Data and Cyber

Smarter hackers, riskier AI

In 2026 ransomware will continue to be disruptive. It's not just organisations that are leveraging AI to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of operations – attackers are too. To trick humans, there’ll be even more use of AI for social engineering – a common method attackers use to deliver ransomware. Not just through more realistic phishing messages, but also through bypassing controls such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) through impersonating users (e.g., cloning voices).

Ad-tech tightened up

Brands and their agencies will pull ad spend closer to the point of inventory, cutting through supply chains and striking more direct, data-collaborative deals with premium publishers to unlock richer audience insights and performance. The winners so far have been those who can evidence clean, consented data flows from source to outcome, while long tail intermediaries can feel the squeeze. Meanwhile, regulatory pressure is shifting decisively beyond cookies and websites, with UK and EU regulators zeroing in on other technologies and devices, such as Connected TV, pushing the market towards accountable, consented first party data and privacy preserving targeting and measurement.

AI risk and tech regulation

Governance under pressure: the agentic AI challenge

In 2026, we expect more organisations to move beyond AI chat-based interfaces to embedding agentic AI into core operations, with autonomous agents executing increasingly complex, multi step workflows such as consolidated data reconciliation, end to end invoice management, dynamic compliance monitoring, inventory management, proactive customer triage and more. As agent creation is democratised and accelerated by ’vibe coding’, a wave of unmanaged agents will emerge, often bypassing traditional user interfaces altogether.
Expect a spotlight on security discussions, which will shift to a new frontier as indirect prompt injection, poisoned retrieval sources, and agent to agent exploits make identity, logging, and provenance by design a key consideration. The scale and speed of deployment will also test governance and operating models, placing CTOs and boardrooms under heightened scrutiny to implement clearer guardrails, accountability frameworks, and operational oversight.

AI gets classified, and the acronyms multiply

By the end of 2026, the jargon will have multiplied: Narrow AI – task-specific systems like chatbots; AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – AI that can reason and learn like a human across multiple domains; ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) – a theoretical stage where machines surpass human intelligence entirely; and Shadow AI – the unauthorised or unmonitored use of AI tools by employees. Boards and senior stakeholders are well advised to understand these distinctions because regulation, risk, and monetisation will differ for each, and the need to ensure the governance framework is both accurate and appropriate for the AI in question.

Digital finance goes mainstream

In 2026, the UK government and the FCA will double down on facilitating innovation and exploitation of crypto assets and distributed ledger technology (DLT), as well as significant broader advances in payment services, including open banking and digital wallets. The UK’s aim is to make sure that the UK has a world-leading payments ecosystem.  The government and FCA are aligned on achieving this – legislation and consultations are moving at pace, shaping new regimes and clearing the path for adoption. And yes, this could be the year when we learn if the digital pound will be a reality.

AI sparks legal fireworks

Autonomous systems promise efficiency but raise thorny legal questions around accountability. Disputes may arise when algorithmic decisions lead to unintended outcomes or when ownership of AI-generated content is contested. Courts worldwide are grappling with whether existing frameworks can keep pace, leaving businesses exposed to uncertainty. In 2026, expect regulators to push for clearer liability standards and new international norms to address cross-border AI disputes.

Immersive consumer worlds

Keeping fans hooked in the attention economy

Sports broadcasters will fight harder for eyeballs in 2026. With increasing volumes of entertainment content vying for our attention, and many viewers (particularly younger viewers) now 'second screening', the race is on to make every match an immersive experience – or risk losing fans to the scroll.  We have already seen a rise in the deployment of in-match virtual advertising targeting specific geographic regions, and this may extend further to include ads that are personalised to specific individual viewers on streaming platforms. 
In addition, broadcasters are experimenting with alternative feeds aimed at specific demographics and audiences – for example, the NFL recently broadcasted a match from a camera angle behind the quarterback, with augmented reality overlaid graphics (to replicate the gameplay of the popular Madden video games), and has for a number of years collaborated with children's TV broadcasters to create augmented feeds, including characters from SpongeBob SquarePants and Disney movies.

Agentic AI redefines brand engagement

In 2026, your first interaction with a brand might be with an AI agent, not a human. Consumers increasingly delegate shopping and decision-making to intelligent assistants that understand their preferences and values. Winning brands aren’t just designing for people anymore – they’re designing for algorithms, ensuring that their identity and ethics are legible to software in an AI agent-focused world.

