BLUE BELL, PA — After years of hype, pilot programs and lofty expectations, artificial intelligence is poised to prove its real business value in 2026, according to a new technology outlook released by Unisys.
Unisys (NYSE: UIS) has published its annual Top IT Insights for 2026 report, identifying 10 trends that the company says will define the next phase of enterprise technology, from how AI is deployed and measured to how organizations protect data and recover from cyberattacks.
“In 2025 we saw a lot of AI hype, with conflicting reports about what the technology can deliver, leaving business leaders asking, ‘what’s next?’ and ‘when will we start seeing results?’” said Mike Thomson, chief executive officer and president of Unisys. “In 2026, we are going to see more functional deployments of AI, a focus on quality rather than cost-cutting, and the emergence of AI applications that will deliver repeatable, ROI-driven results.”
The report forecasts that most AI adoption will take the form of targeted, task-based tools embedded into existing workflows rather than massive, disruptive transformation projects. These smaller deployments rely on cleaner, more focused data sets, making them easier to manage, cheaper to run and quicker to generate measurable returns.
Unisys said three AI applications are expected to break through as standard, high-impact tools across industries: employee and customer chatbots, AI-powered coding agents and AI-driven service assistants. Once viewed as experimental, these technologies are now being packaged into products that can be rapidly deployed and evaluated against clear performance metrics.
The company also predicts a shift in how organizations judge AI investments. Early programs were often justified by labor cost savings, but in 2026 companies will increasingly measure success by improvements in quality, decision accuracy and consistency — factors Unisys says ultimately drive revenue growth and stronger profit margins.
Despite fears of automation-driven job losses, the report says mass layoffs are unlikely. Instead, businesses are expected to use AI productivity gains to modernize systems, reduce backlogs and improve customer experience. At the same time, routine coding work will increasingly be automated, shrinking demand for entry-level programming roles.
On cybersecurity, Unisys warned that AI will accelerate both attacks and defenses. Criminals are expected to deploy AI for more sophisticated phishing schemes, deepfake fraud and voice spoofing, while security teams will use the technology to detect anomalies, hunt threats and automate incident response. As breaches become more common, organizations will be judged less by whether they are hacked and more by how quickly they can restore operations.
That shift is pushing companies to invest heavily in recovery and resilience, including offline backups, clean-room rebuilds and prearranged crisis response plans that can reduce downtime and protect customer trust.
The report also highlights the growing urgency of preparing for quantum computing. Unisys said malicious actors are already collecting encrypted data in anticipation of future quantum decryption, making post-quantum cryptography strategies a priority for protecting long-term sensitive information.
Data sovereignty is expected to reshape cloud computing as well. Governments and regulators increasingly require that data, encryption keys and even computing resources stay within national borders, driving the rise of regional and national cloud environments tailored to compliance needs.
Unisys said the era of moving everything to the cloud is effectively over. Large enterprises now operate hybrid systems and will focus on placing workloads where they make the most sense — private clouds for predictable operations, sovereign clouds for regulated data and public clouds where flexibility is needed.
Together, the 10 trends paint a picture of 2026 as a year when digital transformation becomes less about buzzwords and more about disciplined execution, with AI, cybersecurity and cloud strategy converging into a more pragmatic, results-driven phase of enterprise technology.
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