit.

The advantage of the task-specific multi-agent systems is that it can reduce the possibility of AI-induced hallucinations, while supporting a complex workflow, he said. This results in dynamic agents that call each other as needed to do different things.

But organizations should not bite off more than they can chew, and organizations should start by building small and specific agents, Alvarez said.

"Don't build large monolithic agents because they become too hard to manage and bring in potential problems like hallucinations," he said. "You also don't want to think of these multi-agent systems as human; they augment and work alongside humans."

Smaller is better

Domain-specific language models (also known as small language models) is a coming trend that will get better value from AI agents, Paulman said.

Large language models have "gobbled up everything" and are akin to the Library of Congress, which includes every book ever written, they said. Domain-specific language models are more like the New York University Law School library, with specific knowledge that's focused on the tasks the organization needs done.

"Organizations can spend less time searching and get better results," Paulman said. "CIOs are sitting on a value goldmine, and you have the ability to build domain-specific language models as a digital service."

However, organizations will need to be fully transparent about what the model knows and doesn't know, and they will need context engineers to constantly feed the model with the most appropriate and up-to-date sources, she said.

Physical AI has been around for a long time, with devices performing tasks guided by AI – such as the Roomba cleaning systems, but the trend is picking up steam, Alvarez said

"Physical AI is designed to interact with the physical world. It senses what's around it and can act in that environment," he said.

There are challenges in moving around in the physical world that the physical AI devices will need to negotiate and learn from, Alvarez said. For example, a drone that is tasked with trimming tree branches must decide between a tree branch and a power line and cut only the tree branch. 

"They have to deal with unpredictability and learn from what they do. Testing what you have to do in the physical world requires that learning process," he said.

Prediction is protection

Cybersecurity and data are the final major trends for 2026, all of which will help organizations safeguard their digital assets in a rapidly shifting world, Paulman said.

Preemptive cybersecurity are like AI-powered security operations that use prediction as protection, they said.

Threat actors are already using AI to attack with intelligence and precision, and preemptive cybersecurity uses that same power against them to anticipate, deny, disrupt and deceive, Paulman said.

"This will change the way we work with security, going from 'no' to 'know,'" they said. "Cybersecurity will become mainstream in every project that you do in every stage."

Digital provenance will help organizations know if all the digital assets that they use are real, by authenticating where the data comes from, Alvarez said.

This is important because organizations rely more and more on third-party providers, and they need to know that the data and applications they use from a third party is really from that third party.

"Hackers can use genAI to create a fake HR application, fake media files, fake data files and feed them to your organization," Alvarez said. "You need to make sure you have trust and accountability for all of your data assets."

Finally, organizations are determining where their data resides as they deal with increasing geopolitical turbulence, Paulman said. Geopatriation is the intentional movement of applications and data to sovereign alternatives.

Organizations will have a variety of global and local options that allow them to address issues like regulation, compliance and data resilience, she said. Sovereign clouds offer the ability to have a safe harbor where applications are protected, and as more hyperscalers enter the market, the clouds and applications will become more economically viable.

"Geopatriation is about choosing where your AI lives and who's protecting it," Paulman said. "As the world continues to tilt, bringing your assets closer in makes sense."

Jim O'Donnell is a news director for Informa TechTarget who covers CIO strategy and enterprise sustainability.