2026 is shaping up to be a defining year for enterprises. Across every industry from manufacturing to finance, healthcare and retail, leaders are under pressure to increase efficiency, accelerate productivity, elevate customer experience and modernize their business models. They’re tasked with meaningful digital transformation, all while addressing tech debt and ensuring future investments simplify their tech stack.
Customers are looking for global consistency while grappling with growing digital isolationism, regional regulation and supply chain complexity. Enterprise leaders must be ready for what’s next and move with both speed and purpose.
Based on what we're seeing across our global customer base, here are the top five things every enterprise leader must prepare for in 2026:
1. A Secular Shift to Cloud, Fiber and 5G with Purposeful Multicloud Adoption.
Enterprises are accelerating their move from legacy environments to cloud-based platforms, high-capacity diverse fiber and 5G enabled services. The focus has shifted from if to how—and increasingly, to why a given workload belongs in a specific type of cloud.
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), 90% of enterprises use multiple clouds.1 Organizations are now proactively leveraging multicloud strategies that tap into the unique strengths of different cloud platforms. Low latency, workload placement and application performance are driving architectural decisions more than ever. As part of this converged connectivity model, low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are emerging as a solution to solve unique final mile challenges as well as a valuable backup, providing resilient, diverse coverage when terrestrial networks are disrupted or unavailable.
For example, we are currently supporting customer demand for LEO broadband that uses specialized user equipment, and with the recent successful launch of AST SpaceMobile’s next-generation satellite, BlueBird 6, we are one step closer to making LEO satellite direct-to-device wireless connectivity available to our customers, further enhancing the resilience and reach of enterprise networks.
What leaders must prepare for in 2026:
- Multicloud ecosystems purpose-built around business outcomes—not just migration targets—supported by agile, diverse and highly secure connections.
- A network foundation capable of supporting cloud-native workloads at scale.
- Integrations across fiber, 5G and edge computing that move data when and where it needs to go, instantly.
2. Business-Grade “Always On” Expectations Make Resilient Tech Architecture Non-Negotiable.
Demand for high speed, highly reliable connectivity continues to skyrocket. Organizations that invest in digital immunity—the ability to protect itself from cyber threats and stay online even during attacks—can significantly decrease downtime, protecting both customer trust and operational continuity.
Ten years ago, a manufacturing plant going offline for a day wasn’t ideal but was survivable. Today, with robotics, automation and IoT, minutes of downtime can mean millions in lost revenue and productivity. That reality is pushing enterprises to rethink resiliency strategies.
At AT&T, we’re working with customers to build highly engineered business-grade connectivity blueprints that help keep operations running.
What leaders must prioritize:
- End-to-end connectivity diversity, including fiber, wireless and satellite, to eliminate single points of failure.
- Architecture designed with true physical path diversity—not just different providers on the same conduit.
- Proactive planning for extreme uptime scenarios across distributed locations.
3. A Hyperexpanded Threat Landscape Requiring Zero Trust Everywhere.
Every connected device—sensor, laptop, phone, robotic arm—has become an endpoint and a potential threat surface. The rise of Cybercrime-as-a-Service, where cybercriminals are implementing an organized crime model and offering their tools and expertise to others, means cyberattacks are more sophisticated, more scalable and more accessible to bad actors.
The challenge is that these fixed and mobile assets require different protection models, but users expect identical performance and security across both.
What leaders must do in 2026:
- Utilize zero trust principles across all network layers.
- Extend secure, high-speed access across the enterprise.
- Enhance security around identity, context and continuous verification, not just perimeter defense.
- Strengthen your security posture by implementing solutions like AT&T Dynamic Defense®, which offers business-grade enhanced internet security that’s integrated seamlessly into your existing infrastructure, protecting sensitive data and helping maintain peak performance.
4. Convergence Accelerates and “Wireless-First” Becomes the New Mindset.
The convergence of fiber, Wi-Fi and 5G is reshaping how enterprises think about connectivity. Customers increasingly tell us: “I don’t care what the access technology is—I just need it to work consistently.”
From distribution centers to manufacturing sites, organizations now manage hundreds or thousands of moving devices, far beyond the stationary use cases Wi-Fi was originally designed for. The ceiling on connected endpoints is rising dramatically.
What to expect in 2026:
- A shift toward hybrid networks that maximize the strengths of both Wi-Fi and 5G.
- Massive IoT expansion that requires private cellular networks for mobility, scale and reliability. AT&T Private Cellular Networks delivers the on-premises coverage and business-grade performance of a cellular network, all over an optimized network infrastructure for sensitive data and mission-critical operations.
- A “wireless-first” design philosophy that unlocks new automation and operational models.
5. AI and Automation Redefine Operations—Powered by Low Latency and Ubiquitous Data.
AI is no longer experimental; it’s operational. In fact, 210% more organizations are now registering AI models for production use.2 But for enterprises to realize their full potential, nearly all data must reach the cloud, and do so in real time. While cloud service providers typically don’t charge to ingest data, the costs to egress that data for AI processing and model participation can be significant. These egress fees are quickly becoming a material architectural constraint—one that keeps CIOs up at night—as organizations scale AI programs.
Low latency becomes mission critical when deploying AI for:
- Predictive maintenance
- Real-time analytics
- Automated decisioning
- Computer vision in industrial environments
- Workforce productivity tools
The foundation of AI is data, and the foundation of data is connectivity. Every sensor, device and application must feed into an architecture optimized for speed, security and scale. Increasingly, that architecture must also be designed to intelligently route and localize data to minimize cloud egress charges, ensuring that the network itself becomes a strategic lever for AI efficiency and cost control. Solutions like AT&T’s Enterprise Edge bring together converged business-grade connectivity, secure intelligent networking and edge compute to support evolving AI use cases ensuring businesses have technology that can evolve at today’s pace of change.
For more AI trend predictions for 2026, check out Chief Data Officer Andy Markus’s recent blog.
The Bottom Line
Across industries and geographies, the themes are combining efficiency, reliability, security, convergence and AI readiness. The applications vary, but the enterprise priorities remain the same.
The leaders who will win in 2026 are those who:
- Modernize their networks
- Strengthen their security posture
- Design for uninterrupted operations
- Embrace hybrid connectivity
- Build AI ready data ecosystems
At AT&T Business, we’re committed to helping enterprises navigate this complexity with solutions built for a world that demands speed, reliability, intelligent and secure solutions.
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