Authored by Bashar Jabban

Five Predictions That Matter (2026–2030) 

• Agentic AI (with guardrails): Autonomous, tool-using agents lift productivity across operations but create a new risk class: identity sprawl, tool misuse, and prompt injection. Treat agents like interns with least privilege, narrow scopes, expiring credentials, mandatory human-in-the-loop, and incident playbooks. 
• Machine customers: Non-human buyers—software agents—begin placing orders, requesting quotes, and negotiating micro-contracts in B2B niches. Treat this as a watch/prepare vector: update pricing rules, APIs, identity and fraud controls. 
• The intelligent core: ERP and operations modernize around AI platforms. Data and ML are treated as products with clear ownership, quality SLOs, lifecycle governance, and standardized evaluation. 
• Compute and sustainability constraints: Capex, energy, and location (data residency, renewables availability) shape strategy. Green workload placement and cost/energy observability become table stakes in FinOps. 
• Deep-tech spillovers at the horizon: Quantum readiness for crypto-agility, robotics at the edge, and provenance tooling for trust will progressively impact regulated sectors. Keep them as horizon items—plan, don’t over-promise. 

What Leaders Must Prepare Now 

• Build an AI powered platform — Establish governed data, model ops, evaluation pipelines, safety controls, and cost/energy observability. Treat platforms and data products as products. 
• Define agentic AI guardrails — Policies, permissioning, audit logs, red-teaming, fallback and kill-switch patterns. Make human-in-the-loop explicit. 
• Modernize the core — Modular ERP, event streams, clean APIs, and telemetry-by-design to host AI safely at scale. 
• Green digital by design — Measure energy per workload/model, optimize placement (cloud/edge/region), include energy and circularity in procurement and hardware refresh. 
• Post-quantum path — Inventory cryptography, classify crown-jewel systems, and plan migration to PQC where it matters. 
• Upskill at scale — AI/product/data literacy for all; deepen critical roles such as AI Product Owner, Data Steward, ML Engineer, and AI Safety Lead. 

Future Workforce Development—The human edge 

• AI & Data Literacy (baseline): mandatory foundations across all functions; short, role-aware paths. 
• Role Cards: AI Product Owner, Data Steward, ML Engineer, AI Safety Lead — with clear accountabilities and KPIs. 
• Governance in People Ops: incentives tied to adoption quality, data hygiene, and risk controls (not just output volume). 
• Skills ↔ Ops Loop: model evaluations → skill gaps → updated SOPs & training; review every 90 days. 
• Manager Playbooks: “when to approve, when to escalate” for agentic workflows; keep humans in-the-loop by design. 

Agentic AI Governance—In Practice 

• Treat agents like interns: least privilege, narrow scopes, expiring credentials. 
• Manage non-human identity (NHI): rotate secrets, contain memory, and track data lineage. 
• Defend against prompt injection: sanitize tool outputs; apply allow-lists/deny-lists; validate actions. 
• Runtime monitoring: record tool calls; anomaly detection on actions and costs. 
• Human-in-the-loop and escalation: define when a human must approve; provide an emergency stop (kill-switch). 
• Incident playbooks: prepare for data leakage, model misuse, and third-party tool compromise. 
• Auditability: durable logs, reproducible prompts, and evaluation traces for compliance. 

Emerging Tech Radar  

Micro-Scenarios: 2026 / 2028 / 2030

Leader Signals

• Heineken: Strategy to Execution: Anchored EverGreen strategy with data-and-AI as an enterprise capability; investing in digitally connected brewing and sustainability to future‑proof operations.
• Volvo Cars: Software‑Defined, AI‑First: Building a software‑defined vehicle stack with AI supercomputing and virtual‑world testing to accelerate safety innovation and OTA updates.
• Schneider Electric: Green IT & AI‑Ready Capacity: Operationalizing EcoStruxure/DCIM and AI‑optimized designs (including advanced cooling) to balance AI growth with energy efficiency and resilience.

Key Takeaways

• Alignment-first remains the winning order: Alignment → Platform → People → Guardrails → Scale.
• Autonomy without governance increases risk; autonomy with guardrails increases velocity and resilience.
• Green digital is not a side quest—it is the constraint set for the next wave of scale.

Conclusion

Resources & Further Reading 

• Gartner — Top Strategic Technology Trends 2025
• McKinsey — Tech Trends 2025 / Building AI-enabled organizations
• Deloitte — Tech Trends 2025
• Accenture — Technology Vision 2025