Professionals from a range of global organisations discuss the tech trends they believe are most likely to impact the year ahead.
Throughout 2025 the technology landscape grew and evolved as a diverse array of trends, from artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), to advanced cloud strategies and increased attention to governance, left a mark on the industry and its key players.
“Artificial intelligence was everywhere last year with increasingly impressive large language models from multiple companies being pushed out every couple of weeks,” explained Laura McFarland, a senior solution architect at Liberty IT.
“The lasting effect is that AI is not going away and it will be part of all our lives, directly as a software community and indirectly in many aspects of everyone’s lifestyle, from semi-autonomous cars to the humble electronic toothbrush.”
Mairead Scanlon, the vice-president of technology management for Fidelity Investments Ireland, is also of the opinion that 2025 is going to be remembered as the year that AI went mainstream, signalling what she called “one of the fastest technology uptake cycles in history”.
But with this came challenges, she noted, particularly in relation to cybersecurity as generative AI (GenAI) “increased the number and sophistication of cyberattacks, making defence strategies increasingly complex” – a trend she expects will amplify over time as she predicts that this year “we will see both attackers and defenders leveraging AI, keeping cybersecurity at the top of the priority list for most organisations”.
“Cybersecurity became a board-level priority,” agreed Declan Leonard, the director of technology architecture for BearingPoint Ireland.
“The legacy of 2025 is structural. AI is now a core capability, cloud platforms underpin national and enterprise infrastructure, and security-by-design is a universal standard.” He found however, that ethical and governance concerns “tempered” the full roll-out of agentic AI as organisations waited for further regulatory clarity.
Lean and green skills
Leonard expects that 2026 will bring a new era for AI, security and governance, particularly in the realm of agentic AI, as Ireland’s organisations start to move beyond adoption and instead turn their focus to measurable business outcomes, trust and scalability.
He said: “Agentic AI will begin to emerge in tightly controlled environments, automating complex workflows while operating under robust governance and risk controls. Cloud and edge integration will continue to deepen, driving greater efficiency and performance but increasing complexity across orchestration, security and operational resilience.
“Organisations that successfully balance rapid innovation with strong governance, security and talent development will be best positioned to lead in Ireland’s evolving digital economy.”
For Gerard Gielty, an associate director of technology at Accenture Ireland, skill development – especially in the area of AI expertise – was a core focus for 2025 and he expects that significant retraining and upskilling will be required by 2027, as organisations find themselves underprepared.
There are two main developments on the horizon, he said, in AI readiness and advancements in electric vehicle (EV) battery production.
“2026 will mark a turning point. Companies will move from experimentation to readiness, driven by strong digital foundations, value-focused use cases and tailored responsible AI frameworks,” he said. He also said there will be “encouraging advancements in EV battery technology, from lithium-ion to solid-state batteries”.
This is a viewpoint shared by Scanlon and Leonard, who believe that tech advancements have the potential to positively impact research into green energy. Scanlon said: “With large AI models proving costly and as energy costs trend upwards, AI could well become a catalyst for innovation in green energy solutions.”
With Leonard noting that there will “be a heightened focus on the environmental impact of IT, particularly data centres, with increased scrutiny of energy consumption, grid sustainability and the transition to renewable energy sources.”
Smart upskilling
For Stephanus Meiring, the managing director at Rent the Runway’s Galway facility, while AI can make it easier to create and grow, he has learned from experience that “it does not always arrive at the most straightforward or simplest solution”.
He explained that there is always the risk of overcomplicating matters, a factor that is often reflected in AI disclaimers.
“As AI enables the rapid creation of increasingly complex and potentially incorrect artefacts, whether code, documents, or instructions, the real challenge becomes how we verify truth, accuracy, correctness, and simplicity. These concerns will increasingly come to the forefront and grow in importance. Validation and verification will be critical capabilities”, said Meiring.
Andrew Keogh, the director of product engineering at Workhuman, believes that agentic AI is likely to follow the same adoption curve we saw with coding assistants in 2025, whereby tools such as “Claude Code and GitHub Copilot became integral to engineering practice”.
Keogh said: “For 2026, the focus will be on how humans and AI work together to deliver better outcomes. As AI systems become more autonomous, human involvement in day-to-day tasks (human-in-the-loop) will decrease, while focus will shift toward supervising and guiding workflows (human-on-the-loop).”
He explained that as autonomy develops, human employees will be vital as they set intent, define context, establish constraints and intervene when workflows fail.
“As practices mature, structured training and knowledge-sharing frameworks will be increasingly important to ensure teams can work effectively alongside these advanced systems.”
Looking to the future, Meiring’s feelings are similar to that of all of the experts who shared their viewpoints, in that he believes AI adoption and all that it encompasses is one of the most prevailing trends and will have the most impact in 2026 – but perhaps with a stronger degree of discipline than previously seen.
He said: “Platform engineering will play a growing role in providing guardrails for AI-generated outputs, preventing duplication and enforcing standards for reliability and correctness. Trends such as agentic systems and DevOps to MLOps convergence will accelerate, but success will depend on architectural restraint and measurable business value.
“The organisations that succeed will be those that combine AI capability with strong verification practices, operational clarity and a relentless focus on simplicity.”
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