By 2026, âdigital-firstâ no longer means Zoom works and paper is discouraged. That bar was cleared years ago.
What clients and staff now experience as modern is something quieter. Systems act on their behalf without prompting, and the technology itself fades into the background. When it works properly, no one notices it at all.
This is less about buying tools and more about reaching operational maturity. Here is how we usually break that transition down.
What does âdata sovereignâ actually change in day-to-day operations?
In 2020, the cloud was about resilience. In 2026, it is about control.
Clients increasingly expect clarity on where their data physically lives. Keeping workloads within UK or EU jurisdictions is becoming part of trust, not just compliance. At the same time, cloud spend needs active financial oversight. Unused capacity in platforms like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services quietly erodes margin if no one is accountable for it.
Why is FinOps suddenly a board-level concern?
Because cloud costs no longer scale linearly with value.
We often see environments sized for peak demand that never arrives. The result is predictable monthly overspend with no operational benefit. FinOps is simply applying financial discipline to infrastructure, aligning usage, budgets and accountability. When done properly, it releases cash without cutting capability, which is rare in most optimisation exercises.
Why does NPU capability matter more than CPU speed now?
Software behaviour has changed.
Applications like Adobe, Zoom and AI assistants embedded in operating systems increasingly run local models for transcription, image processing and analysis. Without a dedicated Neural Processing Unit, those tasks fall back to the CPU.
The practical effect is poor battery life, heat and sluggish performance within a year. NPU-enabled machines age very differently, which is why we now treat them as a baseline requirement rather than a premium feature.
If the office firewall is obsolete, what replaces it?
Identity does.
The perimeter is no longer the building. It is the user and their behaviour. Modern attacks rarely brute-force systems. They exploit valid credentials. Identity Threat Detection and Response focuses on spotting anomalies in how accounts behave, not just whether passwords are correct.
This shift also forces uncomfortable conversations about executive risk. Voice deepfakes are now convincing enough to trigger fraudulent transfers. A simple, agreed âsafe wordâ protocol for urgent financial approvals remains one of the highest impact controls available.
What does an âagenticâ workflow look like in practice?
It looks boring when it works.
Instead of asking a chatbot to draft an email, an agent monitors a folder. An invoice arrives, the agent reads it, matches it to a purchase order, posts it into Xero or Sage, and queues it for approval.
The constraint is not AI capability. It is data hygiene. Without consistent file structures and naming conventions, agents cannot act safely. Most early failures trace back to messy information, not weak models.
How does the physical office stay relevant in a digital-first setup?
By removing friction that home working cannot.
Meeting rooms need to release themselves when no one shows up. Acoustic privacy needs to exist outside bookable rooms. People should be able to take a call without negotiating space. These are small design decisions, but they determine whether the office feels supportive or obstructive.
When the environment adapts automatically, staff focus on work rather than logistics.
A simple way to stress-test your readiness
If I were reviewing this internally, I would start with three questions.
Do we have a clear protocol to verify urgent financial requests in a world of voice deepfakes?
Do we know how much of our data is unclassified, unused or forgotten?
Are the laptops we are buying today designed for local AI workloads over the next operating system cycle?
The answers tend to reveal very quickly whether âdigital-firstâ is a slogan or a working reality.
Making the shift without overreaching
If I were weighing the trade-offs, I would avoid chasing novelty and focus on invisibility. The goal is not to impress staff with tools, but to remove drag from how work actually happens.
When infrastructure executes quietly and securely in the background, teams move faster without feeling pushed. That, more than any specific technology, is what a digital-first 2026 really looks like.
