The industry speaks – part 1: AI Appreciation Day 2026

Peter Marelas
Senior Director of Product Management at New Relic

The most significant shift in AI isn't that it produces fluent answers. It's that agents can now reason through complex, multi-step problems, testing and refining their own work until they reach a reliable result. We've moved from tools that respond to systems that think through a problem.

However, the value we get from that still depends on us. The difference between a mediocre result and a genuinely useful one rarely comes down to the model. It comes down to how the problem is framed. The people getting real leverage from AI treat it less like a vending machine and more like a conversation, exploring a subject with it first, stating not just what they want but why, and asking it to explain and verify its own reasoning.

A great example of how visible this is right now is in how organisations keep their digital services running. When a banking app stalls or a checkout fails, engineers are often buried under thousands of alerts with no clear sense of what actually broke. AI has already changed this, sifting through the noise, correlating signals across systems, and pointing to a likely cause in a fraction of the time it once took. It has made the response time fix these systems meaningfully faster.

The next step is letting AI act on what it finds, not just advise. However, an agent is only as good as what it can see. Give it fragmented data and it will move toward the wrong fix, but give it a clear, connected view of the system and it can be trusted to act confidently.

That's the real frontier for AI. Not building more capable models, but building the environments that let them act with confidence. The organisations that get this right will be the ones that turn AI's promise into something they can rely on.

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Jarrod Kinchington
VP & GM, APAC, at Smartsheet

AI Appreciation Day is a useful moment to step back from the hype and recognise how quickly the conversation has matured. From where I sit, the focus has clearly shifted from whether to adopt AI to how to scale it, govern it and translate it into measurable performance.

What’s emerging now is a much more pragmatic mindset. Organisations are no longer trying to prove they are using AI; they are focused on what it is actually delivering. The questions I hear most often from senior executives are grounded and outcome-focused: what is improving, where is value being created, and how is it changing the way work gets done?

Most businesses are already seeing pockets of individual productivity gains, but faster outputs do not automatically translate into stronger organisational performance. The real gap is organisational adoption. Too many organisations are still layering AI onto existing workflows rather than redesigning processes, decisions and operating models around it.

Across APJ, this plays out differently by market. Australia and New Zealand show strong executive intent and experimentation, but scaling outcomes remains uneven. Singapore tends to align AI more closely to execution. Across the region, organisations are increasingly disciplined about linking AI to measurable business impact rather than simply driving usage.

Sarah Richardson
Australian Loyalty Association Founder and CEO

AI is becoming the new front door to the customer journey. Consumers are increasingly using AI tools to compare products, research purchases and seek recommendations before they ever reach a brand website. That has profound implications for loyalty, acquisition and customer retention strategies.

The brands that thrive in the next decade will be those that can demonstrate value at every customer interaction. Loyalty is no longer just a rewards strategy. It's becoming a business-wide growth strategy.

Lindsay Keating
Executive Vice President and General Manager APAC at Pax8

With AI Appreciation Day upon us, it's worth looking at where AI is heading, toward software that doesn't just assist but actually does the work, toward AI being consumed the way everything else is now, through marketplaces and partners. Not one-off direct deals, but consistent monthly consumption models.

My strong view is that the channel becomes the delivery mechanism that brings AI to the masses, particularly the millions of small and mid-sized businesses that would otherwise never build this themselves. That's the democratisation piece.

I'd expect a shift to outcome-based models, more consolidation, and agents working alongside people as genuine co-workers. The winners won't be whoever has the flashiest model – they'll be whoever makes it usable, governable, and trusted at scale.

Kash Sharma
Managing Director ANZ at BlueVoyant

Across the Asia Pacific region, AI has stepped up from something people prompt to something that acts on its own. A growing list of third-party agents are reading data, calling other systems and completing multi-step tasks on behalf of staff, often faster and more consistently than a person managing the same workload manually. Security teams are seeing genuine gains too: alert triage that used to take analysts hours now happens in minutes, and case summaries that took up a whole shift can be ready before an analyst has finished their coffee – real progress worth marking.

However, most businesses are sitting on years of 'security debt'. These could be: files shared too widely, permissions nobody has reviewed, accounts with more access than they need, and an agent will happily draw on all of it when answering a question. The good news is this is one of the most solvable problems in security. Reviewing who has access to what, labelling sensitive data so protection travels with it, and holding agents to the same identity rules as staff are all well-established practices, not new inventions. It's housekeeping, and the payoff is being able to hand agents bigger jobs with confidence.

The next 12 months will decide who gets the most out of this shift. AI agents will take on bigger jobs, working together across entire workflows rather than single tasks, and the region is well placed to lead here. Businesses across the Asia Pacific region have adopted this technology faster than most of the world, and the ones that pair that speed with proper controls will set the standard for what secure AI adoption looks like globally. That's the opportunity worth talking about this AI Appreciation Day: not just what AI can do, but proving it can be done right.