Hyper-personalised AI ads dominate

Advertising in 2026 will be about real-time personalisation. Generative AI now creates bespoke campaigns tailored to individual preferences, moods, and reacting to real-time social listening. But from 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act requires that certain AI-generated content be clearly disclosed, forcing brands to rethink how they balance transparency with a seamless user experience. The winners will be those who turn compliance into a trust-building advantage, using clear labelling to reinforce authenticity and ethical engagement.

Ads go fully immersive

With AR glasses and VR platforms becoming part of everyday life, advertising has gone fully immersive. Brands are placing interactive ads in virtual worlds and holographic campaigns in physical spaces. The race is on to measure consumer engagement and to avoid “ad fatigue” in these new environments.

People and workplace transformation

Future@Work: AI meets human capital

Our annual Future@Work Report reveals a paradox. Tech firms lead in AI deployment, combining high confidence with fast implementation. At the same time, this position leaves them more exposed than most to the volatility shaping the wider tech ecosystem. Tech employers have recognised that the biggest constraint on scaling AI isn’t tooling but human capability, prompting a decisive shift toward meaningful work, purpose-led workplace cultures, and the creation of new specialist roles. Those who are likely to thrive in 2026 are the firms that balance speed with foresight and pair technological investment with deeper investment in people.

Under attack from more angles

As organisations integrate AI into operations, the cyber-attack surface will widen. In particular, expect to see a proliferation of AI-specific attacks, especially prompt injection, where AI is tricked into bypassing security and instead follows attackers’ hidden commands. Increased use of agentic workflows will introduce more risk. Not just by external attackers looking to streamline and scale attacks, but also internally by employees using unapproved, autonomous agents ('shadow AI agents') for work purposes.

Immigration rules tighten the talent pipeline

Senior tech professionals will likely be delighted by the proposed changes to settlement in the UK, as anyone with a taxable income over £125,140 p.a. may be able to settle after three years rather than five. However, those who have any character issues, or engineers on lower salaries, could have to wait ten years or more. It’s also expected that adult dependants will need to meet taxable income and other eligibility criteria for settlement in their own right. This, along with raised skill and salary levels could make the usual ability to hire who you want, when you want, significantly harder within the tech world.

Deals, growth and automation

Big bets return in 2026

2025 was certainly volatile in most markets, including M&A and particularly on cross-border transactions.  It’s difficult to suggest that 2026 will be different, but we are beginning to see some evidence of a recovery, led by larger, strategically targeted transactions. We anticipate that this will filter down into the smaller transactions and the scale-up space.  
For many years tech has been the accepted horizontal; this is now dominated by AI and those businesses supporting that technology.  Take chips: the largely unloved technology supporting the digital ecosystem historically overlooked in favour of the devices on which they run and the services they support.  ChatGPT launched late in 2022, Nvidia’s share price tripled and is now one of the world’s most valuable companies.

As companies sharpen their focus on AI, we anticipate internal restructurings, accelerating disposals of legacy assets and creating a pipeline of spinouts with credible turnaround potential. AI remains the mot du jour at every stage of the transaction lifecycle, not only in terms of target identification and due diligence but also integration.  Verticals could be in defence, cold storage and housing servers, but frankly these are simply examples.  With private equity sitting on significant unspent capital and financing conditions improving as interest rates ease, we expect larger deals to be forthcoming.

Contracts go click

To meet company revenue growth objectives, in-house legal teams know that collaboration with business teams is key. The core contracts of a company that enable growth are no longer untouchable and confusing to stakeholders – they have been redrafted and designed to ensure that sales, procurement, marketing and other business teams can understand and engage with them. Manual population of standard contracts is also a thing of the past – core contracts have been automated so that business teams can efficiently complete them within safe guardrails and without legal involvement. This streamlined contracting process will continue to save time for in-house legal teams and empower business teams to move faster with their deals.

RaaS becomes the startup’s scale engine

In 2026, cash conscious start-up’s and midsized innovators will turn to Robotics as a Service (Raas) to scale operations without heavy investment or long deployment cycles. They gain access to automation integrated with cloud-based control and predictive maintenance, all through a single subscription model. The winners are those that secure RaaS on smart terms, tying fees to performance, locking in uptime, and ring fencing data and IP, while avoiding being locked into immature tech.

