Forrester says AI is reshaping cloud strategy for 2026
Fri, 2nd Oct 2026 (Today)
Forrester has published research on the top cloud trends for 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence is reshaping cloud strategy.
The report identifies 10 developments that technology leaders should watch as AI changes cloud economics, governance, operations, and deployment models.
It says the market is shifting from commodity cloud to AI-native cloud as companies move from AI experimentation to broader deployment across business and IT functions.
Key themes include growing multicloud complexity, rising AI-related cloud costs, sovereignty concerns, and a push to deploy business-facing agentic AI. Cloud strategy is also becoming more closely tied to AI strategy as organisations decide where to place workloads, how to manage resilience, and how much control to retain over infrastructure.
Governance focus
One of the report's central findings is that governance is becoming more urgent as companies deploy AI agents across workflows. Businesses need tighter controls over how those agents access data, make decisions, and operate across cloud environments.
The research also points to a shift from a narrow focus on data sovereignty to what it calls sovereign AI. That includes questions about how AI systems operate, what dependencies they rely on, and whether policies can be enforced consistently across platforms.
Forrester says cloud providers are changing their role by building AI tools into operations, software development, security, and governance. The firm argues that this is pushing buyers to think beyond performance and scale to visibility, accountability, and operational control.
Operational change
Cloud operations are becoming more agent-driven, with AI systems taking on investigation, remediation, and management tasks in complex environments. The report says this shift may help organisations manage larger estates while maintaining human oversight.
At the same time, cloud economics are changing as AI workloads add costs and create new security and compliance pressures. That is prompting some organisations to revisit private cloud and hybrid infrastructure while paying closer attention to cost visibility and governance.
The report also describes a more distributed cloud market, shaped by edge AI, power constraints, ecosystem dependencies, and hybrid cloud redesigns. In this model, organisations increasingly run AI workloads closer to where data is created to meet performance, resilience, and compliance requirements.
Tracy Woo, Principal Analyst, Forrester, said: "AI is fundamentally changing what enterprises expect from cloud platforms. What began as a platform for scalability and agility is rapidly evolving into the operating foundation for enterprise intelligence, automation, and decision-making. As organisations deploy more AI agents across their business, governance, sovereignty, resilience, and cost management will become just as important as innovation. Technology leaders should resist the temptation to focus solely on AI deployment speed. Success will depend on establishing strong agent governance, creating clear workload placement strategies across public and private cloud environments, improving AI cost visibility, and ensuring that AI investments are directly tied to business outcomes. The organisations that balance rapid AI adoption with operational discipline will be best positioned to capture value from the next generation of cloud computing."