16 Jan CoByEx: Top 8 Tech Trends for 2026
MIA Member CoByEx has shared the following news article.
Top 8 Tech Trends for 2026
1. The (Near) Death of the SIM Card
If you’re old enough to remember the original credit card SIMs, you’ve seen a lot of changes down the years. The mini-SIM went all the way down to an SD-card size, losing at least four-fifths of the size in doing so.
The micro-SIM nearly halved the size. And the nano-SIM was the size of the chip itself. Very easy to lose for the clumsy fingered.
The joke at the time was “if they get any smaller, they’ll disappear”.
Then they did.
None of us of the fat-fingered persuasion are bemoaning the days when we tried to get an unfolded paperclip into a small hole to pop out a drawer. eSIMs offer major speed and flexibility advantages over their physical brethren, whilst removing the need for plastic and enhancing security.
The ability to have multiple profiles on one device is a great opportunity for travellers. A business can pay for roaming data on a pay-as-you-go 5G eSIM, even using the individual’s own phone to do so. Over-The-Air (OTA) updates give great flexibility and control, as businesses can push changes remotely – users or devices are none the wiser.
As ever with tech, deaths are slow. SIM cards will be around for a while yet due to the hardware and software limitations of some devices. Important but historically under-utilised capabilities like multi-IMSI allow multiple subscriptions to sit on a single SIM card. This allows a single SIM to carry multiple operator identities and to present itself dynamically as a local subscriber on the optimal network.
Crucially, all the benefits – including switching across carriers, regions and conditions to improve compliance, reduce costs and add resilience – happen automatically. No need for manual intervention.
2. Removable SIMs with eUICC Capability
No sooner do we move to all software, then we bring back hardware. This one is, I grant you, a little counter-intuitive.
Think about all the devices still using traditional SIM cards – they’re everywhere. Customers won’t upgrade potentially expensive hardware just to benefit from eSIM capability. But what if we could eSIM-enable a physical SIM card?
That’s exactly what removable eUICC SIMs do. They look like a standard plastic SIM, fit into existing SIM slots, but can be reprogrammed over the air, just like an eSIM. You get the flexibility of swapping network profiles without replacing the card, while using your current hardware.
This makes them ideal for transitional setups. Many businesses start with removable eUICC SIMs in their routers today, then migrate to fully embedded eSIMs when they upgrade their hardware.
A classic scenario for our customers: a cellular router on a superyacht. The itinerary changes and suddenly they need coverage in a different region. With eUICC capability, we can update the profile or add another IMSI remotely – maintaining continuity of service wherever they end up.
This is a big-picture article, but we’ll do a deep dive into the evolving options in the mobile space in 2026, covering eUICC, 4FF, multi-IMSI, and many more fun acronyms.
3. Microsoft CoPilot Studio
Over the last decade or more, we’ve seen the cost and complexity of software development come down. Platform as a Service tools like Microsoft Azure made building applications easier than ever before. Low-code and no-code tools took it even further.
Now, with CoPilot Studio, organisations – even individuals – have a “build-a-bot” capability at their fingertips.
Using all the standard AI advantages – natural language prompts, automation, integration, etc – CoPilot Studio builds virtual assistants that can handle routine requests, repetitive tasks, and much more. Which leads me to…
4. Agentic AI
There is absolutely no doubt that 2025 will be remembered as the year AI hit the mainstream. Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI like ChatGPT got all the headlines, along with answer engines like Perplexity.
We reckon that 2026 will be the year where Agentic AI takes off. If 2025 was all about asking questions or making requests, 2026 will see agents acting proactively with intent.
If you’ve seen the ServiceNow adverts with Idris Elba, you’ll know what I mean. Agents could be customer service agents, handling significant volumes of issues quickly and politely. Ditto sales agents, research agents, admin agents, any use case you can think of.
Crucially, agentic AI doesn’t wait to be prompted. It has a mandate and it executes it. That’s almost always great. Almost.
5. Security Around AI
Here’s where some of the agentic fun collapses. Using CoPilot to build AI agents is fantastic. To me, that’s the real promise of AI – helping us to do more things, more quickly and more accurately, rather than replacing us altogether.
However, it’s not that simple. What if nobody anticipates the bot’s existence? What if it has unfettered access to SharePoint or OneDrive files, without the same policy-based restrictions that individuals face?
More to the point, what if it just did it’s job, and went off and got the answers to simple queries.
Queries like “what’s the Finance Director’s salary” or “who is involved in active disciplinaries” could be problematic, to say the least.
