- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady reports from Day 1 of Fortune Brainstorm AI.
- The big story: Inside Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros.
- The markets: Relatively steady as investors await Wednesday’s Fed meeting.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning from Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco. The conversations yesterday covered a wide range of use cases, controversies, and companies in the space. You can check out our coverage here and follow along today via livestream. On stage and off, I’m hearing some themes emerging for 2026:
Show me the ROI. As Intuit Chief AI Officer Ashok Srivastava told me prior to joining Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi and Fortune editorial director Andrew Nusca on stage, relatively few leaders are sharing data on the returns they’re getting from AI. (Intuit has quantified AI’s bottom-line impact on earnings calls and shared data from customers using its new QuickBooks offering, which I wrote about earlier this year.) Many attendees agreed that this will be the year in which CEOs will be pressed to prove how AI is helping them grow their business, not just cut costs and headcount.
Corporate adoption will take time—and then take off. While individuals may embrace AI, companies have to contend with legacy systems, cultural challenges, employee resistance and the reality that pilot projects are often hard to scale. Add in concerns around governance, security, data quality and keeping customers happy. But nothing shakes inertia like a fear of extinction, and the widening lead of AI winners is forcing CEOs to take action, bubble or no bubble.
Look beyond the LLMs. There’s more to AI than headline-grabbing large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama and the like. Predictive AI remains powerful stuff. As Stephen Messer, cofounder of Collective[i], pointed out yesterday: “If you look at all the people who created the stuff that’s now hot, none of them are focused on language models.” He’s right. Stanford scientist Fei-Fei Li has moved on to building AI with spatial intelligence; NYU’s Yann LeCun is building systems based on self-supervised learning and world models, or AI that learns to simulate and predict real-world dynamics, which is critical for what-if scenario planning. AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton are focused on the societal infrastructure needed to absorb and derisk AI. Collective[i] has what Messer calls an economic foundation model that studies how the world does business, trained on a proprietary pool of B2B transaction data.
It’s more proof that the players making news and fueling talk of bubbles today are not the only models that will mold tomorrow. To understand what’s next, follow the flow of money and brainpower. Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
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