Looking ahead to 2026: Red Hat’s view across the hybrid cloud

2025 proved to be dynamic in the world of enterprise IT - from the full-on emergence of AI agents to the renewed demands of sovereignty, there was no shortage of storylines throughout the year. But that’s looking behind us; when we look ahead, what do we expect for 2026?

Several of Red Hat’s executives have taken on this question to provide their views into the new year, emphasizing the shifting mindsets and priorities that IT leaders are facing come January. So let’s hear from them!

Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer

“Technology leaders are torn between many priorities, which will become even starker in 2026. They need to encourage AI usage to rapidly realize ROI while maintaining appropriate security and privacy measures. Then they must modernize and address technical debt, and deploy further into hybrid environments as sovereign IT interest soars. On top of all of this, they need to ensure that their teams are skilled and agile enough to not just meet but thrive through this change. With the rapid pace of AI development, we expect that the value of an open platform that can scale to meet these dynamic, often-competing priorities, will become even more recognized in 2026. Red Hat seeks to deliver this platform, built on a foundation of open source innovation with Linux and Kubernetes for cloud native and legacy applications, and then bring this trusted technology and expertise to an agentic future, one that optimizes AI inference for any model, any accelerator and running on any cloud.” 

Mike Ferris, senior vice president, chief operating officer and chief strategy officer

“We are reaching a tipping point where IT modernization is no longer just an efficiency goal. It’s rapidly becoming about survival. Enterprises are caught between a rock and a hard place with the volatility of the virtualization market and the absolute imperative to adopt AI. These dual pressures are exposing technical debt like never before, transforming it from a nagging operational cost into a brick wall that can stifle innovation. All while business demands continue to accelerate. 

To succeed, enterprises will need technology that builds a bridge, connecting the trusted stability of existing systems to flexible, intelligent systems–think AI agents, for example–where we know innovation will be happening in the future. Platforms that leverage existing investment in people and processes while being adaptable to future capabilities will lead industries forward. Delaying this work has always been risky, but in 2026 the stakes are even higher. It really is now or never to build your technology foundation for the future.”

Brian Stevens, senior vice president and chief technology officer for AI

“Over the last three years, the industry has witnessed massive investments in training generative LLMs at frontier labs across the globe. The result has been a broad choice of powerful reasoning models, which are now available as both open source and proprietary. This past year, we’ve seen the emergence of agents, powered by these advanced reasoning models, and integrated into a broad ecosystem of tools, data, and systems. What this means for 2026 is that the emphasis is now shifting to inference platforms, which implies the production platforms for running these agents scalably, efficiently, reliably, and securely. Just as we did two decades ago with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, through Red Hat AI, we are providing the unified inference platform that not only delivers production at scale, but also enables any model, any accelerator, any cloud.”

Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Global Engineering

“We are at the beginning of a new and chaotic technology era, where the rapid pace of generative AI innovation is transforming how every enterprise operates. AI cannot be a solution in search of a problem; instead, AI adoption must be tied to actual use cases. That means CIOs must ensure those AI cases are moving from proof of concept into production. Because AI is moving so fast, enterprises need the ability to quickly integrate new technologies into a production environment–where value can be immediately realized on a common, stable and trusted platform. As we move into 2026, this flexibility should be a focal point for CIOs: Open platforms that bridge heterogeneous systems, workloads (from traditional applications to AI agents), and requirements will be crucial. It’s about the ability to build for today’s production demands while being prepared for tomorrow’s AI workloads.” 

Whatever 2026 holds for the world of enterprise technology, Red Hat will be ready to support our customers and partners. Whether it’s standardizing on a Linux or application platform that meets you where you are, adopting modern virtualization solutions or delivering an AI strategy, Red Hat brings the trusted open innovation needed to turn proof-of-concepts into production systems.

Here’s to the new year!