Simpro Knowledge Base

Annual Day Speech Draft V5 - Gartner 2026 Trends Addendum

Deck: annual-day-high-performance-culture-v5.pptx

Use this addendum with annual-day-speech-draft-v3.md and annual-day-speech-draft-v4-platform-growth.md.

This slide comes after the future landscape slide.

Speech Content

Gartner's 2026 top technology trends are useful not because we should chase all ten. That would be the fastest way to look modern and become confused.

The useful message is that the technology landscape is moving in three connected directions.

First: AI foundations.

Gartner talks about AI-native development platforms, AI supercomputing platforms, and confidential computing. The message for us is that AI is becoming part of the software factory itself. It will affect how we design, code, test, secure, deploy, and operate systems. But AI needs foundations: data, compute, privacy, evaluation, and engineering discipline.

Second: AI orchestration.

Multiagent systems, domain-specific language models, and physical AI show that AI is moving from "one assistant answering a question" toward systems that coordinate work, use tools, understand domains, and interact with the physical world. This is why our teams need product thinking, workflow thinking, and platform thinking. Agents without process clarity will automate confusion.

Third: trust and governance.

Preemptive cybersecurity, digital provenance, AI security platforms, and geopatriation all point to the same reality: as software and AI become more powerful, trust becomes more strategic. Customers will care about security, privacy, data location, authenticity, resilience, and explainability.

So the Simpro takeaway is simple:

Do not chase every trend. Build the foundations that let us absorb the right trends faster.

For us, that means:

  • Platform engineering.
  • Growth engineering.
  • Secure development.
  • Observability.
  • Cost control.
  • Resilience.
  • AI governance.
  • Strong product discovery.

The goal is not to say, "We are using the latest trend." The goal is to say, "We are building a company that can learn and adopt responsibly."

Planned Light Humor

Use this if the room is warm:

If we adopt all ten trends without foundations, we will not become Gartner-ready; we will become incident-ready.

Or:

Trend chasing is like buying gym equipment. It only helps if we build the habit.

Audience Question

Which of these trends would create the most opportunity for us, and which would create the most risk if we adopted it carelessly?

Expected answers:

  • Opportunity: AI-native development, domain-specific language models, multiagent systems, physical AI.
  • Risk: AI security, confidential computing, cybersecurity, provenance, geopatriation, data/privacy.

Bridge To Next Slide

This is why the next part of the story is culture and ownership. Technology trends create opportunity, but culture decides whether we convert opportunity into value or noise.

Source

Gartner, Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2026: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/top-technology-trends-2026