IT has always been an industry geared towards change. Its whole premise rests on technological advancements and always staying one step ahead. That need to innovate, however, has ramped up very quickly over the last five years.
First came the pivot to remote-based work, accelerating an already-growing reliance on cloud-based tech. Then, widespread adoption of AI and automation. Now, the conversation is turning to value, strategy, and governance.
For IT leaders, staying on top of these developments is essential to keeping your organisation secure and future-proofed, while making sure your team is equipped for what’s coming next. Here are the key industry shifts you need on your radar in 2026 and beyond.
1. Value: from support desk to strategic partner
For a long time, IT’s contribution to an organisation was seen as a support desk. Whether closing tickets, maintaining systems, fixing bugs, or simply keeping things working, the department was the platform for making things run, or sorting things that had broken.
The landscape has changed, though, and today IT sits much closer to the centre of business strategy. Decisions around AI, automation, data, cybersecurity, and digital products can directly impact the whole organisation, along with its customers, and IT teams are increasingly influencing business outcomes rather than simply supporting them. For IT leaders, this brings the function closer to an internal consultancy role too, advising the business on where tech can create the most value.
That calls for a broader set of skills alongside more traditional IT expertise. Technical upskilling remains essential, but business acumen, communication, stakeholder management, and commercial awareness are becoming just as valuable to the role.
The result is an IT function measured just as much on impact as reliability, with a direct hand in the business outcomes that matter most.
How to action:
- Build commercial fluency alongside technical development
- Involve IT in business planning from the start
- Give IT leaders regular practice presenting to non-technical stakeholders and boards
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2. AI: from rollout to results
It’s extremely likely AI is already embedded and being used widely across your organisation. The last few years were about getting it in; now, the focus is proving its value.
That’s where a lot of organisations are getting stuck. A recent survey of Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 company leaders, conducted by Plug and Play, found 74% of respondents have AI in production, but half don’t consistently measure its ROI. Often, that’s because tracking sits with whichever team happened to run the pilot, if it exists at all.
IT is well placed to fix that by building the shared logging, integration, and reporting infrastructure that lets teams measure and prove their own results. IT doesn’t need to own every AI outcome, but rather give the organisation visibility and consistency to understand what’s really driving value.
How to action:
- Roll out shared AI logging and reporting infrastructure teams can use
- Review pilots on a set schedule: scale, adapt, or shut down
- Track what didn’t work as closely as what did – the lessons are often just as valuable
3. Governance: from policy to practice
As AI embeds deeper into everyday work, the risk grows with it, and that’s something IT teams need to plan for. This development is significant enough that the latest iteration of the ITIL® framework, (Version 5), has introduced a standalone AI Governance extension module, a sign of how fundamental it’s become to the way IT teams are expected to operate.
Having AI policies in place is the baseline for any responsible IT team, but governance now needs to cover far more than that. It shouldn’t be a document people read once and file away, but something they’re actively applying, day to day, in the decisions they’re making, because no policy can cover every possible situation that may come up. That’s what governance needs to account for now: developing the judgement to apply it to the use case in front of you, with clear protocols in place for when that judgement isn’t enough on its own.
How to action:
- Bring governance into project planning from the outset
- Train people to reason through AI edge cases and apply judgement
- Set a clear escalation path for decisions that fall outside existing guidance, with clear owners in each area
👉 Read next: ITIL 4 vs ITIL (Version 5) – what’s changed?
4. Cybersecurity: from error to agents
Security has always been a top priority for tech teams, but advancements in cyber attacks are creating a different demand for how to safeguard your organisation. Data from the UK government’s 2025/2026 Cyber Security Breaches Survey revealed that 43% of businesses and 28% of charities experienced a breach or attack in the past year. It’s a significant proportion, and though the figure remained fairly steady year on year, the nature of attacks themselves keep evolving.
AI agents are adding a new layer of risk. Unlike a person clicking a bad link, an agent can act with real access and permissions, working across systems with far less oversight than traditional software. Security professionals have taken notice: a recent Dark Reading readership poll found 48% predict that agentic AI will be the “top attack vector for the year”. And, rather worryingly, the predictions are playing out in practice, too, with Anthropic revealing that in a recent security test, Claude hacked into the systems of three organisations on its own.
For IT teams, that widens the scope of what needs watching, extending beyond people and endpoints to every agent given the keys to act on the business’s behalf.
How to action:
- Review what permissions any AI agent needs, and strip back anything beyond that
- Build monitoring for agent activity into existing security processes, not as an afterthought
- Keep a clear log of which agents are live, what they can access, and who owns them
Get fresh insights from an ITIL expert
If this has got you thinking about where your IT function is headed, we’re running a free webinar with Adam Griffith, an ITIL Senior Architect:
From ticket closer to strategic partner: How the role of IT is changing in 2026
Date: September 3rd, 2026
Time: 2:30pm GMT
