to break through language barriers and offer more natural interactions. With the latest OpenAI models including GPT-5.2, ServiceNow will unlock a new class of AI-powered automation for the world's largest companies.
As we enter 2026, we mark this anniversary by bringing together three leaders navigating the most complex intersection of technology, geopolitics, and organizational change we have ever witnessed. André Pienaar, Dr. David Bray, and Ken Banta joined us to discuss what boards and CEOs must understand to remain competitive in an era defined by cascading disruptions and incomplete information. The conversation focused on the critical questions every board should be asking this year.
"Think of these models that you orchestrate to build your own model, and more importantly, do what could be described as harness engineering." By "harnessing engineering", he means companies stitching together a mix of closed and open-sourced models, layering them with their own data and shaping the whole stack to deliver a specific business outcome.
"The CEOs of these companies say, 'It's the embargo on chips that's holding us back,'" Amodei said, incredulous, in response to a question about the new rules. The decision is going to come back to bite the U.S., he warned. "We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips," he told Bloomberg's editor-in-chief, who was interviewing him. "So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips."
Right now, Google's revenue stream comes from advertising via its search monopoly. Search queries are cheap, and the ads Google sells are pricey due to its market power, so it's a very profitable business. Gemini, by contrast, is expensive to operate and generates no revenue. Even if Google were able to shift all of its search advertising revenue to Gemini, it would be moving from an extremely high-margin business to a lower-margin one. So what's actually going on?
The country's top internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), requires that any company launching an AI tool with "public opinion properties or social mobilization capabilities" first file it in a public database: the algorithm registry. In a submission, developers must show how their products avoid 31 categories of risk, from age and gender discrimination to psychological harm to "violating core socialist values."
In the early days, VAST Data's focus was primarily on storing enormous amounts of data. "Even before we talked about AI, data had to be stored somewhere," Pernsteiner notes. The company started out in the world of HPC (High Performance Computing). The choice of this sector was strategic: in that world, the scale and performance requirements are enormous. With this choice, VAST more or less forced itself to set the bar very high.
Unverified and low quality data generated by artificial intelligence (AI) models - often known as AI slop - is forcing more security leaders to look to zero-trust models for data governance, with 50% of organisations likely to start adopting such policies by 2028, according to Gartner's seers. Currently, large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on data scraped - with or without permission - from the world wide web and other sources including books, research papers, and code repositories.
companies reduce staff through automating routine work while still struggling to hire AI specialists, despite a surge in client demand for AI. "Top five Indian IT firms added only 17 net employees in the first nine months of FY26 versus 17,764 in the same period last year," said Chirag Mehta, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. "That is what AI-era productivity looks like in practice: more output per employee, fewer benches, and tighter utilization."
process AI is the integration of AI and ML (with optional natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision, including optical character recognition (OCR) in one platform) into business workflows with the aim of automating tasks that need and require human-like judgment. Also straightforward to define, document AI (occasionally known as intelligent document processing) is a set of technologies designed to enable enterprise applications to ingest, interpret and contextually understand documents with human-like judgment.
Four out of five employees believe artificial intelligence will affect their daily work tasks, according to a new global survey by staffing and recruitment company Randstad. The survey found that Generation Z workers are the most concerned group, while baby boomers feel more secure and adaptable, according to Reuters.
"It will destroy humanities jobs," Karp said when asked how AI will affect jobs in conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
As enterprise AI spending surges past $100B annually, a critical divide has emerged: while billions flow into horizontal AI platforms promising to solve everything, enterprises deploying these tools face a harsh reality check when their generalist agents struggle with the complexity of real-world operations. The disconnect is particularly acute in customer service, where voice remains the highest-stakes channel where one wrong answer can cost thousands in revenue or irreparably damage customer relationships.
That model no longer fits how tech leaders work today. Over the past years, I have spent time in conversations with founders, executives, and operators who carry real responsibility inside their organizations. As a community builder, I often speak with them before they commit to attending events. Their questions are direct. They want to know who will be in the room, how discussions are structured, and whether the environment allows honest exchange.
OpenAI said on Friday that free and Go users of ChatGPT would start seeing ads "in the coming weeks." OpenAI also laid out its advertising principles, such as clearly labeling them and not sharing user conversations with advertisers. "A path to generating several billion dollars in ad revenue in 2026, going to $25B+ by 2030, seems reasonable," Mahaney wrote in a note to investors. That's based on the likely scale of ChatGPT by that time, the proven monetization of high-intent performance marketing platforms, and the current size of this market, the analyst added.
Balancing gut feelings with hard data isn't a soft skill. It's a strategic advantage. In an era where AI, automation, and ubiquitous dashboards flood us with metrics, it's tempting to believe that better spreadsheets alone will yield better decisions. But our most consequential choices rarely emerge from a cell in column D. They arise from an ongoing negotiation between intuition and rational analysis.
