In 2026, more teams are going to rediscover the joy of having their data and workflows close to where the work actually happens. Not because the cloud is bad. The cloud is a great tool. It is just not the right answer for everything, especially when you are talking about performance, predictable costs and keeping control of your own data.
What I am seeing is this: It is easy to move a workflow up into the cloud, and then you wake up one day and realize you are paying for every little thing, and you are also at the mercy of a lot of services you cannot fix or influence. If your internet is flaky, or the provider has an outage, or you get hit with egress costs at the exact moment you need your data, that is not a strategy. That is a hope. In 2026, the smart shops will keep cloud as redundancy and reach, but they will rebuild the core on-prem so they can get their job done with less drama.
The real differentiator will be ‘boring’ infrastructure
I think 2026 is the year more people stop buying ‘fancy numbers’ and start buying results. Everybody can show a chart. Everybody can promise the sky. But in the real world, what matters is whether the product is low overhead, dependable and actually makes your day easier. The best compliment we can get is that someone forgets we are there because they are too busy getting real work done.
More buyers are going to get tired of the enterprise pattern, where you buy the thing and then you learn you need ten other modules, another server and a pile of add-ons to get what you thought you already purchased. That is not delight. That is aggravation. In 2026, the winners are going to be the companies that show up, evaluate the environment honestly and deliver what the customer actually needs with the least amount of fuss. Under promise. Over deliver. And make it work in the real workflow, not just in a lab.
AI becomes a creative partner
AI finally settles into its proper role for creatives in 2026. It stops trying to be the artist and starts becoming the best assistant a cinematographer, editor or photographer has ever had. The true creative spark still lives with the human, not in the machine. You can’t automate taste, timing, instinct and storytelling. What AI can do is clear the runway so creators can spend more time making decisions that actually matter.
Those that rethink where AI lives in the workflow will be the teams that get this right. Instead of pushing raw footage and unreleased work into distant clouds, they will bring AI closer to the media and closer to the creator. When AI runs next to your storage, things happen at the speed of thought. You can test an idea, throw it away, try another and never break your flow. That immediacy changes how people create.
In 2026, the most successful creative teams will not be the ones chasing the biggest models. They will be the ones who build infrastructure that keeps humans in control, keeps their content private and lets AI quietly do the heavy lifting in the background while the creativity stays exactly where it belongs.
Larry O'Connor is the Founder and CEO of Other World Computing (https://www.owc.com).