After navigating an increasingly complex and crowded technology landscape in 2025, enterprise leaders are shifting toward streamlined, purposeful, and trust-driven software strategies for the new year. This move reflects a deliberate effort by companies to balance the need for advanced capabilities with policies that strengthen their security posture and overall business health.
With this in mind, here are three key trends we expect to see shaping the relationship between business and technology in 2026:
Trend #1: The death of single-point tools
One-off applications and task-specific tools may deliver value in a pinch, but that value is often diminished when the solutions are adopted long-term. When teams must continually switch between isolated, single-function tools to gain essential data and context, they often face strategic blind spots, and execute workflows that are fragmented, slow, and prone to errors. As organizations strive to stay competitive in increasingly saturated markets, full organizational alignment and access to cohesive, accurate data will be essential. Single-point tools rarely deliver on this front.
In recent years, we've seen a platform approach to enterprise software emerging as a powerful alternative to single-point tools. Already, a significant majority of CISOs are investing in security platforms and users are expressing a strong preference for tools that solve multiple business challenges. This year, we expect that organizations will continue to embrace consolidated suites of integrated tools and experience a range of benefits as a result.
By moving toward integrated SaaS platforms, enterprise organizations can achieve greater visibility across sales, marketing, customer support, and other critical functions, enabling more informed decisions, and more cohesive and precise execution of processes. From a financial perspective, platform users have an opportunity to weed out tools with limited or redundant capabilities, and reduce unnecessary software spending.
The platform approach also offers significant security benefits. When multiple teams are working within one visible, trackable system, it's easier for central IT to monitor user activity, enforce privacy and security protocols, and produce complete and accurate data in response to both internal and external audits.
Trend #2: Rising demand for organizational transparency
Customers are becoming more discerning about which businesses earn their trust, making transparency more important than ever. Nearly half of buyers now say they're less likely to accept website cookies than they were three years ago, and 42% say they read consent banners always or often before sharing their data. This isn't just diligence for the sake of diligence—86% of surveyed respondents say they will only give out their personal data in instances when it is extremely clear how that data will be used.
While the rise of AI has made data usage a key area of interest for consumers, it is far from the only area where they'll be demanding transparency in 2026. Numerous recent surveys have highlighted their desire for clarity on pricing, AI usage, ESG practices, and more. Companies delivering on these fronts will likely have more success earning consumers' trust—and their long-term loyalty.
To meet the rising demand for transparency, clear policies and well-defined communication strategies are essential. Equally important is high-quality data. Clean and securely stored information supports better reporting, more effective auditing, and stronger compliance with organizational, industry, and regional regulations.
Trend #3: Increased focus on trust in AI ecosystems
Organizations were eager to leverage advanced AI capabilities in 2025, though many soon faced questions (from regulators, consumers, and employees alike) about privacy and security in the AI ecosystem. This year, we expect to see companies engaging with these questions more deeply and taking more concrete steps toward addressing AI-related concerns. As they look to the year ahead, 68% of organizational leaders are ranking AI risk governance as a top priority.
What this looks like in practice will vary depending on the size of the organization and its AI goals. However, half of surveyed executives say they'll be investing significantly in the development of governance frameworks to mitigate AI-related risks and challenges. Ideally, these frameworks will include plans for vetting AI vendors, implementing new tools safely across the organization, assigning live employees to monitor and audit AI activity, and escalating issues to an appropriate DRI.
The need for these protocols will only become more urgent as businesses begin incorporating autonomous agents into core business processes (a mere 13% of IT leaders strongly agree that their organization has the right governance frameworks in place to manage AI agents). Although AI has already delivered profound benefits in productivity and innovation across industries, more complex goals will be difficult to achieve if executives, employees, and consumers don't fully trust the technology.
Preparing to keep pace with enterprise technology trends in 2026
Whether your organization's 2026 plans involve tech stack consolidation, improved organizational transparency, or the development of new frameworks for AI privacy and security, developing a clear strategy for achieving your goals and monitoring outcomes will be essential. This is easier when your organization is working with high-quality data.
Before tackling any level of business transformation, it's helpful to assign a person or team to make sure your data is complete, de-duplicated, accurate, and up-to-date. In most cases, deploying data preparation software will make for a low-friction and efficient process. And once that process is complete, your teams will be better equipped to create actionable strategies, achieve business objectives, and track their impacts on the company as a whole.
