01732 759725 magazine 29 AI PREDICTIONS As we dismantle this system, the specific application a company uses (CRM, ITSM, HRIS etc.) will matter less than the agent’s ability to navigate it autonomously. BS Teh Chief Commercial Officer, Seagate Technology Hybrid model to unlock value in data AI has made data the most prized asset in the digital economy, and that is necessitating a significant Agents won’t replace the people closest to the business. Instead they’ll raise the value of the work those people do. Data teams will grow because the value of data will finally become impossible to ignore. Ryan Manning Chief Product Officer, BMC Helix The fall of the ‘software industrial complex’ We are seeing early cracks in the ‘software industrial complex’ that relies on locking customers into massive, monolithic systems. For years, software giants have built competitive moats around their systems based on consistency of user experience and data storage. Agentic AI is lowering the drawbridge. In 2026, the barriers between systems will drop rapidly as startups and more agile players enable agents to move fluidly between data sources. relied on instinct will start relying on evidence because the barrier to entry disappears. Teams that never submitted a single ticket to the data group will suddenly ask dozens of questions a week. Embedded analysts will become more valuable because they can focus on interpreting results instead of wrestling with pipelines. AI-literate subject matter experts will appear in corners of the organisation where no data capability existed before, and governance teams will grow because a surge in activity always requires more oversight. The surface area will expand quickly. Organisations that adopt agents will discover something counterintuitive; they won’t end up with fewer data workers, but more. This is Jevons paradox applied to analytics. When insight becomes easier, curiosity will expand and decision-making will accelerate. continued... Jarrod Vawdrey Field Chief Data Scientist, Domino Data Lab The great AI ROI reckoning 2026 is when the music stops. CFOs are done writing blank cheques for ‘AI innovation’ that can’t be tied to actual business results. We’re already seeing enterprises start to pump the brakes on a significant percentage of their planned AI spending because leadership finally asked the obvious question: what are we actually getting for this? Most teams have no good answer after a year of PoCs that never made it into production. The handful of use cases that actually do move numbers will survive – revenue up, costs down, cycle time reduced… real KPIs that matter. Everything else gets killed. No more pilot purgatory, no more ‘let’s experiment and see’, no more demos that wow executives but never ship. If you can’t show business impact in three to six months, you’re done. The companies winning in late 2026 will be those that got religious about measurement early and weren’t afraid to kill their darlings. Agentic workflows to autonomous agentic AI systems Most of what’s being sold as agentic AI in 2025 is just glorified workflow automation with better prompts. Sure, it’s smarter than the old RPA bots, but calling it autonomous is generous. Today’s systems are workflows with LLMs integrated following predetermined paths that need constant human checkpoints and break the moment something unexpected happens. 2026 is when we cross the threshold into true autonomous agents. Systems that genuinely make decisions, adapt to changing conditions without predefined rules, and communicate bi-directionally with other agents and humans to negotiate outcomes. Your supply chain agent doesn’t just execute a workflow when inventory drops, it assesses the situation, evaluates multiple solutions, coordinates with procurement and finance agents and chooses the best path forward without a script. That’s the shift: from ‘follow these steps intelligently’ to ‘here’s the goal, figure it out’. Most companies aren’t remotely ready for this. The Forward Deployed Engineer becomes the hottest job in tech Palantir figured this out years ago, but 2026 is when everyone else catches up: the Forward Deployed Engineer is suddenly the most valuable person in your organisation. Not your ML researchers, not your data scientists, but the person who can make AI work inside your organisation of legacy systems. These folks understand both worlds: they can wrangle a large language model and integrate it with your 20-year‑old ERP system that nobody wants to touch. They’re worth their weight in gold because every company has the same problem. You need AI to compete, but your business runs on legacy infrastructure and software that predates the iPhone. FDEs are the only people that can bridge that gap, getting modern AI to play nice with Oracle databases and whatever ducttaped integrations your company’s been running since the early 2000s. Compensation for good FDEs is about to skyrocket, and smart companies are already building internal programs to train them because you can’t hire enough of them.
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