Nearly nine in 10 IT leaders expect to restructure their organizations this year. The talent they’ll need on the other side of those overhauls looks different from what most IT teams were built to deliver.
Info-Tech Research Group released its annual IT Talent Trends 2026 report on Tuesday at Info-Tech LIVE 2026 in Las Vegas. The London, Ontario-based firm finds that as AI absorbs more routine IT execution, technical expertise alone is losing its edge as a talent differentiator.
The capabilities that will define top IT professionals, according to the report, are the ones AI can’t replicate, including critical thinking, creative problem solving, emotional intelligence, and business acumen.
“These kinds of soft skills, like business acumen, emotional intelligence, and creative problem solving, enable IT experts to grasp business requirements, foster innovation, and manage complex transformations in ways that technical knowledge alone can’t achieve,” Heather Leier-Murray, research director at Info-Tech, said in a statement.
The findings draw on Info-Tech’s Future of IT 2026 survey of more than 400 IT professionals. The survey found 42% were actively or passively job seeking, 76% of IT managers reported moderate or increasing stress levels, and 95% acknowledged that major skill changes will be required to keep pace with technology by 2030.
The report outlines four trends for CIOs to act on, all circling the same argument.
As AI handles more of the routine work, organizations need to redesign their teams around what humans do best. That means rethinking how they hire, how they train, and how they structure the relationship between people and AI tools.
“The steady state is gone, and it’s not coming back,” said Leier-Murray. “CIOs can no longer treat talent strategy as a periodic adjustment. They need to continuously realign their workforce, elevate uniquely human capabilities, and intentionally design a hybrid model of how people and AI work together.”
Info-Tech found 65% of organizations anticipate structural changes because of generative AI. The organizations that restructure around human capability will keep their best people. The ones that don’t will train their replacements.
Final Shots
- Info-Tech’s survey found 89% of IT leaders anticipate restructuring their organizations this year. The talent differentiators rising to the top are human ones like critical thinking, communication, and business acumen.
- The IT workforce is restless and running hot. The survey found 42% of IT professionals actively or passively seeking new roles and 76% of IT managers reporting moderate or increasing stress.
- The report frames talent strategy as a continuous discipline, arguing that hybrid human-AI teams will replace the periodic restructure-and-stabilize model most organizations still follow.