THIS IS A PUBLIC PREVIEW OF OUR RESEARCH AGENDA AND MAY NOT REPRESENT OUR FINAL AGENDA

Executive Summary

This document outlines Neuralytix’s projected research agenda for 2026/27. This is the most aggressive research agenda Neuralytix has undertaken in the history of the company.

Historically, research in the technology sector focused on innovations, new or improved features, and cost. Our research shows that for both vendors and enterprise customers alike, technology is no longer about “faster, better, cheaper”. Orthogonal to these attributes are social, geo-political, and economic factors. Neuralytix will incorporate and consider these factors in each of our areas of research.

Consistent with our Priorities 2026 predictions, our research agenda follows the main themes already published:

• The realities of, returns on, and reviewing the justification for AI,
• Data and what do we need to do with all of it, and
• Powering the future – accountability gets serious.

Our Research Agenda

Realities of, returns on, and the review of AI

“AI-fication”

Enterprises and vendors have made vast investments in the “AI-ficaftion” of their products and services. While customers have come to expect AI to be part of a product or service, what is the reality of “AI-fication”? Is “AI-fication” sustainable as a differentiator?

What is the reality of AI projects in the enterprise? Our research in 2025 shows that for a vast majority of enterprise customers AI is still in the development and testing phases. During our research period, we will continue our research regarding taking enterprise AI projects from potential to profitable.

How have “AI-fied” products and services changed products and services that existed before the AI hype? What is the reality of “AI-fication”? With every product and service seemingly AI-driven, are customers really seeing AI as anything more than an expected commodity? We will ask the question, are customers getting AI-fatigue?

AI for marketing

If customers become AI-fatigued, will customers dismiss AI as a differentiator? In other words, is AI helping or hindering?

When AI is used for marketing, it often allows competitors to make claims that its AI capabilities overlap with another competitor, thus creating parity in terms of capabilities. This is a disadvantage for customers as the market now presents customers with too many choices. This will lead to longer sales cycles as customers engage in their due diligence to verify and validate the claims of each competitor.

For newer and emerging vendors, longer sales cycles may not be sustainable. Our research will look at how emerging vendors must balance their investments between product development and product market. Ultimately, there is no point improving a product or service that no one is buying.

Enterprise customers are also using AI to market extra or enhanced capabilities of their products and solutions. In many cases, enterprise customers extend the use of AI for marketing by letting customers know that they are using AI in their internal operations to assist and improve customer experience and/or satisfaction. We ask the question, what does it mean to market the use of AI in internal operations? How do customers directly benefit from the AI enterprises are marketing?

ROI

The biggest challenge for enterprise customers is that while their products and services are going through “AI-fication” and they are marketing AI to their customers, very few enterprise customers are showing any ROI that can be directly linked to AI.

At the end of 2025, we estimate that a very minimal number of enterprise customers can show any return on their AI investments. Our research will look at demonstrating any material or substantive measurable return from the immense amount of investments enterprises are making.

We will seek to understand what executives and boardrooms will demand to see in terms of economic measures resulting from AI. We will also ask the question, what economic adjustments will enterprises make if the metrics are disappointing?

Moving from potential to possible

With so many enterprises struggling to identify ROI from their AI investments, we believe enterprises were too optimistic about the potential of AI, resulting in projects that are too ambitious. Our research will focus on where enterprises can moderate their original enthusiastic expectations of AI, define short-term successful outcomes, and accelerate these projects into production.

Our research will include how technology vendors can help enterprise customers to measure, validate, and demonstrate returns on their AI investments – resulting in a mutually beneficial outcome.

Data and what do we do with all of it?

Since Neuralytix was founded, IT vendors, enterprise customers, and the financial community have come to rely on our comprehensive and visionary knowledge of data and data storage.

Starting in 2026, Neuralytix will extend our global, industry-leading, and authoritative research on data and data storage into 5 distinct, but nonetheless highly related, data management areas:

• Data platforms,
• Data placement,
• Data presentation,
• Data protection, and
• Data governance.

Data platforms

When we consider data platforms, we look at the ways in which data persists as it relates to applications. Will the data reside inside an application itself, in which the application developer is responsible for the availability, protection, processing, and consistency of the data? Perhaps the application is self-developed, and the data will reside inside a platform such as a database, but the same responsibilities now fall upon the enterprise. Or is the data going to reside directly on the infrastructure itself?

There is no data platform that is universally superior. Every application in every enterprise may benefit from a different data platform.

Our research will look at the relative technological differences between different platforms and how data platforms affect data presentation. This includes our research around enterprise storage and data management software.

