Overview
- An IBM Institute for Business Value survey of executives, employees and consumers identifies five priorities for 2026, with leaders turning to agentic AI to speed decisions and reallocate resources, as 95% say decision velocity is critical and 84% see benefits from autonomous agents.
- Workforces show strong openness to AI at work, with 61% saying it makes roles less routine, 42% willing to trade pay for training, and nearly half reporting comfort being managed by an AI agent.
- Security vendors Kaspersky, Eset, NordVPN and Fortinet warn that attackers will wield AI to scale deepfakes, voice cloning, synthetic identities and automated phishing, driving faster, harder‑to‑trace campaigns and evolving ransomware tactics.
- Defenders are urged to embed security into architecture with adaptive Zero Trust, predictive detection, automated response and continuous verification as organizations move to formal governance and human oversight for AI use.
- Data sovereignty rises as a resilience anchor, with 93% calling it essential and 73% stressing that knowing where data physically resides matters, while IBM’s report projects a possible quantum advantage by late 2026 that will depend on collaborative ecosystems.