I had been waiting for the 2026 edition of Zoom Communications Inc.‘s Perspectives, its recently held annual get-together for industry analysts, because I find Zoom to be the most interesting vendor in the communications business today. Though it has many competitors, its product roadmap has been markedly different.
Over the past 18 months, the enterprise technology narrative has been dominated by a singular, persistent theme: artificial intelligence, more specifically agentic AI. From CES to NRF to the World Economic Forum, every vendor, service provider and analyst firm has been preaching the gospel of AI.
Over the past year there have been plenty of media reports discussing artificial intelligence failures and highlighting the negative aspects of it. I’m of the belief that AI will eventually be infused into every aspect of our lives and change the way we work, live and learn.
Cisco Systems Inc. has long been regarded as the market leader in networking, but over the past few years, the company has strived to position itself as “critical infrastructure for the artificial intelligence era.” It now seems to be making headway with that as the stock hits an all-time high. This week at Cisco Live EMEA, in Amsterdam, Cisco delivered another payload of innovation targeted at helping customers move their AI from the “chatbot phase,” and jump into the agentic era.
In the world of professional sports, “data-driven” is often a term tossed around to describe basic box scores. But for the National Football League, the last 10 years have represented a fundamental shift in how the game is measured, analyzed and even played. This week, as the league reflects on a decade of its Next Gen Stats or NGS platform, the story isn’t just about football — it’s an excellent example of how cloud-native infrastructure and machine learning can transform an industry in real time.