It’s the onset of Forrester’s Predictions season. We, the analysts, curate predictions for the coming year centered around different technology categories. In 2026, we will see significant disruption from accelerated appetite for all things AI. Business demands of AI systems, network connectivity, AI for IT operations (AIOps), conversational AI-powered service desk, and such are driving substantial changes that tech leaders must enable within their organizations. Events have also shifted attention to risk management and modern security practices. As we debated on several predictions, we want to preview three technology infrastructure and operations predictions for you:

    • Private AI factories reach 20% adoption, and on-premises servers capture 50% share. Vendors like Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) partnering with NVIDIA, are detailing AI-factory offerings including pre-integrated stacks for local inferencing, fine tuning, and small model training to bypass skills gaps and lower total costs. Meanwhile, IoT and 5G growth are pushing microservers to the edges of the network – into factories, hospitals, and autonomous vehicles, enabling decision makers to prioritize workload placement and investments that balance performance, control, and cost.
    • Fifty percent of security tool vendors move into the secure LAN market. The WAN market is rapidly converging, with networking vendors like Cisco and HPE and security firms such as Netskope and Palo Alto networks now delivering SASE solutions that combine networking and SSE. Forrester predicts that half of SASE vendors that started as pure security providers – like Cato Networks and Netskope – will expand into secure LAN. Vendors such as Cisco and Fortinet already offer secure LAN capabilities.
    • An agentic AI workflow prevents a major outage autonomously. As tech leaders face increasing pressure to improve resilience and uptime amid a growing and complex tech estate, more IT firms will turn to AI for help. Agentic systems are AI tools that can make recommendations and decisions or take next best actions. We predict that an agentic workflow will prevent a system outage through a complex mesh of predictive and causal AI as well as a combination of AI-initiated action and predictive notification with the system and relevant support teams.

To dive deeper into each prediction and the whole list of predictions, read the Predictions 2026: Technology Infrastructure and Operations report.

We are hosting a webinar to discuss these predictions in detail, please register for a live discussion. If you can’t attend the webinar, feel free to set up a Forrester guidance session.

As a Forrester client, you can access all 2026 predictions on the Predictions 2026 Hub.