For the upcoming year, consulting firms, corporations and institutions are speculating what the near-term future looks like for technology. As the consulting firm Gartner suggested in a recent article, "The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends," AI and cybersecurity are the top subjects. It said these trends are particularly important for CIOs, as “technology leaders face a pivotal year,” and these “trends are not just technical shifts — they are strategic imperatives.” These same trends with a higher-education focus are also found among EDUCAUSE’s Top 10 IT Issues for 2026, which add the important aspects of collaboration, humanity and safe AI, technology literacy, and decision-making data skills.
Understanding tech trends in the consumer sector is equally important, as the innovation in devices and infrastructure will most likely make their way into colleges and universities. These consumer trends will focus on such things as the continual migration to smart technologies in an intelligent home, human-centric features in our devices, robots, drones and autonomous transportation. As author Bernard Marr wrote in Forbes last month, “Consumer technology trends aren't frivolous distractions from 'serious' enterprise concerns; they're early warning systems for coming workplace transformations. Every trend in this list represents capabilities your employees will expect, technologies your competitors may adopt and infrastructure decisions you'll need to make.”
Looking deeper into these potential tech trends, and whether they impact the corporate, education or consumer sectors, I think it may be helpful to group them into specific topic areas. Here's what I'd like to see higher-ed IT leaders do next year:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
1. Work diligently to build trust throughout campus to positively drive real AI adoption among faculty, staff and students.
3. Strive to ensure strong AI governance and that sensitive data is protected.
4. Create campus cultures that ensure humans and AI collaborate.
5. Work to promote positive ethics in AI on campuses, and collaborate with other campuses in the U.S. and abroad.
CYBERSECURITY
6. Work to ensure campuses have robust pre-emptive cybersecurity tools, and focus on a proactive rather than a reactive mindset to block cyber threats.
7. Ensure campuses embrace and enforce a zero-trust culture and infrastructure that involves continuous verification of users and devices.
8. Sustain strong cybersecurity plans and processes for cloud and edge security for campuses.
9. Maintain continuous cybersecurity training and development for all campus end users.
10. Provide constant, sustained and easily understandable communications that focus on cybersecurity awareness throughout the year.
QUANTUM COMPUTING
11. Let us hope quantum computing is utilized for the greater good, to revolutionize medicine, enhance diagnostics and accelerate innovative drug discovery.
12. Take advantage of quantum computing to improve science, business and our environment.
13. Prevent quantum computing from infiltrating current data encryption models that could potentially expose sensitive data and personal information.
CONNECTIVITY
14. Develop innovative uses for faster network connectivity with 6G technology, coupled with less latency to meet future demanding processing needs.
15. Provide widespread 6G connectivity to support IoT devices worldwide with enhanced reliability and a higher level of security.
16. Utilize 6G to enhance connectivity to bridge the gap between remote locations and underserved populations.
ROBOTICS, DRONES AND MOBILITY
17. Carefully welcome robotics as “co-bots," or collaborative robots sharing work with human workers, into our workplace and homes to make life easier, faster and safer, but not as wholesale replacements of our human interactions and collaborations.
18. Utilize drones for beneficial purposes such as precision agricultural farming, environmental monitoring, product delivery and public safety.
19. Explore how autonomous vehicles could reduce traffic congestion, increase safety, and provide mobility for humans with motor impairments and other disabilities.
STAFFING AND JOBS
20. Work to recruit, sustain and retain the very best IT staff.
21. Lead with purpose, collaboration and teamwork.
22. Provide the essential amount of training and professional development for staff growth.
23. Provide employment opportunities and the necessary training to compensate for potential job losses due to advances in technology.
A HUMAN-CENTRIC WORLD
24. Strive to prioritize human values such as empathy, critical thinking and collaboration in a technologically driven world.
25. Occasionally disconnect from the digital world, and promote the idea of re-engaging with the physical world to better understand and connect with our environment.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The connection between technology and humanity is complex and transcends all segments of our work and daily lives. While technology can certainly be both fascinating and exciting to ponder, we should use it to augment our capabilities, not merely replace them. For those who have their own topics to add to this list, I encourage you to consider and discuss them. Artificial intelligence is woven into the fabric of almost all the topics I’ve mentioned. However, it is also important for us to diligently prioritize our own human interactions, rather than merely relying on computer-to-computer digital communications. As Albert Einstein reminds us, “The human spirit must prevail over technology.” Perhaps Einstein’s words are a good reminder that while AI and hyperconnectivity can yield great productivity and efficiencies, they may also lead us to disconnect from our important human traits and capabilities. Humans have the inherent ability to consider the emotional ramifications of our decisions, while AI today typically falls short. Perhaps the most important wish for 2026 is to have a balance between artificial intelligence and the human spirit.
