Article by
Lee Caswell, SVP, Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix
Debojyoti (Debo) Dutta, Chief AI Officer at Nutanix
Many organizations are hitting a pivotal turning point in their AI journey—shaping everything from IT strategy and infrastructure to cybersecurity. The latest Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey highlights key trends and hurdles ahead. Specifically, businesses are grappling with how to scale GenAI workloads from pilot projects to full production, while navigating the complexities of data governance, privacy, and transparency, including seamlessly integrating these advanced AI tools with existing IT infrastructure.
Lee Caswell, SVP of Product and Solutions Marketing, and Debojyoti Dutta, Chief AI Officer at Nutanix, have released their 2026 AI Outlook. Their insights serve as a strategic roadmap for organizations looking to unlock their full potential and stay ahead in this era of rapid digital transformation.
Businesses will move from AI-first to AI-smart.
Many organizations dove head first to AI without thinking about the consequences and anticipating the real business use cases. Just like we saw with the initial rush to cloud-first adoption, enterprises are going to re-evaluate their technology stacks and truly see where AI makes sense.
AI applications have become business critical more quickly than any other applications we've ever seen. In 2026, we’re going to see organizations integrate AI into their enterprise IT and explore three areas: business resiliency, Day Two operations, and security.
Enterprise AGI is achieved (or very close) by AI Agents
Today the top models and systems can perform tasks that the smartest humans take pride in e.g. solving very hard math and coding problems. When adapted and incorporated into enterprise systems and AI agents, they will reach near AGI levels to get most enterprise tasks done.
Growth of private/sovereign AI infrastructure, especially outside the US.
Due to the geopolitical shifts, countries have begun to invest in Sovereign AI infrastructure - both software and hardware. This allows countries to be self reliant for their critical AI transformation, both civilian and otherwise.
This starts with their own GPU farms and related power/real estate, up to their own software stacks and foundation models, which will be optimized on their own sovereign data. It will lead to new software infrastructure stacks.
The sovereign edge will continue to evolve
AI is a force for more distributed infrastructure as AI moves out to process data generated at the edge. Enterprises will need to consider the global management, distributed security, and remote recovery/destruction policies available for the sovereign edge and rely more on platform engineering to successfully achieve this.
As AI continues to skyrocket in adoption, businesses will look to find ways to process AI-related data locally. As a result, organizations will look to global management solutions with integrated security and edge resiliency to help keep this in check.
Rapid growth in open generative AI and Agents (Jevon’s paradox) within enterprises.
While there is a lot of healthy skepticism about AI, the gains are tangible and will continue to increase. In the US, this is driven by foundation model labs and killer apps like cursor.
Outside the US, there is a huge open model movement (Deepseek, Mistral etc) and these models are being tuned with private/sovereign data for consumption.
Open source technologies today can provide a significant fraction of the capabilities provided by top AI applications with the help of non US open weights models. We expect to see this open movement grow rapidly, leading to Jevon’s paradox, and will force the hand of US models to compete with open weights models (data: OpenAI was forced to opensource openai-oss-GPT)
The tech industry will enter a decade of Platform Wars.
We're entering a decade of platform wars, where success won't hinge on individual features but on the strength and flexibility of the entire platform. Enterprises will increasingly seek platformization focused on solutions that provide freedom of choice while delivering on three core priorities: resiliency, hardware modernization, and software modernization.
The fastest path to innovation will come from platforms that embrace openness: choice of containers, choice of LLMs, and choice of GPUs. Vendors that can integrate these options seamlessly and rapidly will be the ones that win in this new era. And customers that pick the most complete platforms can integrate management across traditional and new applications deployed across hybrid cloud locations, including the sovereign edge.