Frontier Technologies

Robotaxis hit the road

Autonomous vehicles may finally shift from concept to curb in 2026, with the launch of the first commercial pilots of fully autonomous passenger services on UK public roads . This fast-tracked deployment of 'robotaxis' is enabled by the Automated Vehicles Act 2024 and aims to position the UK as a global leader in AV technology. The rest of the year will see rapidly developing regulation under the Act in preparation for full implementation in 2027, with the focus firmly on safety and accessibility, and which is set to generate an opportunity that the Government estimates to be worth up to £42 billion by 2035.

Neurotechnology

In 2026, neurotech will cross from moonshot to market, propelled by clearer regulatory pathways and increased investment. This tech uses information taken directly from the brain to predict, diagnose and treat complex physical and mental illnesses, as well as understanding emotions, preferences and cognition. Successful use cases range from the more familiar cochlear implants for hearing restoration to deep brain stimulation for movement disorders and brain-computer interfaces (BCI) for paralysis, using thought to control prosthetic limbs or achieving near-natural conversational speed by decoding speech brain signals into sentences in real time. Neurodata is highly sensitive in nature and has attracted regulatory scrutiny around the world, as well as interest from innovators keen to unlock its potential. Strong data governance will be essential for anyone looking to develop this tech in this field.

Quantum’s long game

Tech industry worries about a quantum computing business bubble will abate, likely more quickly than concerns about AI. By the end of 2025, analysts were pointing to comparable dangers in the quantum and AI sectors, and modest revenue projections by start-ups with multibillion-dollar valuations. However, cool heads should prevail to help distinguish AI companies from quantum ventures as a very different type of computing. Although quantum may not get through hoops like scalability, qubit stability, error resolution, deployment and sheer cost any time soon (Google says five years for practical real-world applications, Nvidia says at least twenty), quantum’s potential as the next transformational development in computational power is set to attract investor attention.

Copyright gets complicated

AI is rewriting the rules of IP. In 2026, copyright compliance will become more of a moving target as courts wrestle with liability for AI training and output ownership. Despite the eagerly anticipated decision in Getty v Stability AI (see our analysis here), substantial uncertainty remains around how IP liability applies to both AI training and AI-generated content. Developers may try to dodge risk by hosting models offshore and tightening filters. Meanwhile, the UK’s Data (Use and Access) Act is set to provide some clarity this spring as to whether computer-generated works deserve protection or whether a human author is a copyright prerequisite. Watch this space!

From concrete to code

The growth of AI-led predictive maintenance

With the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards regulations requiring landlords to achieve a minimum Energy Performance Certificate rating before letting or continuing to let their buildings, the expected standards for landlords set at EPC “C” in 2027 and EPC “B” by 2030, we expect to see landlords and property managers leaning on predictive maintenance and AI energy management to cut opex, improve RoI and meet green mandates.

Sustainability and AI will therefore shift from optional add-ons to core drivers of real estate value. Smart buildings powered by IoT, predictive maintenance and AI energy management will become standard, cutting costs and meeting regulatory demands while strengthening asset performance.  At the same time, landlords and investors will move beyond pilots to full-scale AI adoption, using automation and revenue intelligence to streamline workflows and unlock efficiency. We expect corporate real estate providers to follow the likes of Turner & Townsend, who recently launched a digital project management tool - The Hive: Digital Marketplace. The Hive exemplifies this shift, offering a single source for project data, real-time benchmarking, and integrated tools that improve transparency, accuracy, and strategic planning.

Trading on data, not just deeds

In 2026, the most valuable square metres in UK real estate won’t just be prime floorspace; they’ll be buildings with verifiable, compliant data—digital twins that carry a live “golden thread” of safety, energy, and lifecycle information. As the Building Safety regime tightens, developers and owners will be forced to prove safety digitally, not just in handover packs. We expect agreements for leaseto contain warranties, completion definitions, and rent review clauses to hardwire information obligations (such as structured data drops) alongside traditional construction deliverables. Occupiers who can evidence compliance cleanly will see faster gateway approvals and smoother transactions.

We hope you enjoyed this year’s Tech Predictions. We wish you a wonderful 2026!