What to Expect in 2026: Doing more with less
This article is part of our AVEVA PI System Newsletter series, but equally, much of the advice contained within will be applicable to other Industrial Data projects.
Steve Taylor, Principal Systems Engineer at ITI Group, explores:
- cyber security considerations
- what’s required in order to reap value from AI
- how to do more with less, and
- where we think the future of technology is headed…
As we enter another new year, our real-time information team has been reflecting on changes in the digital market-place over the past 24 months. What are the key trends, and where will they go?
The workforce has turned over
Most companies have seen significant restructuring in the past two years – some more than once! Decades of skills and knowledge have been lost, and each newly reformed team is expected to do more with less. This is particularly tricky when you have less knowledge than your predecessors – puzzling through inherited tools and spreadsheets, yet somehow expected to improve. New tools are always on the horizon, but everybody is uncertain around long-term product/vendor stability.
As the dust settles, this is leading to two key shifts:
- Re-evaluations of software landscapes
In an ever-maturing software market, teams are more willing than ever before to tear up the IT plan and start again to save costs – building 5-year plans to move from AWS to Azure to Google (in any which direction), migrating historians, data analysis tools and front-end dashboards. Teams are experimenting with products but are being forced to consolidate them as costs are slashed. Migrations require a heavy up-front investment but offer long term savings: predicting these outcomes is crucial to making the right decision. We’re supporting a few different customers on this journey – watch this space.
- Uptick in experimentation, training and coaching
The most tech savvy among the workforce are being empowered to ‘just do it’, building solutions at pace with GPT assistance, often with less scrutiny than in days gone by, and with less expertise on how to build said solution within the business itself. Building a Proof of Concept is easy, but building a scalable solution takes experience – and so as these solutions are developed and all the usual hurdles are encountered, expect an uptick in training and coaching.
Cyber Security is King
When I finished university in the mid 2000’s, my generation of IT graduates knew just enough to be dangerous – we could find ways to circumvent lockouts on apps, websites and systems, in a world which was still discovering cyber security.
Similarly, cyber threats used to be limited by the knowledge of attackers, who were often very IT savvy but had limited OT knowledge. In the event of a breach, the targets tended to be SQL databases or core servers.
We live in a moment where there is a well documented increase in cyber attacks targeting OT and industrial environments. Today, the high end of ransomware resembles the cyber attack capabilities of nation-states, targeting any system which can lead to business disruption. The tools are advancing quickly, and thanks to GPT tooling their developers and even the tools themselves have access to knowledge that was previously restricted to specialists.
Every single year our teams audit decade-old PI Systems and discover critical security vulnerabilities that have often been in place for five years or longer – which could be used to exploit, cripple or destroy systems supporting 24/7 operations.
As each sector comes to grips with the modern cyber threat landscape and are given budgets to deal with new threats, we will see a steady uptick in system auditing and deployment of security automation tooling to ensure that resolved vulnerabilities stay in the past.
Digital Maturity in the age of AI
Tech evangelists have always waxed lyrical about the value of data – today the world is finally seeing what they were talking about. Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot and all the other models are finally mining our data at scale and producing amazing outcomes.
The AI Sales Sharks of this world are now circling, searching for prey. Every CEO, CIO, CTO and CSO on the planet are barraged by mail promising 400% returns on new AI initiatives using their business data. Like the .com boom of the early 2000’s, thousands of startups are competing for every dollar of business they can find.
Reaping value from AI is especially challenging in the Industrial OT space, where data is strictly controlled and regulated. GPT tooling isn’t so hot when confined to tight datasets, with less data available to tune out false positives and false negatives. The surge of non-specialists entering this space often struggle to distinguish fact from fiction. As Gartner warn, 60% of firms will underachieve on AI initiatives due to poor data governance.
If your data isn’t curated and governed, AI won’t deliver magic: start with data quality before chasing AI hype. The businesses which are successfully adopting AI today are those which began investing in their data foundations long before ChatGPT was a speck in Sam Altman’s eye. Their data was already curated and governed; reliable and well-managed, so it can be mined at scale. And the rest are now playing catch-up because the value potential is finally clear.
As the AI boom continues, the early waves of AI projects are reaching maturity, with a wide array of outcomes. Behind the PR bluster of corporate news releases, internal teams are grappling with an occasional success alongside numerous failures. Nobody has leapt from spreadsheets to lights-out manufacturing… but increasingly businesses can see enough of a path to justify the investment in their data foundations.
An Eye on the Future
On one hand, this is good and healthy, as the market competition helps contain prices, and customers find more options to dodge vendor lock-in situations. On the other, each product has different limits and capabilities, and companies are often making foundational strategic decisions without a full picture of what they will lose along the way.
As with all tech booms, there will be winners and losers as the ripples fade. The market will select some products over others, and prices and feature sets will continue to shift.
As the UK’s leading independent system integrator, our goal is to help each customer move in their own direction depending on their tech stack and business priorities, to connect them with trustworthy products and vendors and make the right strategic decisions. As we frame up our blogs this year, expect to see more about emerging products and trends on the market.
If you’re wrestling with these same questions and concerns, we would love to help you build a secure, well-governed foundation for the future. Drop us a note using the contact form below.
Have a great 2026.