What technology leaders need to know to prove value in 2026

I've participated in numerous technology planning sessions over the past few months with clients and within Unisys. We're all in different industries, geographies and challenges. But everyone is focused on the same thing: return on investment.

Boards want evidence. Finance teams want numbers. Technology leaders need to demonstrate value, not describe potential.

This pressure shows up across every technology decision – AI investments, workforce planning, security infrastructure and cloud strategy. The tolerance for "we're experimenting" or "we're building toward" has ended. Leaders need to show results.

Our research for the 2026 IT Insights Report supports this perspective. We identified 10 specific trends shaping enterprise decisions this year. The through-line connecting all of them: 2026 is when technology strategy moves from aspiration to execution.

What execution looks like

Across the 10 insights in the report, this plays out in four key areas:

• AI deployment: Organizations are transitioning from broad experimentation to focused applications with clear ROI, including knowledge assistants, coding agents, and service operations tools. The wins come from targeted deployments that match existing workflows, rather than transformational projects.
• Workforce strategy: AI is reshaping roles without mass layoffs. Productivity gains get redirected toward quality improvements and growth initiatives. Entry-level coding positions are shrinking, but demand is growing for security engineering, data engineering, and platform teams. The organizations handling this well pair people with AI tools rather than viewing technology as a replacement.
• Cybersecurity: The focus has shifted from breach prevention to recovery speed. Leading organizations invest as much in resilience - immutable backups, rehearsed failovers, clean-room rebuilds - as they do in defensive tools. They're also planning for post-quantum cryptography and AI-enhanced attacks now, not later.
• Cloud decisions: Wholesale migration is over. Organizations evaluate each workload based on where it performs best. Some applications belong in private clouds. Regulated data needs sovereign zones. Certain workloads should be moved back from the public cloud when the economics make sense.

What leaders need to do differently

Moving from aspiration to execution changes how you plan, measure, and allocate resources.

How you plan

You can't wait years to show value, but you also can't rush deployment and sacrifice quality. Focused projects with clear outcomes, typically within 90-180 days, work best. Build pipelines of initiatives that compound over time. And finance leaders need to understand why strategic investments deliver better returns than marginal cost cuts. This involves building business cases centered on competitive positioning, customer retention, and revenue growth, alongside effective expense management.

How you measure

You need balanced scorecards that measure both efficiency and effectiveness. The time to resolution becomes less important than the accuracy of the resolution. Developer velocity becomes less important than code quality. Customer acquisition costs become less important than customer lifetime value. Show how recovery speed affects customer trust. How quality improvements reduce rework. How workforce capability drives innovation. Measuring only cost reduction misses half the story.

How you allocate resources

You can't fund everything. Focused execution means making hard choices about where to invest for competitive advantage versus where to optimize for cost. Protect strategic projects from quarterly budget pressures while eliminating experiments that aren't showing traction.

Questions to ask your teams right now

As you map out technology priorities for 2026, here’s what these questions in five key areas can help you do:

1. Move AI from pilots to production
• Which pilots have demonstrated clear value and are ready for production deployment?
• Do we have the data quality and change management capabilities to scale them?
• How are we measuring value beyond simple cost reduction?
2. Build capability rather than displace workers
• How are we preparing people to work alongside AI?
• Are we building capability or planning for displacement?
• What does our reskilling strategy look like?
3. Focus on cybersecurity resilience
• Can we recover critical systems within 24 hours of a major incident?
• Do we have immutable backups and rehearsed failover procedures?
• What's our post-quantum cryptography roadmap?
4. Choose strategic cloud workload placement
• Are we still migrating workloads based on mandates, or making decisions based on economics and requirements?
• Where do we need sovereign zones?
• Which applications might perform better in a private cloud?
5. Execute in a way that proves value
• What metrics prove our technology investments are delivering business value?
• How fast can we move from pilot to production?
• Which experiments should we stop funding?

These are the conversations that will determine whether your technology strategy delivers a competitive advantage or becomes another budget line that's hard to justify.

Moving forward

Our 2026 IT Insights Report offers tactical strategies for key technology decisions organizations will face this year. Download the report to see all 10 insights and how they connect to your priorities. If you would like to explore how these insights can be applied to your organization, please reach out. We're partnering with technology leaders on these decisions every day.