All Covered Experts on AI,

IT, and Cybersecurity Trends in 2026

The new year is officially upon us, and rapid technological transformation continues to challenge businesses to stay agile and forward-thinking.

From advancements in AI and automation to shifts in cybersecurity and cloud strategies, 2026 promises both opportunities and complexities. To help organizations prepare, we asked All Covered experts to share their insights on the IT, unified communications, AI, and cybersecurity trends 2026 could be bringing along with it. 

Whether you’re planning your next digital initiatives or just curious about what’s next, these insights will give you a clear picture of what to watch for in the next months.

2026 Cybersecurity Trends

Cando Wango, Cybersecurity Solutions Architect
"We are certainly seeing a trend in cybersecurity of consolidation and control. There is a need to simplify security operations to make them much more efficient, and we are seeing that across the board.  This is in answer to threat actors partnering up, and making their attacks more robust, comprehensive, and resilient. It should be noted; AI is fueling much of this and will continue to enhance threats throughout the future.

Partners and vendors that have previously had solution sets in one discipline or another, have recently been acquiring companies and AI tools to make those solution sets more complete, and consolidated. This I believe is an effort to make a complete defensive approach under one common team.  2025 has been a year of integrating and building complete platforms that try to integrate what they cannot completely perform. Much attention will be needed to the efficacy of these approaches, as I am sure it will not be an apples-to-apples comparison between companies.

MSPs & MSSPs are starting to converge on remediation approaches and on compliance efforts. I think a mainstream model that combines the capabilities of both will become the new normal. It will be a race to see who can approach the need with the most efficiency and the most efficacy at the proper price point.  I believe larger companies will have the upper hand here, as the cost to play will be higher than the previous models.  Timing will also be essential, as the first to the table will have the most success.

2026 is shaping up to be a very competitive year for cybersecurity and IT services. I look forward to innovation and out of the box thinking to come. It’s an exciting time to be in business."

2026 AI Trends

Tim Campbell, Practice Director, Microsoft 365
"Here are some of my bets:

AI governance will become important to auditing. Controlling AI access, information shared with AI, and tracking AI activity will become important. Agent 365 and similar technologies will become a part of the normal discourse.  

Data Security will continue to be important, both for AI readiness, but also as an additional security layer completely unrelated to AI.  

Agents will become integrated with most popular apps, and daily interaction with agents will become commonplace."

2026 Offensive Security Trends

Rick Stern, Security Services Sales Director, Depth Security
"Organizations are increasingly recognizing that checklist driven vulnerability scans fail to reflect real-world risk. As a result, we’re seeing growing demand for adversary emulation, attack simulations, and frequent testing models that mirror how modern attackers move through environments over time. Credential abuse, identity misconfigurations, and privilege escalation remain the most reliable attack paths across environments.

More importantly, organizations are beginning to treat offensive security results as strategic input rather than a one-off exercise to satisfy auditors, using results to prioritize security investments, validate defensive controls, and guide security roadmaps. Looking ahead to 2026, offensive security will increasingly be viewed as a continuous feedback loop for executive leadership and boards, providing clear, evidence-based insight into actual business risk and security maturity."

Jake Reynolds, Director, Offensive Security Services, Depth Security
"Looking ahead to 2026, my hope is that we avoid a repeat of the year 2000, this time with AI.

World-changing technologies like the internet, and now AI, tend to arrive suddenly, while realistic business value lags behind the hype by several years. Expectations often froth well before sustainable profitability appears. Cisco is a useful historical marker here: it didn’t regain its dot-com-era stock price until December of 2025, roughly twenty-five years later.

What I want to see in 2026 is AI profitability without a first-wave crash. That means fewer speculative promises and more durable, revenue-producing deployments that survive beyond novelty. Technically, I’d like to see AI pushed further toward the edge, running on the devices in our hands. At the same time, centralized AI at scale still makes sense, especially as it moves closer to the power grid and increasingly leverages solar and other cost-efficient energy sources. The future isn’t purely centralized or decentralized; it’s a pragmatic blend of both.

From a cybersecurity perspective, I hope 2026 is the year we see meaningful breakthroughs in runtime testing. Commercial and open-source tools have made impressive strides in static analysis, deep binary inspection, and highly structured environments like CTFs and bug bounties. Where they still fall short is in live, messy, real-world systems.

What I expect (and this is as dangerous as it is helpful) is agentic AI capable of reasoning across networks, chaining vulnerabilities across nodes and services without hints, prior knowledge, or contrived starting conditions. That kind of capability would more closely resemble real attackers but moving at machine speed, fundamentally changing both offensive and defensive cybersecurity landscapes."

2026 Cloud Trends

Private Cloud
Stephan Cico, Director – Cloud Services, North America
"We’re seeing a strong shift toward private cloud because customers want control and confidence. After recent public cloud outages, reliability and guaranteed SLAs are top of mind. Organizations are looking for environments where they can own their data, enforce security policies, and maintain predictable performance without surprises. Hybrid models will continue to grow, but the driver isn’t just technology; it’s trust. Businesses want the peace of mind that comes from knowing their critical workloads are running on infrastructure they control. They turn to All Covered as trusted advisors to help shape strategies that balance flexibility with security and reliability."

