Seven enterprise tech trends in S’pore to look out for in 2026

SINGAPORE - The year 2025 has been a banner one for tech, with artificial intelligence (AI) making the most impact on businesses. A government survey showed that small and medium-sized enterprises in Singapore have adopted AI at an average of three business uses, and other types of organisations are using it in five. Most companies are tapping the technology for information technology, customer service and finance.

Here are seven enterprise tech trends expected to take hold in Singapore in 2026:

1. CFOs cut spending on generative AI

After a year of great promises and proven productivity boosts, generative AI bots and assistants have still not lifted bottom lines.

Hence, in 2026, chief financial officers (CFOs) will crimp AI spending, delaying a quarter of AI spending into 2027, said Mr Fred Giron, senior research director of consultancy firm Forrester.

At the firm’s recent 2026 tech trends forecast session, Mr Giron cited four hurdles: a missing link between the technology and business strategies; a lack of investment in AI foundational enablers such as data and platforms; middle management bottlenecks; and organisations having forgotten how to innovate after years of outsourcing.

He said: “All the companies are tracking one very simple metric when they scale AI, which is the number of hours that is saved to the employees. But the issue is that these hours are not impacting the bottom line.”

Costs involved in preparing data for scaling AI and that of running live AI agents are also considerations, he said.

Therefore, expect CFOs to defer AI investments in 2026, said Mr Giron.

2. In demand: safe storage of data at home

In August,

Google Cloud announced expanded data-residency guarantees

, allowing organisations to keep not just data at rest, but also interactions with its Gemini model within Singapore.

This, the tech firm said, would allow sectors with stricter data rules, such as finance, healthcare and government contractors, to run work­loads locally.​

Pure Storage’s vice-president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, Mr Nathan Hall, expects data sovereignty to rise in focus as global trade tensions rise.

“Organisations must gain clear visibility into where their data resides, who controls it, and how easily it can move when markets shift,” he said.

Mr Mohan Veloo, chief technology officer for Asia-Pacific, China and Japan for app delivery and security services firm F5, said governments across the region are investing heavily in sovereign AI infrastructure.

“Compute, data and AI pipelines are increasingly treated as strategic assets that must be locally governed and secured,” he said.

3. More Chinese tech investments here

Chinese technology firms with presence here are making plans to introduce new robots, language models and cloud services to win over more local clients in 2026, as Chinese capital continues to flow into the Republic in search of markets to cushion China’s economic slowdown.

The trend is being boosted by the Chinese strategy of offering open-source models to drive adoption and innovation, as compared with pay-to-use models favoured by the West.

Mr Charlie Dai, principal analyst at Forrester, said the US and China are adopting different growth strategies for their technology sectors, with the former focusing on the private sector and China taking on a government-driven model.

It does not mean only one can succeed, he said.

“We see the future of co-existence... And I believe it’s actually a good thing to make it more competitive. So, for those companies in South-east Asia... they can have more choices.”

4. More AI agents talking in one’s language

As voice technology improves, AI agents will start appearing in everyday devices such as personal voice assistants, customer service avatars and roving robots.

Singapore’s home-grown large language models such as SEA-LION and MERaLiON are driving this shift in South-east Asia, with support in regional languages such as Javanese, Sundanese, Tamil, Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay and Bahasa Indonesia.

San Francisco-based firm Salesforce, which makes customer relationship management applications, is one firm making its solution available in Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay and Bahasa Indonesia in South-east Asia.

Mr Gavin Barfield, Salesforce’s chief technology officer for solutions in ASEAN, said: “Voice will increasingly become the new interface through which we interact with agents, replacing chatbots. Agentic voice technology will allow humans to speak to agents in a natural, conversational manner, as if conversing with another human.

“These agents can handle all incoming calls in real time, effectively eliminating the need for interactive voice response – press one for sales; press two for support menus, and hold music – which has been an annoyance.”

5. Smaller firms turn prey for casual hackers

Smaller companies with weak defences will be the new targets in cyberattacks, with the rise of bad actors deploying easy-to-use tools.

“Instead of attacking the big bank directly, they will hack the bank’s smaller printing vendor,” predicted Mr Gaurav Keerthi, chief executive of cybersecurity firm StrongKeep.

AI will create risks faster than it solves old ones, he added, as companies rush to scale AI without enough governance or technical controls, and developers use AI-written code before sufficient scrutiny.

“OpenAI itself warned that its new model will lead to high cybersecurity risk,” he said.

But Mr Keerthi believes that incidences of cyberattacks will also become normalised. “Companies will pivot their focus from avoiding incidents to managing the outcome. Society will adopt similar heuristics, and blame organisations only if they bungle the recovery effort.”

6. Telcos offer more services like identity verification

Led by Singtel and M1, local telcos will continue to move beyond network connectivity to offer platforms where businesses can customise services.

Mr Julian Gorman, head of Asia-Pacific at the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, said companies could increasingly tap the telco network for tasks such as to verify customers’ identities, confirm a device’s location, or to guarantee real-time network performance.

“These tools make the mobile network itself part of a company’s security and performance system, not just a basic channel for data,” he said.

The goal is to make the network itself a secure engine for innovation, especially as scams rise and data rules tighten. This shift also lets banks and fintechs detect fraud faster while keeping sensitive data within Singapore, he added.

7. CIOs to clean up AI slop

Chief information officers (CIOs) get the job of cleaning AI slop.

Forrester’s Mr Giron gave an example of a sales department that rushed out an AI agent in 2025 that drafts contracts and dispatches them automatically to clients.

“As you can imagine, in one scenario, 500 clients are receiving these contracts where they have this lifetime unconditional return,” he said.

“Because the AI wants to please customers, that would create significant incidents, and then the chief executive officer will call in the CIO and say ‘okay, can you handle this mess, please’.”