Dhruv Majumdar
VP, Security Solutions, at Fleet Device Management

AI is helping security researchers uncover vulnerabilities faster than ever before, but it's also accelerating the speed at which those same weaknesses can be exploited, from days to hours. As AI-powered vulnerability discovery becomes more capable, the gap between finding a flaw and seeing it weaponised will continue to shrink.

We need to respond to them faster. AI-assisted, and eventually autonomous, patching will become a necessity, not a luxury, because security teams won't be able to keep pace manually. But speed alone isn't enough. The real challenge is deploying fixes safely, with an understanding of business context and user experience. An autonomous system can't reboot a trader's workstation in the middle of a billion-dollar transaction or interrupt a CEO during a board meeting just because a patch is available.

The organisations that get this balance right, combining AI-driven speed with intelligent operational guardrails, will have a significant competitive advantage over those still relying on manual processes. AI deserves appreciation because it's pushing us towards entirely new ways of operating that simply weren't practical before.

Laurent Halimi
CEO and founder of Cyberr

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it's going to replace cybersecurity professionals. What's actually happening is far more significant: it's redefining the skills that every cybersecurity professional will need to succeed.

We're already seeing employers look for AI knowledge alongside traditional cybersecurity expertise, and AI-focused training and certifications will soon become just as important as many of the security credentials the industry has relied on for years. Understanding AI models, prompt engineering, LLM risks and how attackers are weaponising AI is rapidly becoming part of the baseline skillset, even for entry-level security roles.

That shift shouldn't be viewed as a threat. Every major technological change has created new specialties, new career paths and new opportunities, and AI will be no different. Cybersecurity professionals who invest in AI skills today will likely be the ones leading security teams tomorrow. Those who combine strong security fundamentals with AI expertise will have a significant advantage over those who treat AI as someone else's problem.

AI, whether we like it or not, is shaping the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. The challenge now is making sure education, certifications and workforce development evolve quickly enough to prepare them.

Gunter Ollmann
CTO at Cobalt

AI is already making security teams faster and more effective, but we also need to be honest about where the industry is today. There's a growing tendency to assume AI can replace security expertise, when the evidence suggests the opposite. Our research found that 78% of security teams have seen automated scanning tools miss critical vulnerabilities, and support for fully automated pentesting has dropped to just 9%. That's proof that context still matters.

The challenge is even more pronounced with AI applications themselves. LLMs introduce new attack paths, business logic risks and behavioural flaws that can't always be identified by pattern matching or automated validation. That's why we're seeing organisations embrace a more pragmatic approach: automate what machines do well, but rely on experienced security researchers to uncover the issues that require human judgment. As AI becomes embedded in every business, confidence won't come from trusting automation alone. It will come from knowing you've validated your most critical systems with both intelligent tooling and expert adversarial testing."

Amit Shuster
VP, Product and Engineering, at Vetric

Artificial Intelligence Appreciation Day shouldn't just be about appreciating AI. It should be about appreciating the digital infrastructure that makes AI possible. Around the world, organisations are discovering that AI is only as intelligent as the networks, edge environments, and data ecosystems supporting it. The next wave of AI innovation won't be won by whoever builds the biggest model. It will be won by whoever can move data faster, process intelligence closer to where it's created, and deliver secure, real-time insights at global scale.

That is why network technology and edge computing have become strategic enablers of AI rather than background infrastructure. As AI moves from centralised cloud environments to factories, hospitals, retail locations, financial institutions, and smart cities, intelligence must move closer to the edge, where milliseconds can determine outcomes and resilience becomes a competitive advantage.

AI Appreciation Day is also a reminder that innovation carries responsibility. Building trustworthy AI requires secure networks, transparent governance, resilient infrastructure, and human oversight at every stage. The future of AI won't be defined by algorithms alone. It will be defined by the quality of the digital foundation beneath them and by our ability to combine human expertise with intelligent systems to solve global challenges responsibly.

Cathal McCarthy
Chief Strategy Officer at Kore.ai

Artificial intelligence has come a long way in the past two years, and it's made us rethink what makes humans valuable in this AI world. We have evolved from task executors to orchestrators, freed from mundane work to concentrate on the skills that matter most: judgment, empathy, creativity, and curiosity. AI is helping us become more humane again by giving us more time to think critically, ask questions, make better decisions, and work more effectively with each other.

What's particularly interesting is that AI is the first technology that learns with us. As people become more skilled at using AI, the tech becomes more effective as well, creating a continuous cycle of improvement. Rather than replacing human expertise, AI amplifies it. AI Appreciation Day is a great time to appreciate this extraordinary partnership between people and tech.