By Ravikumar Ramachandran, Member, ISACA
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else-if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’’
– Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Chapter 2
Over the last few years, I’ve written pieces looking ahead at key governance priorities for the upcoming year, and while revisiting these pieces, I reviewed moving from “potential technology” to “practical products” in 2026, to name a few.in the current context of ever accelerating digitization of businesses, newer and innovative models of service delivery, higher convergence of knowledge and ever increasing demand for cyber security skills and AI skills in the face of newer and evolving AI-assisted cyber threats, fleeting technological evolutions including rapid growth of AI models and its usage, and quantum computing moving from “potential technology” to “practical products” in 2026, to name a few.
Things have become too dynamic and complex compared to previous years and it is becoming very difficult to arrive at the governance priorities for 2026. CEO and governance professionals will be grappling with multiple demanding tasks, finding it almost impossible to distinguish between urgent and important ones.
Nevertheless, an attempt has been made to prescribe top five priorities which will help them offer a perspective for their unique context and environment. The rankings are subjective and are arrived at after discussing with industry CEOs belonging to different industries.
Priority #1: Managing Skills Gap and Talent Management
As per World Economic Forum, skills gaps are the biggest barrier to business transformation around the world. An estimated 59% of the global workforce will need reskilling by 2030 to meet changing skills demands, but not all workers will ultimately receive it. The inability to meet evolving skills demands is slowing down progress across industries and creating pressures for workers and employers alike. In the coming 12 months, AI and ML engineering, data science, cybersecurity and blockchain development will be among the most in-demand skills.
As Banking and Fintech industries are embracing cutting edge technologies, without a skilled workforce to implement these technological solutions, the financial services industry will suffer a lot. According to IDC, IT skills shortage is expected to impact 9 out of 10 organizations by 2026 with a cost of $5.5 trillion in delays, issues, and revenue loss. Thus, CEOs and governance professionals should take up skills management as their top priority and create a continuous learning environment and ensure a continuous supply of trained workforce in their organizations. In this new world, upskilling, reskilling and continuous education, are not tasks for HR, but they are business priorities.
Priority #2: AI Ethics and Compliance Management
AI is bringing in lots of ethical requirements in its usage along with its advancement. Often AI is trained on data sets which could lead to copyright or data privacy violations. The legal positions on this are very unclear and set the biggest risk for CEOs and governance practitioners. Agentic AI are very powerful and can take independent decisions which boosts functionality but at the same time comes with huge risks and leads to the accountability question for its mistakes or for its abuse by cyber criminals. AI is creating huge job losses and enough has been spoken and written about it.
According to ISACA’s AI Pulse Poll, 89% say they’ll need AI training within two years to advance their careers or even simply stay in their roles. Retraining the workforce and deploying them constructively becomes the ethical responsibility of those in governance. AI creates synthetic content, deepfakes and misinformation, which needs to be monitored by humans and corrected. AI’s algorithms are complex and difficult to ascertain how they arrive at certain decisions.
So, AI’s explainability and transparency are to be addressed on priority. Finally, AI is creating lots of environmental impacts contributing to greenhouse gas emissions due to its high energy and water consumption, which leads to the Environmental, social, governance (ESG) issues to be focused on by governance professionals.
Priority #3: Preemptive Cybersecurity
As per Gartner’s technology trend playbook for 2026, preemptive cybersecurity is the norm going forward. That is using AI and orchestration to anticipate and neutralise threats before they materialize. With the advent of AI, cyber threats have increased multi-fold due to attacks by AI agents and at the same time, AI tools and browsers need to be protected by cyber security measures.
The predictions for 2026 are:
1. A surge in AI agent attacks: Cybercriminals will exploit the vulnerability in AI tools to inflict harmful actions on the victim organization.
2. The demand for AI Security: Enterprises will resort to AI tools protection mechanisms and will implement AI firewall to protect all its AI assets
Thus, CEOs and governance professionals must take measures towards preemptive cybersecurity. They should realise that cybersecurity gives the foundation of trust for all the stakeholders of any enterprise and they cannot afford to compromise on it.
Priority #4: Agile Strategic Management Using Data Analytics
Traditional strategic planning involved fixed, long-term goals, detailed forecasts, and periodic reviews. This is not suitable in the face of constant disruption. Agile strategic planning by contrast is having short planning cycles, incremental objectives, and adaptive learning.
This concept having been borrowed from agile project management have the following core principles:
1. Iteration and Continuous Feedback: Organizations conduct regular strategic “sprints” or checkpoints to assess progress and adjust priorities taking feedback from customers, employees, and external stakeholders.
2. Collaboration and Decentralized Decision-Making: By fostering transparency and communication across departments it aligns diverse perspectives with overarching objectives and enhances employee engagement.
3. Real-time Data and Analytics: Modern strategic planning is purely data-driven and thus provides an empirical foundation for decision-making.
Priority #5: Strategic Technology and Innovation Management
As per Forrester predictions for 2026, business and tech leaders will push for more pragmatism, more accountability and for more meaningful connections. To win the race to trust and value, they will push for operational discipline and smarter governance of AI and in parallel, resurface the importance of human insight.
The future of information systems management lies in the seamless integration of cloud and edge computing – a distributed intelligent architecture where data is processed wherever it is more efficient to do so.
Emerging technologies such as 5G networks, AI-driven orchestration and quantum computing will accelerate this convergence. Industry leaders should be prepared to embrace this technological convergence and in addition should embed innovation into strategy rather than treating it as a separate function to ensure that creativity aligns with purpose and market relevance.
Concluding remarks
The above points have been collated from various research studies and discussions with industry captains. Though lots of efforts have been taken to include all important information within these five priorities (kept for the sake of brevity), there could be much more. CEOs and governance practitioners can customize these ideas as per their unique needs and requirements.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are of the author’s own views and does not represent that of the organization or of the certification bodies he is affiliated to.