What should our priorities be in 2026?

Regardless of which part of the public sector we are talking about, the focus this year should be on getting our data ready for AI, cyber resilience and recovery - AI is not a magic bullet and cyber risk grows every day.

Owen Powell, ICT Director at Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust and Rick Martire, GM Sovereign Services at Rackspace Technology were both deeply involved in the research for our report ‘Is our data and infrastructure ready for AI?’ I invited them on to the UKA Live Podcast to discuss what the key priorities should be for public sector CIOs as we move into 2026.

• What do we need to do to maximise the potential of AI? Where do we start - data quality? Structure? Standards?

• Get your data in order - to enable collaboration and true joining up of health and care data must be secure, interoperable and accessible.

• Cyber attack is a case of not ‘if’ but ‘when’ – so what’s the plan?

• We focus a lot on cyber security… in light of recent attacks should we flip that to resilience and recovery?

• Money and time are in short supply, where do you go first? Do you fix the data? Do you fix the cybersecurity?

Download the UKA Inform white paper now: Is our data and infrastructure ready for AI