AI Appreciation Day 2026
AI Appreciation Day arrives in 2026 at a moment quite different than a year ago. AI has moved from a tool that helps people write, search and analyze faster to systems that recommend actions, trigger workflows and operate with growing autonomy across the enterprise. That change has shifted the conversation from what AI can do to how organizations adopt, govern, secure and trust it.
This year, we gathered commentary from technology, security and industry leaders on where AI stands and where they think it is headed. Their perspectives span agentic workflows, cost and model literacy, data protection, software integrity, manufacturing, commerce and the security research community. Together they point to a common theme: the value of AI depends less on enthusiasm and more on the discipline organizations build around it.
Jay Bavisi, Founder and Group President,EC-Council
“AI Appreciation Day is a useful moment to recognize how deeply AI has entered everyday work. But appreciation should not be confused with uncritical adoption. The more mature conversation is about what it takes to adopt AI responsibly, defend the systems it touches and govern its use with discipline.
AI is no longer only a productivity tool that helps people write, search or analyze faster. It is moving into workflows where it can recommend actions, trigger processes, access data and influence decisions. That changes the responsibility for every organization using it. The question is not simply how much AI can improve productivity, but whether leaders understand where it is being used, who is accountable for it, how it is secured and when human judgment must intervene.
For AI to be sustainable, organizations have to look beyond immediate efficiency gains. The real measure is whether AI can be scaled without weakening trust, increasing unmanaged risk or leaving people unprepared for the decisions these systems now influence. A system that is powerful but poorly understood, widely used but weakly governed or difficult to secure will eventually create more pressure than progress.
The real test for enterprises is not whether they can deploy more AI. Most already can, and many already are. The test is whether their people are prepared to work with AI, question its outputs, defend against its misuse and govern autonomous action before it creates business risk.
That is what AI Appreciation Day should remind us of. The future of AI will not be shaped by enthusiasm alone. It will be shaped by the discipline organizations build around AI: Adopt. Govern. Defend.”
Johnny Halife, Chief Technology Officer, Southworks
“The biggest surprise for companies moving AI into production is the speed. When an agentic workflow actually works, there is a near-magical quality to it. Once AI becomes part of the underlying infrastructure and starts contributing to team outcomes without being driven on a daily basis, the upside is tremendous. That is the real shift: moving from copilot to autopilot.
On the flip side, cost is the thing that catches teams off guard. Once AI is infrastructure, the token bill scales with everything else. Recent pricing and quota changes have pushed some companies to press pause on initiatives until they get that under control.
On this AI Appreciation Day, my advice to any CTO in that position is to know your models. Not every task needs frontier intelligence. Model literacy is a genuine developer skill in 2026, and understanding which model to use for which job is what flattens the AI cost curve without stalling the initiative.”
Unnikrshnan Kurup, Director of Client Consulting & Strategy, Theorem
“On this AI Appreciation Day, it’s important to remember that AI’s value is clearest when it helps people discover things, get educated and make better decisions. In commerce, that is becoming more important as the path to purchase becomes more hybrid across people, content, media and AI agents. Retail media is playing the performance role, video commerce is helping build trust and education, and AI agents are becoming a new way to help consumers make decisions.
When we think about the future of AI in commerce, it should sit where it makes everyday decisions easier and more useful. People will keep using AI when the value exchange is clear: it saves me time, it saves me money, it helps me make better decisions and it makes my life easier.
A large share of commerce will become agent-assisted, but there will still be a separation between tasks and desires. AI agents can take over routine work like replenishment, comparison, deal hunting, delivery optimization, product filtering and subscription management. Humans will still drive taste, identity, values, gifting, discovery and emotional choices.
Rather than replacing people altogether, agents will become a new layer between intent and decision-making. The biggest opportunity is using AI to create convenience without taking away control. AI should help people make decisions they understand and feel confident in, not decisions they cannot explain or reverse.”
