Artificial intelligence is entering a more consequential phase as businesses move beyond experimentation and confront new questions around value, autonomy, trust and infrastructure. Ahead of its return to the Javits Center December 9-10, The AI Summit New York has identified 10 emerging trends in its new report, AI in Action: From Experimentation to Enterprise Value, examining the forces expected to shape enterprise AI adoption and investment heading into 2027.

Where is AI delivering measurable returns? How much autonomy should AI systems have? Can organizations trust the systems making increasingly important decisions? And what happens as AI becomes embedded in the operating model itself? Five of the report’s leading trends highlight questions confronting business and technology leaders as organizations look to turn growing AI investment into measurable results.

1. Agentic and Multi-Agent Systems: Agentic AI is moving beyond prompt-driven assistants toward systems that can plan, reason and take action across complex enterprise workflows. As organizations deploy teams of specialized AI agents, the opportunity for greater automation and productivity is also raising the stakes around governance, transparency and human oversight. This makes the ability to monitor and audit autonomous systems increasingly critical.

2. AI Governance, Safety and Compliance (TRiSM): As AI becomes more embedded in business operations, the focus is shifting from whether organizations can deploy AI to whether they can trust, govern and account for it. In 2026, enterprises are moving from responsible AI principles to operational controls, including risk classification, system documentation, continuous monitoring and human oversight, as evolving regulation and greater AI autonomy make trust, transparency and accountability business imperatives.

3. On-Device and Edge AI with Small Models: AI is moving closer to where data is created as more capable small language models and AI-enabled devices allow organizations to run everyday tasks locally rather than relying exclusively on large cloud models. This emerging hybrid approach of using on-device AI for frequent or sensitive tasks while reserving larger models for complex reasoning is giving enterprises new ways to improve speed and privacy while gaining greater control over the cost of scaling AI.

4. Sovereign and Private AI: Concerns around data residency, intellectual property and regulatory compliance are growing. Enterprises and governments are seeking greater control over where AI models run, how data moves and who has access to it. Sovereign and private AI environments, supported by open-weight and custom models, are giving organizations more options to keep sensitive data within controlled infrastructure while tailoring AI systems to their own security and business requirements.

5. AI Compute and Infrastructure Economics (Chips, Energy and Data Centers): The race to scale AI is being constrained by the physical infrastructure required to power it. Once largely considered IT concerns, these infrastructure decisions are moving onto enterprise profit-and-loss statements as executives weigh performance against the growing costs, energy and capacity requirements of deploying AI at scale.

Industry Leaders Look Ahead to 2027

The trends identified in the report will also help shape the conversations taking place at The AI Summit New York 2026, where enterprise leaders, technologists and AI practitioners will examine what comes next for commercial AI.

Bringing together perspectives from some of the world’s leading organizations, the Summit offers a forum for industry leaders to share real-world experiences, challenge assumptions and explore what it will take to move AI from ambition to enterprise-wide impact.

“This is one of the few rooms where the people who’ve answered that question and the people still asking it are standing next to each other. It’s for anyone who owns a piece of the gap between AI ambition and AI production and in 2026, that’s most of us,” said Wayne Filin-Matthews, Senior Vice President, Architecture and AI at The Walt Disney Company and a member of the Summit’s 2026 Ambassador Chapter, highlighting the value of connecting with those leading AI transformation and navigating its challenges.

Looking ahead to 2027, Kristin Myers, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, Northwell Health, points to significant changes in how organizations adopt, manage and scale AI.

“We’ll see continued advances in agentic AI, lower costs, and AI increasingly embedded into the technology platforms organizations already use. The market will mature and consolidate, while regulation, cybersecurity, privacy, and responsible AI will become even more important as AI becomes more autonomous. The biggest shift may be workforce-related. AI will reshape roles, skills, and operating models, making AI fluency and workforce transformation critical to successful adoption at scale,” said Myers.

The full AI in Action: From Experimentation to Enterprise Value report, including all 10 trends and additional industry insights, is available to download now.

Early registration for The AI Summit New York can be completed by visiting https://newyork.theaisummit.com/. Media may apply for credentials via the online form here. For more announcements on agenda details, speaker additions and networking opportunities, follow The AI Summit Series on LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

ABOUT THE AI SUMMIT NEW YORK

For more than a decade, The AI Summit New York has been the trusted platform for enterprise leaders and tech innovators to explore and apply commercial AI. We unite influential minds, pioneering technologies, and practical insight to transform theoretical discussions into tangible, profitable business outcomes.

The AI Summit New York returns to the Javits Center in December 2026 to unite bold innovators, influential executives, and cutting-edge solution providers to shape the future of enterprise AI. https://newyork.theaisummit.com/

ABOUT THE AI SUMMIT SERIES

If you’re building, buying or backing AI, The AI Summit Series is where ideas become outcomes. We cut through the buzzwords to spotlight real use cases, live demos and candid playbooks that help you deploy faster, govern smarter and prove ROI with confidence. No hype, just AI that transforms business.

Launched by Informa in 2016, at a time when artificial intelligence events were largely focused on research and academia, The AI Summit Series was the first conference and exhibition dedicated to what AI means in practice for business.

For a decade, the Series has convened senior executives, investors, technology providers and data scientists to share insight, showcase breakthrough solutions and shape the commercial AI ecosystem. Trusted long before the hype, The AI Summit has established itself at the centre of the global AI community.

Today, the Series delivers world-class events across London, New York, Singapore and Melbourne continuing to set the standard for enterprise-focused, responsible AI worldwide.

For more information, visit www.london.theaisummit.com.

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