ServiceNow’s EMEA president Cathy Mauzaize argues that agile leadership is needed to ensure companies can take full advantage of AI.
If the past few years were about understanding what AI could do, 2026 is about seeing what happens when it becomes inseparable from how we live and work.
The focus in the coming months will be on embedding AI into the operating fabric of business – reshaping industries, reimagining customer experiences and redefining how people work.
Here are the four trends that I believe will define 2026.
Multimodal will become the new natural
We’ve entered a new era of work without boundaries, where the tools adapt to the way people think, speak and create.
The modern enterprise UI is multimodal by design. IDC predicts that by 2028, 80pc of enterprise AI systems will be capable of processing multiple types of input. While the London School of Economics recently predicted that Generation Alphas won’t be communicating with their managers by email by the time they enter the workforce.
While I don’t know that email is ready to go away just yet, communication – with each other and with AI – is definitely not restricted to text. Voice, image, clicks, text and video can coexist in a single, intelligent workspace where every interaction feels natural, fluid and intuitive. Instead of switching between disconnected apps, employees engage through one unified experience that understands context and intent.
This is already transforming how work gets done. Teams can brief projects through conversation while AI captures notes, updates documents and builds visuals in real time. Service agents move seamlessly between chat and voice, while AI anticipates next steps and retrieves data instantly. Analysts can ask questions aloud, then explore insights visually, all in the same place.
Governance versus speed will define leadership
As AI becomes core to how organisations operate, leaders will face a growing challenge: how to maintain trust without slowing down innovation. Across EMEA, this balance between governance and speed is becoming the defining measure of AI maturity.
The EU AI Act marks a turning point that moves regulation from theory to practice. But rules alone won’t create responsible AI. The real test will be how organisations translate compliance into everyday practice, embedding accountability and transparency into workflows, data and decisions.
The University of Oxford’s Annual AI Governance Report 2025 found that leading organisations are embedding governance directly into workflows, not treating it as a compliance exercise. In doing so, they’re maintaining innovation speed while reducing AI-related risk.
The leaders who succeed will treat governance not as a brake, but as an engine of trust and resilience. They’ll build cultures where transparency, explainability and ethical use are built in, not bolted on. They’ll use clarity to move faster, not slower. Doing this will require a central, single-platform lens of large language models (LLMs), AI agents and workflows.
This new era will demand both discipline and agility. AI must remain fast enough to drive innovation, yet be governed tightly enough to earn trust. The leaders who get this balance right will define the next phase of growth, proving that responsible AI and rapid progress can coexist.
CIOs to lead on agentic AI
As AI becomes more embedded, 2026 will mark the rise of agentic platforms – networks of intelligence that blend human and machine work to drive speed, accuracy and innovation. These agents will increasingly operate alongside people, managing workflows and simplifying complexity – not to replace human judgment, but to strengthen it.
Yet, as this new layer of work evolves, so does a new layer of risk. The challenge will no longer be shadow IT, but shadow AI – models and agents developed outside governance frameworks. This creates vulnerabilities for compliance, privacy and security. Although regulations are evolving across regions, innovation is already moving faster than policy. CIOs and boards will need to anticipate, not react, staying one step ahead of regulatory change to avoid future disruptions. Agility will be the differentiator.
The leaders who succeed will do so by adopting flexible, adaptive platform architectures, able to connect data, governance and decision logic by design.
AI for work will be blended, not siloed in apps
In 2026, AI will no longer sit beside work, it will flow through it. What began as an extra layer of efficiency has evolved into operational intelligence, helping organisations move faster, make better decisions and focus on what matters most.
This evolution isn’t about moving from ChatGPT on your phone to your enterprise desktop. It’s about learning to work in a blended environment, where AI is seamlessly integrated into daily tasks. This is dependent on identifying the right AI practice for each specific use case; and orchestrating your agents for each task to work together for real business outcomes, supported by the industry, context and personalised knowledge of your work.
For individuals, this shift is deeply personal. The most effective employees will be those who can work fluently with AI – managing their own agents, prompting effectively and knowing when to trust, question or redirect automated output. Many organisations are already recognising this by making AI proficiency part of performance and evaluation metrics.
For the new generation entering the workforce, this won’t feel new; it will feel natural. They will expect to collaborate with intelligent systems as part of how work gets done.
For organisations, success will depend on how seamlessly they enable this human-AI partnership – not as a tool to adopt, but as an environment to master.
Cathy Mauzaize is president of the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region at ServiceNow, with responsibility for driving the growth strategy. She previously held senior leadership roles across companies including Microsoft, SAP, Dell, PwC, and Hewlett Packard.
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