IT leadership expectations didn’t shift because a new buzzword showed up. They shifted because the environment did.
As we enter 2026, the business climate is defined by faster market swings, thinner tolerance for friction, and AI moving from experimentation to embedded operations. Gartner expects task-specific AI agents to be integrated into about 40% of enterprise applications by the end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025, a signal that autonomous capability is becoming a normal part of software, not a side project.
In this world, IT leaders are measured less by intention and more by outcomes. The expectation isn’t “transform eventually.” It’s evolve continuously, and prove value along the way.
Three expectations are shaping what IT leadership means in 2026:
- Speed without chaos.
- Transparency without overhead.
- Automation without surrendering control.
Those sound like contradictions only if you’re trying to meet them with last decade’s models.
Expectation #1: Speed is a Baseline, but Stability is Non-Negotiable
Speed used to be a differentiator. In 2026 it’s assumed.
The business expects faster delivery of features, integrations, and improvements and expects that acceleration to happen without outages, broken logic, or rewrites that put continuity at risk. This is where many IT teams feel squeezed. You can go faster by cutting corners, but nobody wants the bill that comes due later.
The new demand is speed with confidence: smaller changes, safer releases, and clear predictability about what will happen when code moves forward.
What’s really changed here is the tolerance for episodic progress. Big-bang programs and “one day we’ll tackle that” roadmaps don’t match a market that shifts weekly. The organizations that thrive in 2026 will be the ones that can deliver meaningful change in slices, safely, while operations keep running.
Expectation #2: Transparency is Now a Leadership Requirement
In 2026, IT won’t be judged only by what it finishes. It’s judged by how clearly the business can see what’s happening and why.
Executives want a steady, credible line of sight from backlog to outcome. They want to know what’s moving, what’s blocked, where risk is being reduced, and whether futurization is producing measurable capacity gains, not just activity. And importantly, they want this visibility without more meetings, more spreadsheets, or more overhead.
This expectation is rising for a good reason. Atlassian’s 2025 State of DevEx survey found that developers are saving time with AI tools, but they still lose comparable time to workflow and organizational friction across the delivery lifecycle.
The punchline is telling: developers only spend a small share of their week coding, so speeding up “typing” alone does not resolve the true bottlenecks.
So, transparency isn’t about reporting more. It’s about proving where capacity is going, and showing momentum the business can trust.
Expectation #3: Automation Must Expand Capacity, Not Just Optimize Tasks
Automation used to mean shaving minutes off manual steps. In 2026, automation is expected to change the throughput equation.
AI coding assistants can help developers move faster on individual tasks and in the right context they absolutely help. But their gains are bounded, because humans still carry the hardest part of delivery: compiling, testing, validating, and iterating until something is actually production-ready.
Meanwhile, developer trust in AI output remains mixed; Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey shows AI use is high, but nearly half of developers report low trust in accuracy.
The implication for leaders is straightforward: automation must do more than assist. It must reduce lifecycle bottlenecks, enforce validation, and scale output without demanding proportional headcount growth.
In other words, 2026 expects automation that finish-lines work — safely — not just automation that starts it faster.
What These Expectations Mean for IBM i IT Leaders
IBM i leaders are living the 2026 mandate in a more intense form. You steward applications that are proven, revenue-critical, and packed with decades of refined business logic. Those systems are not liabilities to escape. They are assets to futurize — to extend with modern capability, AI readiness, and new development velocity without sacrificing the stability that makes IBM i indispensable.
At the same time, you’re navigating pressures that make futurization urgent: aging RPG/COBOL talent, mounting technical debt, integration demands, and the constant pull of backlog. You’re asked to move faster, but you also know exactly what “faster but reckless” costs.
So, for IBM i, meeting 2026 expectations isn’t about abandoning the platform. It’s about amplifying what already works through incremental futurization and capacity-scaling automation.
Why AI-Assisted Coding Alone Won’t Meet 2026 Expectations
AI assistants in IDEs can be useful, but they don’t resolve the core leadership problem: throughput bottlenecks live beyond code generation.
Even with AI suggestions, your team still has to verify equivalence, compile, test across complex business paths, and ensure changes are safe to deploy. That reality limits gains, especially in mature codebases where accuracy and context matter most. The result is a better developer experience — but not necessarily the capacity shift leadership now needs.
To meet 2026 expectations, IT needs automation that completes full tasks end-to-end with enforced validation.
The Capacity Shift: Futurization with Hybrid Refactoring + Agentic Automation
This is where the futurization model aligns cleanly with the 2026 bar.
Algorithmic + AI Refactoring provides safe, predictable transformation at scale: deterministic algorithms handle the repeatable bulk work, AI accelerates complex edges, and automated testing validates functional equivalence as you go. Coexistence allows legacy and futurized components to run side-by-side, so the business never has to pause.
Then agentic-native automation changes what’s possible post-transformation. Autonomous agents don’t just suggest code. They complete full engineering cycles inside isolated containers: they implement tasks, compile, run tests, validate results, iterate until they pass, and return production-ready outcomes with evidence. And because they run in parallel, capacity becomes elastic — without hiring into a shrinking talent pool.
That combination is how IBM i teams deliver what 2026 expects: Speed with stability, transparency with proof, and automation that scales capacity instead of adding risk.
What Leadership-Grade Futurization Looks Like in 2026
For IBM i organizations, success next year won’t look like a dramatic “we escaped legacy” story. It will look like quiet, undeniable performance.
It looks like releases landing faster while defects drop. It looks like backlog categories retiring instead of refilling. It looks like refactoring becoming routine rather than aspirational. Most of all, it looks like a business that trusts IT’s roadmap because it’s already experiencing outcomes — not promises.
That’s what futurization is for: extending what’s proven with the capabilities that keep you competitive.
Your Next Step: Lead the Expectations Instead of Reacting to Them
The IT leaders who win in 2026 won’t be the ones chasing risky rewrites or hoping modest AI boosts add up. They’ll be the ones futurizing incrementally, protecting core logic through coexistence, and scaling delivery capacity with autonomous automation.
If you’re feeling pressure to deliver faster, integrate more, and do it all safely on IBM i, you’re not stuck. There’s a practical, measurable way forward.
Ready to explore what speed-with-confidence, transparency-with-proof, and automation-with-control look like in your environment? Reach out to our team at Futurization@ProfoundLogic.com.