2026 will be the year CEOs must prove AI is powering growth—not just cost cutting and layoffs

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 diane.brady@fortune.com

Top news

Paramount goes hostile

Paramount Skydance submitted a hostile all-cash bid worth $108 billion to purchase all of Warner Bros. Discovery yesterday, in an attempt to upend Netflix’s $83 billion deal. Paramount’s tender offer pulls together financing from Jared Kushner, Larry Ellison (father of Paramount CEO David Ellison), and the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all with ties to President Donald Trump, who has said he’ll be personally involved in the regulatory decision-making process. Warner Bros. has until Dec. 22 to consider Paramount’s offer. 

Ford x Renault

Ford and France’s Renault are teaming up to build small electric cars to compete with the Chinese EVs flooding the European market. “We’re in the fight for our lives and our industry, and [there is] no better example than here in Europe,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said from Paris.

JPMorgan’s American Resiliency Fund

Jamie Dimon is recruiting big names to support his $1.5 trillion initiative to insulate the U.S. from foreign adversaries. Dimon on Monday said he’s poached Todd Combs, Berkshire Hathaway’s stock picker, to run a related $10 billion fund. He’s also enlisted the likes of Jeff Bezos and Condoleezza Rice to advise on the project. 

Berkshire Hathaway shuffles ranks

Todd Combs’ departure was just one in a series of executive moves at Berkshire Hathaway as CEO Warren Buffett prepares to hand the holding company over to Greg Abel. Longtime CFO Marc Hamburg is retiring, to be succeeded by Charles Chang; Nancy Pierce has been promoted from COO to CEO of GEICO; and Michael O’Sullivan is Berkshire’s new general counsel, hired from Snap. 

Australia’s pioneering social media ban

Starting today, Australia will launch a landmark experiment to ban kids from social media. The government will require social media companies to block children under age 16 or face big fines. Other countries are watching with interest; Malaysia now says it will impose a similar rule starting next year. 

Billionaires' top concerns

A majority of the global billionaires surveyed in a new UBS report said they were concerned about tariffs negatively affecting the market, followed by “major geopolitical conflict” and policy uncertainty. Notably, only 1% said they weren’t concerned with “any economic, market, or policy factors negatively impacting the market environment over the next 12 months.”

A CEO’s ‘patent cliff’ plan

In a new interview with Diane, Bristol Myers Squibb CEO Chris Boerner talks about his plan to navigate the company’s looming patent cliff, and how a focus on company culture was the missing piece. 

The markets

S&P 500 futures were up 0.09% this morning. The last session closed down 0.35%. STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.06% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.13% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.14%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.51%. The South Korea KOSPI was down 0.27%. India’s NIFTY 50 is down 0.47%. Bitcoin is down at $90K.

Around the watercooler

Apple won’t be the same in 2026. Meet the company’s next generation of leaders and rising stars after its biggest executive exodus in years by Dave Smith

Baby boomers have now ‘gobbled up’ nearly one-third of America’s wealth share, and they’re leaving Gen Z and millennials behind by Sasha Rogelberg

Craigslist founder signs the Giving Pledge, and his fortune will go to military families, fighting cyberattacks—and a pigeon rescue by Sydney Lake

Google Cloud CEO lays out 3-part strategy to meet AI’s energy demands after identifying it as the ‘most problematic thing’ by Jason Ma

CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.