IT professionals are often the unsung heroes who work behind the scenes to ensure everyone’s work experience runs smoothly. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in the computer and IT occupations is projected to grow by 14.6% from 2021 to 2031.
Below, we have gathered predictions for what these positions will look like in the future. We hope you find them insightful.
AI Will Continue to Drive Change in IT
10-15 years ago, one of the biggest transformations in IT was the shift from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. Organizations were actively migrating existing workloads, while new software was increasingly designed and deployed directly within cloud ecosystems. This fundamentally changed the role of IT teams, requiring them to think more about automation, scalability, security, and infrastructure as code.
Today, AI is driving the next major transformation. In the past decade, methodologies such as Agile, Kanban, and Scrum were the ways of organizing software development around business needs. AI is changing these processes and the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). I expect many existing workflows will need to evolve as organizations learn where AI genuinely improves productivity and where human expertise is still necessary. It will take some time for the industry to determine what really works, what doesn’t, and what new processes should be established to build and deliver software faster and more effectively.
Artur Yolchyan, Engineering Leader, Al and Cloud
Increasing IT Accountability
Over the last decade, IT’s job has expanded from keeping systems available and secure to managing cloud, SaaS, data, integrations, and now AI. I think the next shift is more consequential. IT will increasingly be accountable, not just for whether an AI system works, but for whether the enterprise can reconstruct what that system knew, where the information came from, how it was transformed, and why an action or decision followed.
As AI agents begin working across applications and conversations, questions of provenance, interoperability, governance and durable records move from compliance concerns into core IT architecture. Models will change quickly. An enterprise’s memory and decision history cannot disappear every time the technology stack changes. That pushes the IT leader’s role beyond custodian of systems toward architect of trustworthy machine-assisted decisions.
Ken Herron, Co-Founder, VCONify
Transitioning to Supervised AI-assisted Workflows
Over the last decade, IT has moved from primarily operating systems and delivering technology to becoming much more embedded in how the business makes decisions and changes how work gets done. I see that clearly in data engineering. The role is no longer just about building pipelines or moving data. Engineers increasingly have to understand business rules, data quality, governance, cloud architecture, security boundaries, cost, and now where AI should and should not be used. I think the next shift will be from people producing every technical artifact themselves to people designing, supervising and validating increasingly AI-assisted workflows. AI can already accelerate SQL, documentation, testing, metadata analysis and troubleshooting, but speed does not remove accountability. If anything, judgment becomes more important because technically plausible output can still be wrong for the business. The strongest IT professionals will combine deep technical foundations with systems thinking, domain understanding and the ability to challenge what AI produces rather than simply accept it.
Amit Kumar Singh, AVP, Lead Data Engineer, EXL
Governing Software That Can Act on Its Own
I run the technology stack for five small companies rather than an enterprise IT department, so this is the small business view. “For a decade the IT job was keeping systems running and keeping people out of trouble. The next decade is governing software that acts on its own. We already run AI agents that publish to our websites, close the books daily, and flag billing problems overnight for a person to work. The hard part was never getting them to act. It was deciding what they are allowed to do unsupervised, and building gates that stop them when they go past it. That is closer to writing policy than to administering servers. The IT person who thrives is the one who can name exactly which actions need a human signature and prove the rule is enforced rather than documented.
Jack Wright, VP of Operations, HealthWright Technologies
Reading Business Context
The clearest marker of the last decade is that IT stopped getting judged on ticket queues and started getting judged on business outcomes. Firefighting is table stakes now. The work that matters is the security, cloud, and governance decisions that let the rest of the company move faster while staying inside compliance. Going forward, the IT leaders who get a real seat at the table are the ones who can tie infrastructure and data choices to a number a CFO recognizes. They skip the technical explanations and focus on showing what a system actually changes. Hiring reflects it too. When I help founders build technical teams, the people who scale with a business can read business context, not just architecture diagrams.