Shiv Agarwal, Co-Founder and CEO, Singulr AI
“AI Appreciation Day is the perfect moment to move past the hype and understand how AI can actually create value inside an enterprise. That value isn’t simply created through better models and more tools or agents. AI creates value when people can use it to eliminate painstakingly repetitive tasks, make better decisions, experiment safely and securely, and move faster.
The challenge in 2026 is that most organizations are trying to govern a constantly evolving, dynamic technology with processes built for a much slower generation of software and controls that have become fragmented over time. Employees are using these new tools before IT and security teams have had a chance to review them; new AI features appear in SaaS applications without as much as a notification; and, on top of that, agents are starting to take actions across systems. The cost of using AI is skyrocketing without proper usage oversight and optimization controls. Governance can’t just apply to a policy or onboarding document anymore; it has to operate in real time where AI is actually being used.
True AI appreciation means recognizing both the technology’s promise and the reality of how it operates within a given organization. To get the most value out of AI, your company needs visibility, clear digital and interpersonal controls, training, and confidence to keep internal policies aligned with the real world as AI continues to gain more autonomy.”
Hari Srinivasan, Vice President of Products & Strategy, Lineaje:
“Agentic AI is driving enterprise technology past ‘just’ assistance and directly into autonomous operational execution. As these systems independently generate code, execute workflows, and make real-time decisions, they fundamentally alter the enterprise risk profile.
The shift demands an immediate evolution in governance. Enterprises can no longer rely on periodic audits; they require continuous, real-time visibility into Agentic AI, including AI-generated software, and rigorous integrity verification throughout the entire development lifecycle. That process begins with software lineage—equipping organizations to trace exactly what AI created, verify its origin, and validate its integrity before a single line of code reaches production.
For AI Appreciation Day, the industry conversation must mature from AI adoption to strict AI governance. As Agentic AI reshapes enterprise operating models, continuous governance should become the baseline, not the exception. True value isn’t what AI can build—it’s about ensuring every AI and AI-generated outcomes can be governed, verified, and trusted.”
Freddy Kuo, Chairman of Luminys Systems Corp. and CEO of Foxlink Group:
“This AI Appreciation Day, the conversation should move beyond celebrating AI for its own sake. The next chapter of AI will be defined by systems that operate reliably in the real world, support better human decisions, and deliver measurable outcomes.
That requires more than powerful models. It requires an AI Factory approach: a closed-loop ecosystem where real-world data, computing, model training, solution development, deployment, and feedback continuously reinforce one another. As AI moves into physical environments, trust will matter as much as intelligence. The most valuable AI will not replace people. It will strengthen the teams responsible for making critical decisions every day.”
Dan Kutchel, CEO, Overtime:
“On AI Appreciation Day, we’re reminded that AI’s promise is not just about moving faster. It’s about building better, more flexible experiences for people. Ultimately, AI’s value should be measured not by the technology itself, but by the business outcomes it delivers.
AI’s most meaningful impact will be in how it expands choice for consumers, creating experiences that not only better meet an individual’s needs, but also help businesses drive stronger engagement, loyalty, faster payments, and growth. In some moments, consumers will want the speed, convenience, and 24/7 availability of interacting with an AI agent. In others, they’ll want the empathy, judgment, and creativity that only human connection can provide. The future we should be building is not one that forces a single way of interacting, but rather one that offers people flexibility and choice. It’s about giving people the right experience at the right time, with trust built into every interaction.
As voice AI and agentic systems evolve, we have a responsibility to build technology that earns trust through transparency, reliability, and thoughtful design. The companies that will succeed will empower businesses to serve consumers in ways that feel more personal, natural, and human-centered.”
Jessica Hammond, Senior Director Product Management- Gen AI, Protegrity:
“While AI Appreciation Day is a moment to recognize the value AI is creating for organizations, we cannot celebrate adoption without considering the risks that come with it. AI systems are moving from content generation tools to agents that retrieve knowledge and act across enterprise workflows. The more AI is embedded into daily business, the more sensitive data moves through prompts, logs, retrieval systems, tools and outputs.
