The 2-Z of 2026 tech predictions: X-Z

The 2-Z of 2026 technology predictions ends with:

X is for eXperience

"Voice AI is entering a new phase in Asia Pacific — one shaped by three converging forces: the surge in enterprise AI investment, the region’s linguistic and cultural complexity, and rising expectations for real-time, empathetic customer service. While AI innovation has historically focused on text-based chat and automation pilots, we’re entering a stage where enterprises are no longer experimenting with conversational AI but enabling systems that can handle live dialogue, context retention, sentiment understanding, and multilingual switching as the default, not the exception," said Amitabh Sarkar, VP & Head of Asia Pacific and Japan - Enterprise at Tata Communications.

Source: Salesforce.
Barfield.

Gavin Barfield, VP and CTO, Solutions, Salesforce ASEAN, also predicted that voice will become more common in 2026. "Voice will increasingly become the new interface through which we interact with agents, replacing chatbots. Agentic voice technology will allow humans to speak to agents in a natural, conversational manner – as if conversing with another human," he said.

"Maturing this technology will take time, with the diversity in language, as well as nuances in slang, accents, and colloquialisms in human speech, adding to the complexity."

According to Barfield, voice-equipped agents can operate as a limitless labour force handling incoming calls in real-time, effectively eliminating the need for interactive voice response (IVR) menus and even hold music, which he called "an annoyance in traditional customer service". "We could see AI agents functioning as triage within contact centres, interacting conversationally with customers to route queries to the relevant departments. With more experience, AI agents may resolve routine requests autonomously, for example, processing the annual fee waivers for a credit card," Barfield suggested.

"Not only does this ensure a natural, seamless, and positive experience for the customer, but it also frees up time for human employees to focus on resolving complex cases and focus on building rapport for stronger customer relationships."

Customer experience

"Cybersecurity in marketing will move from a background concern to a frontline customer experience issue. As breaches become a constant, and regulation rises and intensifies, customers in our region are increasingly asking: 'Do I trust this brand with my data?'" Shahid Nizami, VP for APAC and GCC at Braze asked.

"Brands must leverage their first-party data and strong governance not merely as defence, but as a technical foundation that fuels transparency, explaining how data powers meaningful, personalised experiences while leaving customers in control. 

"By mastering this complexity and building trust through clear execution, forward-looking brands can successfully convert security from a necessary cost centre into a powerful competitive differentiator." 

Personal AI agents could change the way companies connect with their customers, Barfield suggested. "Instead of offering messaging, products, and services tailored to consumers, businesses will also need to consider how their outreach can best meet the preferences and objectives of personal AI agents.

"In 2026, brands may find their identity defined less by their logos or slogans and more by their AI agents. We can envision customisable agents becoming always-on brand ambassadors: intelligent, deeply personalised, and continuously evolving with every single customer interaction," Barfield said. 

"This could mark a decisive shift in how customers connect with brands. Instead of judging companies by clever taglines, customers might evaluate brands by how their AI agents interact with them. In this new agent-driven reality, the winning brands will be those whose AI interactions feel less like scripted support and more like a genuinely helpful partner."

Employee experience

Source: TeamViewer.
Werner.

Kai Werner, Chief Human Resources Officer, TeamViewer, identified the digital workplace experience as a defining factor in employee retention. "As expectations for seamless technology continue to rise, frustration caused by poor systems and disconnected tools is increasingly influencing whether employees stay or leave," he said. 

"By 2026, organisations that fail to address digital friction risk losing talent to competitors offering more supportive and functional work environments, making employee experience a leadership priority rather than an IT issue.” 

Andrew Hewitt, VP, Strategic Technology, TeamViewer, added that enabling employee productivity and creativity can benefit employers.

“In increasingly distracted digital environments, the ability to protect employee focus will emerge as a key source of competitive advantage," Hewitt said. 

Source: TeamViewer.
Hewitt.

"Organisations that reduce digital friction and enable sustained focus will unlock higher levels of productivity and creativity, while those that ignore the cost of distraction will see performance erode over time.” 

Niko Walraven, Area VP - APAC at Neat, spoke of AI as a productivity enabler. "By 2026, AI in the meeting room will evolve from an equaliser to a true productivity engine orchestrator. AI is moving beyond basic augmentation to become an intelligent co-pilot that actively orchestrates meeting flows," he said.

"Through features like attention management and outcome guidance, AI will drive concrete business results while ensuring visual equity. This shift transforms hardware into a strategic asset, delivering measurable ROI and healthier, inclusive spaces purpose-built for high-impact innovation."

Y is for youth

AI adoption in Asia-Pacific

While many industry observers are talking about AI adoption in terms of Day One or Day Two, Yongliang Zhang, GM, BytePlus, believes that AI adoption in the Asia-Pacific region is still developing, with the region standing at the cusp of broader, enterprise-level AI deployment.

"As organisations continue to scale their AI capabilities by integrating AI technologies into everyday workflows and adopting AI-driven processes, they are well-placed to capture new areas of growth and strengthen their competitiveness. This momentum underscores the need for businesses to stay informed on the emerging AI trends shaping the year ahead," Zhang said.

Source: BytePlus.
Zhang.

"AI continues to evolve at a pace where we have not seen clear limits. It reminds me of the early days of the Internet, when most people only used it to read news. The most significant shifts in AI are still ahead of us."

"In this environment, speed matters more than anything else. We are entering a phase where companies that move quickly on AI adoption will gain a competitive edge over peers that are slower to adapt, regardless of size or history. It is very much a 'fast fish eats slow fish' era," Zhang elaborated. 