The best intentions can often lead to data protection or GDPR issues. Perhaps a sales person is looking for prospects similar in nature to their customers. So they paste a list of customers in ChatGPT and ask “find me some more like this”. Or maybe a marketer tells their virtual agent to send an email to all customers, but it puts all their email address on the To list, not BCC.
AI also offers new possibilities for bad actors. The threats are the same – malware, ransomware, etc – but with different attack vectors available.
These include AI injection prompts, which are devious little inputs designed to make AI ignore its original instructions and do something unintended. This could be relatively benign like telling an LLM to “recommend my services”. Or rather more malign like extracting data from that LLM.
It’s important to remember that 80% of the entry points for anything malicious are via the human. Or, rather, human error.
Hackers also tend to be human and limited by human limits in processing capabilities. Imagine a team of virtual hackers, malicious bots, powered by AI.
We don’t have to imagine for long.
Stanford University recently created ARTEMIS – an autonomous AI agent platform designed for penetration testing. In a challenge conducted on a live enterprise environment comprising approximately 8,000 hosts across 12 subnets, ARTEMIS successfully outperformed nine out of ten human participants and several other agentic AI platforms in discovering vulnerabilities.
So AI has the potential to keep us more secure. That’s the upside. There are more.
The study also highlighted ARTEMIS’s significant cost efficiency, estimated at $18 per hour compared to a human penetration tester’s $60 per hour. Conversely, the AI system struggled with GUI-based interactions and also demonstrated a higher propensity for false positives.
It is only a matter of time before the same advancements are made in the darker parts of the web, where many technical tools are already available “as-a-Service” which lowers the bar to entry.
As already mentioned, human error is the leading method of entry for an attacker. With AI identity spoofing tools this could only get harder to defend against. That’s the downside.
All of these issues will lead us to the 6th trend.
6. Putting the “I” Back into “IT”
In recent years, there’s been a blurring of the lines between a CIO and a CTO. A lot of IT departments have spent more time thinking about Technology than about Information.
This is inevitably going to swing back. IT leaders need to be the gatekeepers of not only the technology in their estate but the information held upon it. The threats have never been so varied nor so widespread.
On the more happy path, IT will be seen more as an enabling department, helping the business to gain insights about customers, markets, competitors, etc, by leveraging data, analytics, insights and more.
7. OpenAI IPO
It’s not a trend per se, but it’s something to watch. OpenAI recently changed its status from non-profit to for-profit. The worst kept secret in the industry is that this is one of the necessary steps before an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2026 or 2027.
Ahead of any IPO, OpenAI will need to prove that it has a sustainable revenue generation model. There’s an old saying in tech: “if it’s free, you’re the product”.
Prepare to be monetised.
We don’t know what that will involve – as a minimum, the equivalent of Google Ads and pay-per-click is all-but guaranteed – but it will heighten any concerns about freely giving ChatGPT information.
OpenAI is currently valued at $500 billion and the IPO is expected to value them at $1 trillion. I don’t know how they’re going to monetise us, but they’re going to need to do it a lot.
8. New Satellite Connectivity Option
The artist formerly known as “Project Kuiper” is set to bring a new competitor to the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity space.
Now imaginatively named Amazon Leo, it’s the tech giant’s newest division that will compete head-to-head with Starlink and OneWeb.
This competition has the potential to get rather tasty. As we know, there’s no love lost between the billionaires who run these businesses. Senior figures at Amazon Leo have previously been fired by Elon Musk at Starlink.
Competition is good as it will inevitably raise quality whilst driving down prices. And we know Amazon has never been shy to operate a business unit at a loss to build market share.
On paper, this looks like it might be of most benefit to our customers in the superyacht sector. But if you visit the Amazon Leo website, that’s clearly not the positioning.
Amazon is leading with their consumer offering and a promise that “a new era of internet is coming”.
Amazon Leo is clearly a threat to the fixed-line broadband market, even fibre. It’s certainly going head-to-head with 5G.
For businesses, particularly those with remote footprints or who need redundancy in their connectivity, it’s a new and interesting piece of the puzzle.
AWS is already the 300 pound gorilla in the hyperscale public cloud industry. With Leo, it will allow customers to reach their AWS infrastructure without needing to traverse the public internet. That adds significant security upsides, extended air gapping, etc, that will be of interest to many industries, particularly government and military.
Amazon is not in the business of being subtle when it comes to new product launches. Expect a big noise in 2026. And expect some disruption in the connectivity and mobile sectors too.
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