CES 2026 wasn’t about product launches or demos. It was about posture. I spent the week inside keynotes, closed demos, and enterprise floors, moving deliberately, listening more than speaking. What stood out wasn’t any single company or device. It was the collective shift from reactive AI, where humans prompt systems, to proactive AI, where systems act in alignment with intent. The signal was clear. The world is no longer experimenting around AI. It is reorganizing itself around it.
Every job will change. Some roles will disappear. New ones will form. This isn’t a software cycle. It’s an industrial expansion. AI is not an app. It’s a stack. Compute. Energy. Models. Agents. Applications. Distribution. Whoever controls that stack doesn’t just ship products. They shape companies, regions, and nations. In the same way the U.S. dollar functions as global infrastructure, the American AI tech stack is positioning itself as global infrastructure.
Global GDP sits around one hundred trillion dollars today. AI breaks that ceiling. Over half of the world’s AI researchers are in China. Capital, talent, energy, and compute are aligning at scale. What’s forming now will define where jobs move, where value concentrates, and which countries expand their influence over the next decade.
Rich Mbariket Founder, Mbariket Ventures Enterprise U.S.—Nigeria Markets 🌍 https://mbariket.com