Airports Council International – North America (ACI-NA) has published the 2026 AirportNEXT Futures Study, in which 320 airport executives across the United States and Canada ranked cybersecurity threats to operational technology systems, a risk category already driving contracts like TSA’s $5bn Screening Partnership Program as the single most important trend facing airports over the next three to five years. The study, produced with research partner AirportNEXT Solutions Inc, scanned eight areas of airport and aviation activity and used strategic radar mapping and AI-assisted research to identify 55 trends before putting them to the panel.
Work on the study began in late 2025. That technology-risk ranking lines up with infrastructure moves like the FAA’s surface surveillance rollout milestone. Respondents spanned airport CEOs, operations chiefs, and finance, IT, commercial, HR and marketing leads at commercial, general and business aviation airports of every size, and their scoring put cybersecurity above every other risk facing the industry, in every region and role surveyed.
Economic pressure fills out the top five
Economic uncertainty sits close behind. Three of the five highest-ranked trends covered a slowing economy, tighter government funding and rising interest rates, with skilled labour shortages completing the top five alongside cybersecurity risk to operational technology. Behind those, the highest-scoring trends included 5G and private wireless networks, cloud platforms, biometrics, artificial intelligence such as the live pilots running at CVG and Munich Airport’s agentic AI trials, advanced air traffic management and personalised passenger services such as mobile driver’s licence acceptance.
That list tracks closely with what operators are already piloting. Munich Airport and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport are running live agentic AI pilots rather than waiting for a roadmap to tell them to, and the biometrics trend that scored highly in the survey is the same category covered in Airport Business Magazine’s comparison of biometric boarding system vendors.
Priorities split by size and border
The rankings are not uniform. Larger airports placed greater weight on digital passenger experience, while small and medium-sized airports expect economic conditions to hit them harder. Canadian and US airports diverged on international aviation dynamics, sustainability, government funding, workforce challenges and the availability of new small aircraft, and airport CEOs specifically flagged local community engagement as a high priority.
Funding constraints running through the findings sit alongside a capital investment picture that is anything but uniform across the sector, as tracked in our roundup of the biggest airport capital programmes of 2026-27: airports weighing new terminal or technology spend against a tighter funding environment are exactly the readership this study is aimed at.
From 55 trends to 120 strategies
ACI-NA turned the rankings into action at its 2026 CEO Forum, where airport leaders reviewed the preliminary findings and generated 126 candidate strategies. The project team refined those ideas and tested them with 32 AirportNEXT airports for validation.
The finished study carries 120 airport strategies backed by 72 case studies from 61 airports across North America, covering 12 dimensions of the business from terminals, security and technology to transportation access, workforce, government relations, community support, sustainability and economic development. Each strategy is tagged as either achievable within 24 months or requiring two to five years, which is the detail that turns a trends report into a working document rather than a slide deck.
What to do with it
For a head of operations or finance director, the value here is benchmarking, not prediction: compare your own board’s stated priorities against where 320 peers placed cybersecurity, funding and labour, and use the size and country breakdowns to check whether your airport’s plan matches the pattern for its category or is an outlier. Treat the 24-month and multi-year strategy split as a starting checklist for the next master planning or board cycle, not a substitute for pricing out the specific systems and contracts it points toward.