Val Narodetsky, CEO, Odesa
Managing an Evolving Web of Identities, Permissions, Data, and Third-Party Connections
Ten years ago, cybersecurity was just treated as an IT responsibility, alongside keeping systems running and employees productive. This model has been dismantled by cloud adoption, remote working, sprawling supplier access and now AI. Modern IT leaders used to defend a small technical perimeter, but in 2026 and beyond they are managing a constantly evolving web of identities, permissions, data flows and third-party connections. Today, a small configuration can become a whole business security issue.
The next step will be even more significant. AI agents are already acting inside this IT environment. Agents that can query company data or take an action essentially become additional privileged users. The difference between them and a colleague is that an agent’s behaviour can be potentially manipulated through the information it receives. IT teams must step up their governance over machines, always testing what their boundaries can hold.
George Rees, Senior Security Consultant, Secarma
IT Will Become A Strategic Partner
A decade ago, IT was a reactive function. Something broke, you called someone, they fixed it. Today it’s something closer to a strategic partner, the teams and providers involved are expected to understand a business’s growth plans, not just keep its systems running. You see it in how quickly a company can hire across borders, how seriously security and infrastructure get treated before problems show up rather than after.
Looking ahead, I think the next decade is about trust as much as technology. Automation and AI are already everywhere in IT, but the businesses adopting them well are the ones with IT guiding that adoption deliberately, weighing not just efficiency but security. The professionals who matter most from here are the ones leadership consults when making that call, the trusted partner deciding which new technologies are genuinely worth adopting, and how to do it securely.
Hugh Caldwell, CEO, Texaport
Enabling a Hybrid Workforce
Ten years ago, IT got measured on what it kept running. Uptime, the network, the ticket queue. Two things broke that model. The cloud took infrastructure off our hands as the thing we were custodians of, and a global pandemic forced IT to become the operating layer of the entire company in about three weeks. Security moved off the IT org chart and onto the board agenda somewhere in there, and data stopped being exhausted and became the raw material. In the healthcare industry, this shift was sharper still. We went from wiring up electronic health record systems (EHRs) to running models that sit between clinicians and payers in real time. The job changed from keeping systems available to shaping how the work actually gets done.
I’m optimistic about where this goes. The best IT organizations I see now run like product organizations with a P&L mindset to match, reporting on revenue enabled and hours returned to the people doing the work rather than ticket volume. The bigger change is still ahead. Agentic AI means IT is about to be accountable for a workforce that isn’t human, and every agent needs roughly what an employee needs: a defined scope, credentials, a supervisor, and an offboarding date. That discipline already lives in IT. Nobody else in the company has it. Which is why the CTO role stops being about the stack and becomes about enabling a hybrid workforce and the economics behind it.
Zach Evans, CTO at Xsolis
IT Will Become an Intelligence Layer
Over the last decade, the role of IT has changed from maintaining systems to actively shaping how businesses operate. Earlier, IT teams were often measured by stability, uptime, and operational efficiency. Today, they are expected to help identify new opportunities, modernize workflows, improve customer experiences, and enable faster business decisions. The next evolution of IT will be centered around becoming an intelligence layer for the organization. With AI becoming embedded into everyday processes, IT teams will spend less time managing repetitive tasks and more time designing systems that combine automation, data, and human expertise. The challenge will not simply be adopting new technology, but ensuring these systems are secure, reliable, and aligned with business goals. I believe the strongest IT organizations moving forward will be those that can balance innovation with governance. The teams that succeed will not just deploy AI tools, but build the infrastructure, processes, and culture needed to use technology responsibly at scale.
Kavin Xavier, Vice President of AI Solutions, CapeStart
An Accelerated Shift Towards Stewards of Enterprise Decision
Over the last decade, IT has evolved from being a technology service provider to becoming a steward of enterprise decision-making. The next decade will accelerate that shift. As organizations invest in data products, AI agents, automation, and intelligent workflows, the next challenge will be ensuring that every human and machine decision is grounded in a shared understanding of the business. Concepts like ontology, semantics, and enterprise knowledge models may sound academic today, but they are where the most forward-thinking IT orgs are designing for the future. Organizations that can consistently define what customers, products, risks, policies, and business events mean across the enterprise will be able to automate more confidently and make better decisions at a faster pace.