Public Cloud
Stephan Cico, Director – Cloud Services, North America
"For most customers, the cloud is about outcomes, not technology. They don’t care where their applications live; they care that everything is available when they need it and at a cost that makes sense. In 2026, the focus will be on delivering that experience: seamless access, predictable pricing, and peace of mind. Customers look to All Covered to manage Azure and guide their overall cloud strategy, so they can stay focused on their business while we handle the complexity behind the scenes."

2026 Communications Trends

Jacob Foster, Director of Service Delivery and Operations – Unified Communications
"In 2026, UCaaS platforms will continue their evolution toward fully unified, AI-driven ecosystems that seamlessly combine voice, video, messaging, and workflow automation. This comes as companies look to reduce tool sprawl and take advantage of ecosystems that span multiple collaboration needs.

Advanced AI capabilities, such as autonomous voice and chat agents, will see increased adoption, enabling smarter call routing, real-time insights, and call barging for supervisor support during live customer conversations. We will also see a greater focus on compliance requirements for these autonomous agents. At the same time, video and voice will be enhanced through AI, including real-time transcription, generative codecs to improve call quality, and deepfake-prevention security features.

Businesses will also continue to return to the office, driving a need for improved hybrid collaboration tools.  Next-generation video/audio endpoints designed for hybrid work environments will begin to replace pandemic-era hardware as companies look to bridge the gap between in-person and remote employees.

Customers will also increasingly look for providers who can offer both UCaaS, internet connection, and managed services like security and networking to simplify vendor complexity."

Aaron Fitzgerald, Director of Unified Communications Sales and Customer Success
"I see the way we communicate with our customers really exploding with the insertion of AI. Today communication is still largely done the same way it has been done since the 1800’s. We will start to see AI agents as tier 1 in support centers. We will start to see SMS and RCS bots as the primary ways organizations communicate and market to their customer bases instead of email. Call recording will continue to evolve into a powerful tool for leadership to understand what is happening in all corners of their business in a simple digest and enable rapid response when needed. 2026 is going to be exciting!"

2026 Device Trends

Dean Norton, National Manager of Device Services
Continuing emphasis on DEX - Digital Employee Experience. This is a term I first started seeing this year and to my knowledge we're not using it much at AC, and should be.

Hybrid work is now no longer a trending term. But discussions of how to manage distributed workforces IS topical and cuts across much of what AC offers.

In 2026, we will extend further our customer coaching to stop treating endpoint devices as merely depreciating assets—necessary but often inconvenient—and re-orient thinking to treating them as a managed business platform. We move beyond merely device management to include experience, productivity, compliance, and cost control. 

Device Lifecycle is elevating to the C-level, with interest from CFOs driven by considerations around TCO, recruitment, retention, lost productivity and more. This overlaps our webinar on employee experience, reflecting that Device Lifecycle sits at the intersection of IT, Finance, and Risk/Security. As we noted: Device Lifecycle is a team sport.

2026 Legal IT Trends

Mike Hammond, Legal Territory Sales Manager
Legal tech continues to rapidly evolve and because law firms have traditionally been laggards in technology adoption, they are now being forced to adapt to keep pace with industry expectations and competitive pressures.

Two areas of focus are around AI and Cybersecurity. Agentic AI becomes the biggest shift in legal technology, moving beyond simple prompts to autonomously executing multi‑step legal workflows. AI also becomes fully embedded into everyday legal processes, enabling proactive, context‑aware assistance that supports higher‑quality work and faster outcomes.    

Because AI depends on high‑quality data, firms place major emphasis on data readiness and structured knowledge, recognizing that poorly organized data will limit the effectiveness of advanced tools. Predictive analytics then builds on this data foundation, helping firms forecast litigation outcomes, costs, and risks with far greater accuracy.

Finally, with growing threats and regulatory changes firms are being forced to strengthen their security posture. Cyber-insurance pressures and clients explicitly demanding that firms show a more robust security posture is helping nudge this forward. 

2026 Healthcare IT Trends

Danielle Morrison, National Practice Manager – Healthcare IT Services
Generative AI made its way into healthcare a few years ago and shows no signs of slowing down. Its rapid growth is expected to continue through 2026 and beyond. While there’s still work to do in aligning federal AI guidelines with existing healthcare regulations, AI will remain a critical tool for addressing many challenges faced by healthcare organizations. At the same time, it will continue to spark debate among those hesitant to adopt it or seeking clearer standards for safe, secure, and compliant use.

Cybersecurity also remains a pressing concern, as healthcare organizations are frequent targets of attacks. Strengthening security platforms, governance policies, and end-user training will stay at the top of IT priorities. In addition, changes and uncertainties in federal funding will continue to impact healthcare organizations of all sizes well into 2026.

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