Neural Dispatch: Pilots to Infrastructure, what AI leaders expect in 2026
The biggest AI developments, decoded. 31 December 2025.
I’m sure you have been wondering this too. What are the big expectations from AI in 2026? Rather than make wild guesses, flimsy assumptions and simply confuse ourselves, I spoke with a number of Tech and AI executives, in terms of how they see the space evolving in the next 12 months that lie ahead of us as an open road waiting to be discovered. They are closely tracking utility, infrastructure, enterprise scope, voice as an AI driver, cybersecurity and more. Their words…
India embarks on mission to deliver technology’s impact
“As we move towards 2026, India’s technology sector is entering a phase where scale, accountability, and outcomes matter more than momentum alone.
“The industry has built strong foundations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity, and digital platforms, supported by deep talent and a mature ecosystem of startups, GCCs, and global enterprises. The next chapter is about converting capability into sustained business and societal impact.
“AI adoption is becoming sharper and more grounded in real use cases. Enterprises are asking clearer questions around productivity, resilience, and trust. They expect technology to integrate seamlessly into core processes, not sit at the edges as experimentation. This shift places responsibility on the industry to design solutions that are secure, explainable, and aligned with long-term value creation.
“India is well positioned to lead this phase. Our strength lies in combining engineering depth with domain understanding and scale execution. As an industry, success in 2026 will depend on how well we collaborate across ecosystems, invest in skills, and apply technology with purpose. The opportunity ahead is significant, to strengthen enterprises, empower people, and reinforce India’s role as a trusted global technology partner.” — Sindhu Gangadharan, MD, SAP Labs India, Head of Customer Innovation Services, SAP and Chairperson, Nasscom
India’s AI data-centre infrastructure
“2025 marked a turning point for India’s data-centre and digital infrastructure landscape. AI-led workloads have redefined facility design, shifting from traditional IT to GPU-intensive inference and real-time analytics that demand higher power density, advanced cooling, and workload-aware operations.
“As we move into 2026, the priorities are shifting. Energy and efficiency are becoming strategic differentiators. Power availability, sustainable sourcing, thermal management will increasingly determine where investments flow and who gets the competitive advantage.
“Talent evolution is equally critical—the industry now needs professionals who can bridge physical infrastructure with digital intelligence, understanding compute density, cooling, energy optimisation, and workload orchestration as one integrated system rather than isolated domains.” — Suresh Rathod, President, Colocation, CtrlS Datacenters
AI moves beyond experimentation
“As we look ahead to 2026, AI moves beyond experimentation and enters a phase of maturity. The upcoming year will see AI become the backbone of enterprise architecture, reshape software lifecycle development, and redefine cloud consumption. At the same time, enterprise systems are undergoing a fundamental shift toward intelligent operations, while tech sovereignty emerges as a strategic priority, driving organisations to build resilient interdependence.” — Pascal Brier, Chief Innovation Officer at Capgemini and Member of the Group Executive Committee.
Conversational AI agents
“The past year marked a clear inflection point for voice technology, with Voice AI moving beyond experimentation into real-world adoption across creative workflows and enterprise use cases from customer engagement and multilingual content to next-generation agent experiences. At ElevenLabs, this shift is reflected in the rapid growth of Voice Actor Marketplace, which now supports more than 10,000 voices globally and connects creators and enterprises with diverse, licensed, high-quality AI voice talent.
“Looking ahead to 2026, the focus is shifting from standalone voice models to conversational agents that can create, understand, and act across audio, video, images, and text within a single, continuous experience.
“Voice has already emerged as a natural interface for human-computer interaction, and the next phase will be defined by agents that understand context, access knowledge, integrate with real systems, and respond in ways that feel timely and intuitive. As voice quality continues to converge, differentiation will increasingly come from delivering seamless creation and frictionless interaction that make these models genuinely usable in real workflows.” — Carles Reina, GTM, ElevenLabs
AI rewires how cyberattacks work
“In 2026, AI will shift from an attacker’s ‘helper’ to an autonomous force multiplier, fundamentally rewiring how cyberattacks work. The past year was filled with AI’s contributions to basic malicious activities like social engineering, deepfakes, business email compromise and more. While this will continue as a baseline for threat actors, 2026 will be the year of real AI attacks. Threat actors will predominantly shift to launch malicious campaigns through vibe coding—exacerbating the speed and delivery of execution. They will increasingly use AI as a teacher or trainer to help them do reconnaissance, but not because they don’t know how to launch a low-level attack.
“This reconnaissance will enable them to gather critical information about a target, and create the specialised tools needed for scanning and exploitation. This attacker-AI synergy will slash learning time and propel the automated construction of hyper-scale cyber operations to new heights. — Grant Bourzikas - CSO, Cloudflare
Cybersecurity threats, and laws
“The Indian cybersecurity ecosystem is transforming rapidly with Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) evolving into highly targeted, stealth-driven campaigns powered by AI automation and sophisticated social engineering. Additionally, stricter enforcement of cyber laws, including DPDPA, will push organisations in 2026 to move beyond checkbox compliance toward holistic security strategies.
“Following the recent movement towards strategic cyber resilience solutions, enterprises are beginning to increasingly depend on adopting multi-layered, human-centric defences, combining AI-powered threat detection, robust email and data protection, and governance frameworks aligned with regulatory mandates.
“Organisations that do not prioritise proactive security measures, employee awareness, and adaptive technologies may face significant operational challenges and reputational risks in an evolving digital landscape.” — Bikramdeep Singh, India Country Manager, Proofpoint
AI adoption and pragmatism
“We expect Agentic AI to move from potential to measurable impact in 2026. Indian enterprises have moved beyond debating the need for AI and are now focused on accelerating scale with speed and purpose. Agentic AI is emerging as a trusted digital teammate, capable of observing, deciding, acting, and learning across the business fabric. From autonomous finance operations to conversational knowledge platforms, these intelligent agents are driving reinvention beyond incremental gains.
“The winners will be those who pair this power with trust and talent — embedding ethical frameworks and re-skilling their workforce to collaborate with AI. This is not just a tech trend, it is the foundation of a new era where humans and machines achieve more together.” — Aditya Priyadarshan, MD & Lead – AI, Accenture in India
A subtle shift, on the way
“2025 reinforced a simple truth. AI is no longer experimental. It has become foundational to how organisations operate and compete. As we move into 2026, the focus will shift from simply adopting AI to putting it to work in ways that deliver measurable resilience, efficiency, and customer outcomes. The question leaders are asking is no longer whether to use AI, but where it can create the most meaningful impact.
“At the same time, the cloud conversation is evolving. It is moving away from questions of ownership toward questions of governance. Who controls the data, how it is protected, and where it can be processed are becoming central concerns. This shift is why sovereign and distributed cloud capabilities are moving from niche requirements to mainstream priorities for enterprises and governments alike.” — Faiz Shakir, VP & MD, India and ASEAN, Nutanix.
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