Looking ahead, I believe IT will increasingly become the governing function for enterprise intelligence. The sum of a company’s operations is really an aggregation of millions of individual decisions. As decision-making becomes distributed across people, applications, workflows, and AI agents, IT’s role will be to establish the meshed frameworks that ensure those decisions are aligned, explainable, and governed. In that world, IT is no longer just responsible for technology platforms. It becomes responsible for the operational fabric that connects data, knowledge, automation, and business outcomes. The future of IT isn’t just building smarter systems. It’s creating the intelligence framework that allows an entire organization to make better decisions.
Ethan Miller, Vice President of Delivery Services, Hylaine
Connecting Technologies, Individuals and Processes
Over the past ten years, IT has evolved from being mainly an operational support tool into a major business strategy component. With cloud, big data, cybersecurity, automation and now artificial intelligence technologies, all are increasingly interconnected with aspects of customer experiences as well as business performance. In my role as a digital marketer, the most significant change for me is that IT is no longer simply maintaining the operation of the organization’s technical infrastructure. IT is increasingly involved in determining how technology may be employed to enhance business operations.
Going forward, I believe IT will evolve to focus less on managing discrete technological systems and instead, connect technologies, individuals and processes. While AI will continue to automate much of the repetitive effort associated with IT tasks, the need for effective human oversight, high-quality data, robust security and adequate governance will keep growing. Those IT professionals who can effectively integrate their understanding of technology with their knowledge of the business problems that each technology seeks to solve. Will be uniquely positioned as those organizations struggle to transition away from merely implementing new technologies toward ensuring that these implementations result in a measurable business impact.
Darren Taylor, founder and managing director, Lead Velocity
Keeping the Environment Understood
Looking back 10 years (2016), I was learning about cloud native architecture and building layers of cybersecurity controls against threats that were primarily vulnerability exploits and misconfigurations. The key distinction, IT was in a gatekeeper position. Everything ran through IT, and it was rare for anything technical to enter our environment without our knowledge.
Where we are now (2026), the job has flipped. IT’s focus now is more on discovery work as we try to get a handle on the dozens of tools, apps, and AI initiatives that are already running full steam ahead inside the business. IT is introduced sporadically into the decision making process, often as an afterthought. This is because it’s never been easier to spin up a new SaaS tool or AI chatbot. Cybersecurity has shifted as well in the same way, with attackers targeting identities vs. devices. Effective IT teams recognize that they are no longer in a gatekeeper role and are now in an advisory role. Since we cannot lock down or intercept all the business decisions that impact or involve technology, our job is to focus on earning a seat at the table early enough to guide those business decisions as early as possible.
It’s a great time to be in IT, so long as you recognize that our role has shifted from controlling the environment to doing our best to keep the environment well-understood by business leaders. The IT teams that thrive over the next decade will be the ones who can help their organization build fast, safe systems with risks and capabilities that are generally well understood in the field and in the boardroom.
John Snyder, CEO, Net Friends Inc.
Governing Systems that Act on Their Own
Over the last decade IT went from a service function to the group accountable for nearly every system the business runs on, which means IT now signs off on initiatives it doesn’t own. The move to recurring subscriptions accelerated that, turning procurement from a one-time capital approval into continuous risk analysis: where the data lives, how it authenticates, what the exposure looks like if the vendor is breached. Physical security is a good example, where IT’s questions increasingly decide the purchase. From here, IT’s next responsibility is governing systems that act on their own, deciding what software is permitted to do without a person in the loop.
Dinesh Coca, GM & SVP, Product & Engineering, HiveWatch
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