What Leaders Need to Know About AI in 2026

What leaders need to know about AI is changing quickly in 2026, as companies move from early experimentation to real business decisions. AI is already affecting workflows, customer interactions, employee routines, risk, cost, and decision-making. Leaders now have to decide where AI belongs, how it should be governed, who owns the output, and how the business will know whether the work is actually improving.

What Leaders Need to Know About AI

Zach Burnett, CEO of RadarFirst: Leaders need to understand that AI is not simply a technology investment. It’s an operational and governance challenge. Most conversations today focus on what AI can do, but leaders should be asking how they’ll govern it at scale. As AI becomes embedded across the enterprise, the volume of decisions, outputs, and potential incidents increases dramatically. Organizations need clear definitions of what constitutes harm, risk, or an incident, along with established processes for responding when something goes wrong. The companies that succeed with AI will be the ones that pair innovation with strong governance frameworks. Leaders also need to take a hard look at ROI. While the cost of AI models continues to decline and tokenization becomes cheaper, lower costs don’t automatically translate into greater efficiency. In fact, Jevons paradox suggests the opposite can happen.

As a resource becomes more affordable and accessible, overall consumption often increases. With AI, organizations may find themselves generating more content, analyzing more data, and creating more workflows than ever before. Rather than reducing work, AI can expand the amount of work organizations choose to do. The key question for leaders isn’t whether AI will make work disappear. It’s whether their organization is prepared to manage the increased scale, complexity, and opportunities that AI creates while ensuring those investments deliver measurable business value.

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