Direction

Opener

The older I get, the more I realise how little I know. At the same time, knowledge is becoming continuously easier to access; answers are instant and always within reach.

There’s a difference here though: If I’m told the answer but not the reasoning, is that really knowledge?

That’s a problem at the heart of the current stage of AI. It is growing in power, capabilities and ease of entry, but we, as humans, need to develop alongside it. In 2026, there’s a balance to be struck: can AI make our lives and work more efficient without doing our thinking for us?

Microsoft

As a tech leader, Microsoft’s position is to embed AI into platforms that people already use, make it scalable and provide common value. By introducing AI into familiar apps and platforms, technology that could seem intimidating or out of reach becomes intuitive and accessible.

There’s a particular emphasis here towards agentic AI, which works more seamlessly in the background without human prompting and intervention – something we’ll taking a deeper dive into in the next article. It’s a model that aims to give users knowledge, flexibility and access to create agents that provide value by industry, role or by process.

They leave two parts to consider: Could AI or other technology replace people, roles, departments within a company? Will it be AI-first organisations that use AI to reduce costs, close gaps and provide enough competitive advantage that the competitors are the ones who will be replaced?

By keeping your finger on the pulse of technology, you can plan for competitors, advancements in technology and ensure the real-world execution and expertise wins.

Tech Hype against Delivery

AI is currently in a phase of inflated expectations. There is significant capability, but solutions tend to either be generic or missing the flexibility necessary to deal with real-world industry complexities. AI is not (yet) a reasonable substitute for sector and area expertise, and outputs can often be approximately correct rather than definitively right.

In 2025 the waste industry saw big technological advancement in a variety of areas:

·         Automated Customer Service

·         Waste sorting, contamination, load calculating

·         Route optimisation, live planning adjustments

·         Customer onboarding, contractual agreements

·         Flagging data errors, missing revenue, compliance issues

Even with these successes, there is still more hype than actual delivery especially in business applications. But, there is no sign of technology slowing down. The value will catchup with the hype, so we should ensure that we use this time to develop our own companies and people to be agile, and to grow with technology as it becomes available and adds business value.

Transformation

At tegos, we have been active with business development initiatives through a “Customer Zero” mindset. This means practising what we preach internally first and proving we can evolve alongside technology.

We have two current focuses, one is around test-driven development, automations to help monitor performance and the software development cycle in general. The second is knowledge management, turning complexity into context so that information is easily accessible, regardless of product, version or customer specifics.

Often treated as an afterthought, governance is now a critical topic as technology becomes more accessible and autonomous. This provides new risks, where users regardless of intention can expose company data or generate decisions outside of traditional IT controls. At tegos, this risk led to nunq being created, an AI platform that gave users the flexibility and models for productivity whilst retaining overall control and policies. Traditional IT and governance must shift in order to adapt to the accessibility of technology, as if controls are too tight then users have the capacity to ignore them.

Our strategy is to never replace expertise with technology. Instead we aim to apply innovation only where it adds real value. As powerful as this technology can seem it carries a risk undervaluing existing expertise and even deskilling our teams if introduced for its own sake. We need to be open to this exciting and rapidly developing area, of course, while avoiding band wagon jumping or over-reliance on solutions that aren’t yet developed enough. The key is to stay informed and flexible, ready to adapt and able to direct our own transformation.

Repeating cycle of technology

This growth of technology is a familiar pattern: initial hype and some fear, followed by both missteps and productivity gains. Eventually it often re-defines how the work gets done. These patterns range from revolutions to remote working, mechanisations, computing, the internet, cloud computing to AI. With every new development the expectations increase.

A recent and very visible example is digital collaboration; a shift in work habits forced by COVID-19 that fundamentally changed the way people collaborate, the effects of which we’re still experiencing. This is seen in software tools used daily by workers and students, like Microsoft Teams that went from 20 million users in 2020, to 320 million by 2024.

At the same time people are becoming more technologically literate and more comfortable with digital tools even outside of IT roles and companies. This puts new pressure on systems providers (us included); to be intuitive, easy to use and to integrate with other solutions and platforms. This is where transformation thrives and friction is reduced as people, technology and tools all advance and companies find strategic paths that allow them to be more competitive while making life easier for all concerned.

Direction

As companies and platforms continue to modernise, new technologies will become easier to integrate. AI and tools are going to become increasingly widespread and increasingly integral to our working lives. It’s no longer going to be about access to the innovations, but how they can best be applied.

Organisations that invest in developing people alongside technology will be the best positioned as value increases.  It’s a careful balance — wait for the technology to mature and you risk missing the boat, but dive in too quickly and you can become over-reliant at the expense of human expertise. The trick is to evolve alongside technology: Staying curious, critical and value focused.