Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Kyle Campos, CTPO, CloudBolt
The past few years have laid the groundwork for more intelligent and automated systems, but 2026 marks a true turning point where technology silos aren’t just broken down; they start to converge.
AI agents will finally stop acting as isolated tools and begin operating as active participants in shared ecosystems. As more enterprises adopt AI and mature in their usage, they’re shifting from scattered experimentation to intentional orchestration, bringing structure, strategy, and long-term vision to what used to be ad-hoc deployments.
Meanwhile, the broader technology stack is undergoing a similar transformation. Systems that once lived in their own silos are beginning to converge, reshaping how businesses think about scale, governance, and day-to-day operations. Optimization is becoming continuous, orchestration is becoming multi-layered, and teams that once operated independently are aligning around unified workflows and shared outcomes.
This is the year AI and cloud infrastructure stop operating as a collection of standalone tools and start working together as a coordinated network that can share context, make decisions, and create far more value than any singular system could on its own. This shift will redefine how teams interact with AI, how vendors compete, and how enterprises rethink the very architecture of their technology stacks.
The Next Phase of AI: Agents Finally Start Talking to Each Other
In 2026, we’ll see a surge in Model Context Protocol (MCP) adoption, cross-agent communication and effective multi-agent systems. After years of AI tools operating in isolation – with each powering a single workflow or productivity task – organizations will begin stitching these systems together into coordinated networks that can reason, plan, and execute across functions. This will be one of several factors pushing enterprises to formalize corporate AI strategies, moving usage out of individual productivity lanes and setting clear organizational requirements. As a result, vendors will be expected to align with these strategies, with RFPs explicitly requiring interoperability and MCP compliance.
Kubernetes and Cloud Optimization Go Mainstream
As AI-driven workloads continue to rise, infrastructure efficiency will become mission-critical. Next year, automated Kubernetes optimization will hit majority adoption, finally moving cost management and performance tuning out of ineffective manual processes that have dominated in past years but cannot keep up with the volume of modern workloads. This trend toward continuous optimization will also expand beyond Kubernetes to data warehouses and other high growth workloads, fueled in part by increased AI-driven usage across enterprises. By the end of 2026, continuous optimization will be table stakes for any enterprise running at scale in the cloud.
The End of Silos: The “School of Fish” Approach
Teams responsible for “build,” “manage,” and “optimize” initiatives will no longer operate in isolation. Instead, the shift from “pets to cattle to school of fish” will take hold, where orchestrating the entire stack holistically, not just compute clusters – from deployment to management to optimization – will deliver faster, more efficient, and secure operations. As these boundaries blur, more and more teams will adopt shared tooling, context, and workflows, making infrastructure feel less like a set of layers and more like a synchronized system.
Big Shakeups for Broadcom/VMware Customers
Lastly, 2026 will be the year Broadcom begins to experience the fallout from its VMware shift. Many companies that have experimented with alternatives last year are now planning their next moves, and early signs of a larger customer exodus are expected to appear. As enterprises move toward more integrated, interoperable architectures where orchestration, optimization, and AI all work together, lock-in to monolithic, siloed platforms becomes increasingly untenable.
As these shifts take hold, 2026 will challenge enterprises to rethink not just the tools they use, but the operating behind those models. The winners won’t be the organizations chasing every new AI capability; they will be those that are building the connective tissue that allows capabilities to reinforce each other. Success will hinge on creating environments where automation can evolve, systems can learn from shared context, and infrastructure can respond to demand. In this next phase, the real competitive advantage comes from treating infrastructure not as a set of standalone investments, but as an integrated layer of the business.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kyle is a seasoned technology veteran with a 25-year track record of building scalable, agile, and practical development projects. At CloudBolt, he is Chief Technology and Product Officer, where he leads the development of next-generation capabilities to further CloudBolt’s mission of helping enterprise customers build, manage and optimize any cloud.