Southeast Asia's advantage

Zhang also said that Southeast Asia has a shot at being an AI leader. "Southeast Asia has meaningful advantages: large populations, strong local cultures, diverse languages, and unique industry structures. These factors give the region an opportunity to create its own AI capabilities and potentially leapfrog established markets," he observed.

"However, the region is still moving slowly. AI development speed, talent density, technical skills, and investment are growing, but have yet to reach the level of global leaders. Many users still rely heavily on AI products built in the US, China, or Europe."

Zhang elaborated that AI progress compounds quickly. "New applications generate new data. Companies integrate AI into their systems. Teams are also building workflows around prompt engineering, context design, and agent-based execution. Meanwhile, new hardware — cars, wearables, drones, robots — further deepens the integration between software and the real world," he cautioned.

"Once this compounding effect accelerates, the barriers to development will rise sharply. If Southeast Asia cannot accelerate during this window, its gap with leading markets will grow, not shrink.

"Teams that learn quickly from real-world AI usage will widen their lead, while slower organisations will find it increasingly difficult to catch up."

Barfield from Salesforce predicted that 2026 will see more localisation and relevance of AI innovation to markets in Southeast Asia, with more options available to cater to different purposes.

"AI innovation has primarily been in English at launch, with a focus on getting the technology working well. As agentic AI becomes more mature, we anticipate that (2026) will see more investments in localising AI to reflect the unique linguistic tapestry that is ASEAN. AI models finetuned with regional linguistic and cultural nuances will deliver more accurate and contextually relevant responses, improving customer experience and making a true business impact in the region," he said.

"We will also see a variety of LLM options emerge for local businesses, as global LLMs localise and more regional, local, and even industry-specific small language models (SLMs) emerge to cater to varying needs." 

The availability of local and region-specific AI unlocks a huge opportunity in ASEAN, empowering businesses to solve uniquely local problems, he explained. "For example, we are making our Agentforce available in Southeast Asian languages such as Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese, Bahasa Melayu, and Bahasa Indonesia for the first time, to enable more local businesses in the region to transform into truly agentic enterprises," Barfield added.

Barfield is just as upbeat about the ASEAN region becoming an AI leader. "ASEAN has a history of technological leapfrogging, famously skipping the PC era for mobile-first super apps connecting millions across a geographically and culturally disparate region. We may be poised to witness this phenomenon again with agentic AI in 2026, with its young, digitally-savvy, and ambitious population," he said.

"Businesses unburdened by archaic legacy infrastructure have the freedom to adopt agentic AI workflows to unlock an entirely new model of work for ASEAN businesses, where AI agents and humans work alongside one another.

"This would not have been possible before agentic AI. This ability to bypass old systems and traditional thinking is the essence of the leapfrog: it empowers millions of ASEAN businesses to instantly access a digital workforce of autonomous AI agents working alongside human counterparts to fundamentally transform the very nature of work itself."

AI startups

Zhang also observed a trend towards nimble, young, and small AI companies that move very quickly. "While many did not exist a few years ago, their growth and compute consumption already exceeded those of traditional IT or cloud companies. Their survival depends on constant iteration — which again reinforces the 'fast fish' dynamic," he said. 

What startups can rely on is AI lowering the barrier to entrepreneurship, Zhang said. "Programming becomes easier and cheaper, and tasks like creative work, design, finance, and even early legal work can be supported by AI. As a result, we will see more startups with fewer than 10 people — sometimes even five or fewer — capable of building products with much larger potential," he said. 

Agreement intelligence

"A long-held assumption is that enterprise technology breakthroughs begin in Western markets. In 2026, the opposite will be true. Asia Pacific is outpacing the West in digitalisation and AI-led transformation, driven by complex supply chain diversification, rising intra-Asia trade, and the operational necessity for automated risk management," said Kartik Krishnamurthy, VP Asia, Docusign. 

"The APAC region is now the fastest-growing contract management software market globally, projected to expand at a 13.9% CAGR through 2030. Southeast Asian firms are also surpassing those in Australia and New Zealand in adopting AI for foundational functions such as tax and audit research." 

"This momentum is creating structural advantages that put the region on a different trajectory. Early adopters in Asia will accumulate deep proprietary datasets across multilingual agreements, regulatory interpretations, and sector-specific commercial norms – data moats that will be difficult for global rivals to replicate," Krishnamurthy added. 

"In 2026, Asia is poised to define the global benchmarks for agreement intelligence."

APAC stands for the Asia-Pacific region. 

Z is for zero-day

Adam Meyers, SVP of Counter Adversary Operations, CrowdStrike, called AI the 'Zero-Day Accelerator'. 

"In 2026, we’ll likely see an explosion of zero-day vulnerabilities driven by AI. As AI accelerates code generation and software development, it’s also becoming ideally suited to finding flaws in software. There are two primary ways to identify these vulnerabilities: targeted analysis, which is resource-intensive and typically requires a human in the loop. The other is commonly called fuzzing and involves automation to identify flaws," he said. 

"GenAI is a game-changer for the latter. AI can optimise fuzzing methodologies and analyze crash reports at scale, rapidly surfacing exploitable flaws.

"Early indicators suggest advanced adversaries are already investing in this research, driving down the cost of discovering and weaponising vulnerabilities. These exploits are the keys that adversaries use to gain initial access to their targets. The defenders who succeed will be those using AI with the same speed and precision: detecting, patching, and proactively hunting for zero-days as fast as they’re found."

Zero-day vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities which haven't been discovered by the company responsible, so they cannot be fixed. Such vulnerabilities are prized by cybercriminals, as they can be freely exploited while the company responsible has literally zero days to address the problem. In an ideal situation, companies prefer 'nothing to see here' situations where they're informed about the vulnerability and have some time to create and issue a patch before news breaks that the vulnerability existed. 

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