Published on LinkedIn and amitabhapte.com on4^th Jan 2026

As we enter 2026, the AI industry remains gripped by what feels like scale fever. The prevailing assumption is that enough capital, energy, and hardware will eventually resolve into utility. The pipes are being laid at extraordinary speed. The open question is whether repeatable business value will follow.

The $40 Billion “More” – The scale of investment is now detached from traditional venture logic. Masayoshi Son has fully funded SoftBank’s $40 billion investment into OpenAI. This forms the down payment for Stargate, the hyperscale data-centre joint venture with Oracle. What’s notable is not just the size, but the intent. This is infrastructure being built ahead of clearly defined workloads. In my experience, one pattern holds. Infrastructure only creates value when it attracts the right tenants. We are, in effect, constructing the most expensive library in history. The job of leadership is not to admire the architecture, but to ensure the books are being checked out. And that they move the P&L.

The Efficiency Pivot – While the West continues to scale outward, parts of the East are scaling inward. DeepSeek is promoting training approaches that prioritise efficiency over brute force, aiming to stay competitive despite chip constraints. This isn’t a novelty. It’s a reminder that optimisation has always been a counterweight to abundance. For organisations operating with finite compute budgets, this matters. The strategic question is shifting. Not how many GPUs we can acquire, but how effectively we can utilise what we already have. Software-level optimisation is becoming as important as hardware procurement. The era of “buy more” is giving way to “use better”.

The Platform Mirage – OpenAI is experimenting with embedding third-party services directly into ChatGPT, allowing users to interact with tools like Spotify or Zillow through a single conversational interface. The ambition is clear. Replace the mobile grid with a universal text box. In practice, most of these integrations function as lightweight connectors. They struggle to match the speed, clarity, and precision of dedicated interfaces. This pattern isn’t new. The 2016 chatbot wave promised similar consolidation and quietly receded for the same reason. For complex enterprise tasks, purposeful graphical interfaces remain faster than conversation. Chat is powerful for intent discovery and orchestration. It is rarely the most efficient execution layer.

Resilience as a Requirement – Value is increasingly concentrating in specialised infrastructure and operational plumbing. Octopus Energy is spinning out Kraken, its AI-driven utility operating system, at an $8.65 billion valuation. At the same time, governments are hardening their positions. India is investing $4.6 billion in local component manufacturing while issuing strict compliance mandates on AI platforms. These signals point to the same conclusion. Resilience is no longer a secondary consideration. Regionalised supply chains, local compliance, and operational sovereignty are becoming baseline requirements. They are not inefficiencies to be minimised. They are the cost of continuity in a fragmented world.

My mindshare beyond Tech: the digital detox paradox – One of the most popular resolutions for 2026 is not a new app but deleting them. The Wall Street Journal reports a surge in digital detoxing, driven by growing recognition that constant notification cycles erode focus rather than enhance productivity. The irony is structural. At the same moment we are investing billions in agentic systems designed to capture attention, users are reclaiming time away from screens. As a CIO, my responsibility is to ensure systems are always on. As a leader, I know that the best thinking often happens when people are not. High-performance cultures depend on deep work. And deep work is the first casualty of the notification bell.