Deloitte's 2026 Tech Trends Got Me Angry
Deloitte dropped their 2026 Tech Trends report and it reads like a McKinsey deck written by someone who last touched a terminal in 2019. Let me tell you what they got right, what they buried, and what they completely whiffed on — from someone who actually ships infrastructure.
Deloitte published their Tech Trends 2026 report and I've been stewing on it for three days. Not because it's wrong exactly. Because it's almost right in ways that are more dangerous than being obviously wrong.
The Report Thinks AI Agents Are a 2026 Story
They're not. They're a 2024 story that already blew up in production at companies that weren't ready for it.
In early 2024, a fintech I was consulting with — 200 engineers, $3.2M/month AWS bill — deployed an LLM-backed agent to handle customer support routing. No circuit breakers. No token budget enforcement. No observability beyond basic CloudWatch logs. Within 6 weeks they'd burned an unplanned $400k in OpenAI API costs because the agent got into retry loops nobody had instrumented. Their on-call rotation was PagerDuty alerts for billing anomalies, not application errors. The money was gone before anyone noticed the pattern.
Deloitte frames agents as something enterprises should start exploring. That ship has sailed and some of it is on fire in the water.
What They Actually Got Right (and Why It Matters More Than You Think)
The section on technology debt as a boardroom-level risk is genuinely good. Not because it's new — every senior engineer has known this since forever — but because the framing has shifted. They cite internal platform teams as the mechanism for resolving this debt, and that's exactly what I'm seeing.
The pattern right now: companies that built Backstage-based internal developer portals in 2022-2023 are now seeing measurable cycle time reductions. Not vibes. Actual DORA metrics. Teams at Spotify (obviously), Zalando, and American Airlines have published numbers. The report gestures at this without naming the tooling, which is a miss.
If you're not running a real IDP with service catalog, scaffolding templates, and golden path enforcement by 2026, you're going to feel it in hiring. Engineers are interviewing you on your developer experience now.
The Quantum Section Is Embarrassing
I'll be fast here. Deloitte says quantum computing will begin delivering "production-adjacent" value by 2026. I don't know what production-adjacent means and I don't think they do either.
IBM's 1121-qubit Condor processor still has error rates that make it unusable for anything finance or logistics would actually care about. Google's Willow chip got headlines in December 2024 for beating classical computers on a specific benchmark — a benchmark designed to be hard for classical computers and easy for quantum ones. That's not production. That's a demo.
The real 2026 quantum story is post-quantum cryptography migration. NIST finalized ML-KEM (FIPS 203) and ML-DSA (FIPS 204) in 2024. Most engineering teams haven't started their crypto inventory, let alone migration planning. That's the actual fire. Not the shiny qubit count.
What's Missing From the Whole Report
eBPF. Entirely absent. In 2026, eBPF-based tooling — Cilium, Tetragon, Parca — is going to be the default observability and security layer for anyone running Kubernetes at scale. Datadog already has an eBPF agent. Cloudflare runs their entire edge on it. The fact that a major infrastructure trend gets zero mention tells you exactly what kind of practitioners wrote this report.
WebAssembly in server-side contexts is also missing. Fermyon, Fastly's Compute platform, wasmCloud — these aren't experiments anymore. WASM component model is real and it's changing how people think about polyglot microservices without the overhead of containers.
What I'd Do Differently
If I were writing the actual 2026 trends report worth reading: lead with platform engineering and IDP adoption curves with real Backstage download numbers. Put post-quantum crypto migration in the top three because it has a hard deadline and most teams are asleep on it. Don't mention quantum computing until there's a real error-corrected qubit running in a customer environment. And for the love of everything, talk to people who read kernel changelogs, not just CIOs.
The Deloitte report is useful for one thing: sending to your VP when you need budget approval language. For actually understanding what's coming at you technically in 2026, you need different sources.