Additionally, with many enterprises reevaluating their primary hypervisor platform, our research will cover data platforms offered by alternative hypervisor, storage-as-a-service (StaaS), hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI), and composable infrastructures.

Data placement

While data can persist on different data platforms, where that data is physically residing is also a consideration. This has always been a core research area for Neuralytix. Our leadership has expertise and experience in this area for nearly 30 years and is considered amongst the most knowledgeable, visionary, and influential people in the data storage industry.

Starting in 2026, we will extend our research on the three dimensions of enterprise storage – capacity, performance, and cost – as it relates to in-cloud, on-premises, and hybrid data storage platforms and integrate it with our research program on data governance. Data governance has a massive impact on where data is placed. Data governance and data placement impact carries with it economic, political, and environmental implications. From a technological perspective, data placement has a direct impact on performance, infrastructure capabilities, and data presentation.

Data presentation

How we present data to an application is dependent on both the data platform chosen and data placement. When we consider data presentation, connected to both data platforms and data placement, how we present data to applications is a key factor in performance. It will also be a key determinant on cost.

A key addition to our research program in 2026 is the inclusion of data presentation by way of metadata, along with our traditional research on block, file, and object protocols.

The volume of data that is stored is so significant that no computing infrastructure can process all the data at once. The use of metadata can solve that problem. Metadata can significantly improve performance, for example, for ingesting data into AI engines. The use of global namespaces, supported by metadata, can reduce the complexity of managing data distributed across an enterprise. The same can be said for applications that provide holistic insight into an enterprise’s universe of data.

Our research will look at the benefits of how metadata can materially reduce capital investments and operational expenditure, while also considering the challenges of relying on metadata.

Data protection

Starting in 2026, Neuralytix will divide our research into data protection (including storage redundancy, fault and disaster tolerance, backup and restoration, archiving) into the protection and retention of data for the short- to medium-term and for long-term preservation of data.

Our research will also incorporate security aspects of data protection that consider non-human security implications. We will also consider how data protection has a bearing on data consistency, data quality, and data governance.

Data governance

The previous four areas of data and data technologies are technical. Data governance is political.

Neuralytix has identified over 1,200 sets of laws and regulations across over 200 sovereignties around the world. Some of these laws and regulations conflict with each other.

Our research will look at the influence of data governance across several perspectives:

• Trust,
• Corporate policies,
• Value of data over time,
• Economics of storing data, and
• Geo-, socio-, and political implications

These perspectives will also be integrated with our research on “Powering the future”.

Powering the future – accountability gets serious

Regions such as Europe have already made considerable strides in implementing guidelines and regulations in terms of energy efficiency and the environmental impact of technology infrastructure.

We believe that in 2026, apart from interested stakeholders such as the environmental interest groups, governments, and energy providers, shareholders will seek accountability. Energy and sustainability can impact the reputational impact of an enterprise, thus affecting its market capitalization (i.e. the share price).

Beyond individual enterprises, the number and size of datacenters announced or already being built is causing global political concerns about energy consumption and carbon emissions of these new datacenters. Current estimates suggest that by 2030, the energy consumption of datacenter infrastructure will exceed the annual energy consumption of Japan.

Our research will focus on three major factors related to the sustainability of powering the Information Age:

• Social,
• Political, and
• Economic.

How our research will be organized

The agenda we have outlined above highlights a significant interrelationship and interdependence amongst our research topic areas.

Our projected published areas of research will integrate multiple aspects of our agenda into six distinct topics as follows. (Our historic software-as-a-service (SaaS) research will be integrated into these new topics as appropriate).

• AI – reality and realization,
• Data – what to do with it,
• Economics of technology – ROI and cost/benefit analyses,
• Governance – the corporate and geo-political effects,
• Preserving data for the long term – implications and implementation, and
• Socio-political accountability of technology – how will this impact innovation.

Two topics of research will continue without any changes.

• Enterprise storage – from media to enterprise storage systems and software, and
• On-premises and in-cloud infrastructure – opportunities and challenges, build or buy.

Neuralytix has earned global recognition for our industry- and thought-leadership for these research areas. It must be noted that although we will conduct distinct research, the elements of our research in these areas will be integrated into our new areas of research and vice versa.

For each of our areas of research, we will continue offer our complimentary, but limited, industry analysis for IT vendors of all sizes and stages. For our existing and future clients, we look forward to the opportunity to engage with you through our advisory services and custom solutions.

As a public preview, we welcome our readers to provide their feedback to us by at [email protected].

Our final research agenda will be published on February 9, 2026.

Revision: 2601-preview