Samsung and Munich Re's Hartford Steam Boiler (HSB) unit, which offers insurance for equipment breakdown, are planning to leverage IoT sensors, AI and smart appliances to spin up personalized home insurance. Welcome to the 2026 monetization of AI use cases.
Enterprises will get all-you-can eat agentic AI pricing, data tools are going to be a headache, AI agents will look more like a feature than a revolution and physical AI will matter. Those are some of the trends to watch in 2026.
DeepSeek published a technical paper co-authored by co-founder Liang Wenfeng that argues for a new architecture to train foundational models. DeepSeek's paper is just another development leading to the following: The muscle head era (error) of AI is coming to an end.
Meta acquired Manus in a deal that aims to give the company a rare win in artificial intelligence after a year of revamping. Manus is critical to fleshing out Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dream of a universal AI assistant to get work done across its products.
Quantum computing hogged the headlines in 2025 and it was ok to say it was the year of quantum--or maybe qubits--after just a few months. The quantum computing developments were flying, but it's worth noting that we're years away from big commercial adoption.
Groq announced it has entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq's inference technology. Groq CEO Jonathan Ross and team will join Nvidia, but Groq will operate independently with GroqCloud.
As CxOs zoom out on 2025, it's clear that the year was characterized by AI building blocks and the need for real returns. Agentic AI platforms aren't quite mature, but the industry standards and connections are making deployments more realistic.
ServiceNow acquired Armis, a cybersecurity exposure management company, for $7.75 billion in cash in a move that will triple the company's addressable market in security.
Actian, the data and AI division of HCLSoftware, is seeing strong demand for its metadata, data catalog and governance tools. Wobby will bring an agentic AI data analyst to Actian so customers can get insights on complex datasets quickly. Separately, HCLSoftware said it’s acquiring Jaspersoft from Cloud Software Group in a deal to build out Actian’s agentic AI toolset.
Alphabet said it will acquire Intersect, a startup focused on energy for data centers, for $4.75 billion and the assumption of debt. Google, a unit of Alphabet, owns a minority stake in Intersect.
Paychex is betting that its proprietary data sets in human capital management and adjacent markets will make it a winner in AI via productivity and new products.
Rimini Street’s first act took 20 years, but the second will move much faster as the company aims to layer agentic AI on top of legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
