AI Value Creation Summit & New Year’s Reception 2026

5 key takeaways for leaders in AI 

1. The underestimated speed of the AI revolution 

The summit opened with a stark reality check: AI is not evolving linearly. It is accelerating faster than institutions, regulation, and corporate structures can respond. We are entering an AI revolution centered on scaling intelligence. The new paradigm is that we are learning to replicate the act of thinking itself, turning cognition into a scalable resource for society. This is underscored by Eric Schmidt’s prediction that Artificial General Intelligence could arrive within three to five years, followed shortly by Artificial Super Intelligence, leaving little room for gradual adaptation. 

Markets are already reacting. The emergence of agentic AI solutions has triggered massive investor reassessments, erasing nearly $300 billion in market value across established software players. The reason is structural: autonomous agents increasingly replace traditional SaaS workflows, directly challenging license-based business models. As a result, an AI strategy is no longer optional, it has become a core part of a company’s equity story, with the absence of one quickly turning into a red flag for investors and M&A. 

2. From tools to agents: how work and markets are changing 

A central theme of the summit was the shift from AI as a supportive tool to AI as an active operator. Adoption is moving from individual assistants to human–agent collaboration, and further toward fully autonomous agent-to-agent systems executing complex workflows, giving rise to new agentic target operating models that redefine how tasks are coordinated and decisions are made. This evolution fundamentally changes how organizations scale. Teams no longer grow linearly with headcount; leadership shifts toward orchestrating human–agent systems, and productivity gains become exponential rather than incremental. At the same time, customer behavior is changing just as radically. Search is moving from traditional engines to large language models, where visibility is binary: brands are either relevant or invisible. 

“82% of leaders expect agents to join digital teams within the next 12–18 months. This means, organizations are moving from assisted work to agent-operated processes, where humans set direction and agents run execution.” 

Daniel Soujon, Partner & CTO at OMMAX

3. AI transformation is a leadership task, not a technical one 

Successful AI transformation does not start in IT or with isolated use cases; it starts on the business side, led by the CEO and top management. Organizations that treat AI as a technical topic or delegate it deep into the organization struggle to gain traction. Those that lead from the top, define a holistic ambition, and focus on a small number of high-impact use cases are the ones that consistently move from intent to execution. This requires a mindset that allows experimentation, accepts mistakes, and encourages learning with low ego. 

4. AI must create customer-facing value, not just internal efficiency 

Leaders must resist optimizing AI purely for internal efficiency. The real opportunity lies in using AI to create customer value across discovery, experience, and trust, not just to improve P&L line items. As customer journeys increasingly move through LLMs, brands must become AI-friendly for the agentic age: visibility is no longer driven by keywords, but by presence in high-intent prompts, content quality, credibility, user signals, and clean data foundations. Ultimately, AI must move beyond slide decks and equity stories: Without deployed solutions, measurable impact, and visible changes to how work gets done, the narrative collapses quickly. Leaders must act with radical realism and accept uncertainty, because in an exponential world, waiting for clarity means falling behind. 

“Leaders must run first, build the right data foundations, and turn AI from a slide deck into execution, otherwise it remains a story without impact.”  

Dr. Stefan Sambol, Founding Partner at OMMAX 

5. Outlook: moving toward the agentic enterprise 

The next phase of AI is not about deploying more tools, but about how work is orchestrated. As organizations move toward human–agent co-operation, people increasingly design, supervise, and intervene in agent-driven systems rather than executing tasks themselves. Competitive advantage will hinge on whether companies can translate this shift into a coherent operating model with clear decision rights, governance, and accountability. 

Early signals already extend beyond the enterprise. Platforms such as RentAHuman.ai show how autonomous agents can coordinate human labor for real-world tasks at scale, attracting over 80,000 human sign-ups within days of launch. While experimental, such models underline a critical point: the boundary between digital agents and physical execution is dissolving. For leaders, the challenge is no longer technological readiness, but the ability to define how humans and agents jointly create value.