There has been a definitive shift in the digital landscape. Today, autonomous intelligence – not simply technology adoption – is driving competitive advantage.
This is the headline finding from HCLSoftware’s Tech Trends 2026 report, which polled 173 enterprise leaders over eight months.
Key takeaways from the study include:
- AI agents and autonomous systems show the strongest global pull. Seventy-six percent of leaders prioritise these, with 81% of enterprises reporting live or pilot initiatives. Governance remains the ‘missing link’ for 25%.
- Eighty-four percent expect AI-accelerated Low-Code/No-Code to reach full scale within 18 months, while ‘Service-as-Software (SaS) is rapidly disrupting traditional SaaS.
- Ethics and infrastructure are moving from IT silos to the boardroom. Seventy-nine percent confirm Responsible AI frameworks are active, 88% are assessing post-quantum cryptography readiness, and 60% anticipate 6G readiness within three years.
As AI evolves from assistants to autonomous agents, systems can initiate, execute, and complete work end-to-end – shifting enterprises into a ‘self-driving’ operating model. Digital sovereignty becomes a strategic imperative: the control layer enabling global scale while protecting compliance, data integrity, and stakeholder trust.
Organisations building governance-by-design will scale autonomy with confidence; those that don’t risk fragmented operations and eroding accountability.
HCLSoftware’s Tech Trends 2026 argues that the core challenge is not deploying autonomy, but designing it—integrated across experience, data, and operations. So autonomy becomes a reliable system property rather than disconnected features.
“Enterprises will be defined by what technology decides and governs on their behalf. The next 24 to 36 months are for leaders who can establish autonomous, resilient, and sovereign operating models,” says Kalyan Kumar, chief product officer at HCLSoftware. “As AI agents compress decision cycles and rewrite the enterprise stack, governance-by-design is as critical as innovation-by-design.”
The report’s 2030 Trend Matrix underscores how today’s technologies are converging into tomorrow’s industry-shaping plays — accelerating the shift from isolated pilots to integrated systems and enterprise-scale operating models.
The signal for leaders is to build governance, talent and architectural foundations now so autonomy, orchestration, and speed can scale without losing control or trust.