Appreciating AI without considering how it handles data is how innovation quickly turns into liability. Reliable AI starts with data that is accurate, well understood and managed throughout its lifecycle. Organizations need to know where data came from, how it is classified, who can access it, when it can be used and how it is protected if something goes wrong. Those that succeed in this next phase of AI adoption will be the ones that can prove their AI is governed, protected and secure by design.”
Dan Abramson, SVP Americas at Syspro
“This is the fifth AI Appreciation Day, and it feels remarkably different from the last. In just 12 months, AI has moved from being a technology the manufacturing industry was exploring to one it is broadly embedding into critical day-to-day operations. Today is a chance to reflect on not just the extraordinary pace of AI advancement, but how much manufacturers have adapted and achieved in putting it to work.
Manufacturers continue to manage supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, tighter margins, and changing customer expectations every day. AI is radically helping them cut through that complexity, making operational data easier to interpret, surfacing risks earlier, and reducing the time teams spend on manual analysis.
AI Appreciation Day also serves as a reminder that AI must serve people. The manufacturers seeing the strongest results are leveraging AI embedded into the systems their people already rely on. Whether it supports production planning, inventory management or quality processes, AI is giving teams better information and more confidence to make faster, smarter decisions.
Manufacturing has always depended on expertise, sound judgment, and accountability. Every decision has implications for production, customer commitments, quality, and safety. At its best, AI supports and strengthens those core principles, keeping teams at the center of what matters most: quality, safety, and customer commitment.”
Dror Zelber, Vice President of Product Management, Radware
“AI Appreciation Day tends to focus on what AI can do. For enterprises, the more urgent question is how to secure autonomous agents once they begin accessing data, interacting with business applications and completing tasks with minimal human involvement.
Security teams need to know where these AI agents are running, what they can access and whether their behavior creates risk. Without that visibility, governance becomes difficult and compliance reporting becomes much harder to support.
The next phase of AI security will be about managing the entire ecosystem of agents rather than individual applications. Organizations that want to use AI at scale will need visibility, governance and behavioral protection built into every deployment and into the way those agents operate.”
Ryan Heidorn, Chief Technology Officer, C3
“On AI Appreciation Day, I think less about the technology in the abstract and more about what it can make possible for teams operating under real security and compliance pressure. In the Defense Industrial Base, organizations are expected to protect sensitive government data, manage identities across increasingly cloud-native environments and prove that CMMC controls are working in practice. That creates a constant stream of alerts, evidence, access decisions and risk signals that can overwhelm even mature teams.
Where AI becomes especially valuable is in helping security teams turn that complexity into action. It can identify patterns faster, surface unusual access behavior, prioritize the risks that matter, support documentation and make continuous monitoring more achievable. For contractors preparing for a CMMC assessment, that kind of speed and visibility can help bridge the gap between security that exists on paper and security that can be demonstrated day to day.
But appreciation should not become blind trust. AI is not a substitute for governance, accountability or operational discipline. It can make strong processes faster and more scalable, but it cannot make weak processes defensible on its own. The organizations that will benefit most are the ones using AI to strengthen security processes they already own, not bypass them. For the DIB, that means applying AI responsibly to support identity management, assessment readiness and stronger protection of the data our national security ecosystem depends on.”
Kara Sprague, CEO, HackerOne
“AI Appreciation Day tends to celebrate what AI creates. In security, the more interesting story is what it defends against.
Attackers adopted AI first. They use it to find and exploit weaknesses faster than any human team could match, and that is exactly why AI has become indispensable to the defenders. But AI has not replaced the human security researcher. It has raised the value of one. In the first half of this year, security researchers earned roughly $47 million through our platform, up 25% from the same period a year ago, even as AI made finding vulnerabilities faster than ever. AI can flag a possible vulnerability in seconds. It still takes human expertise to prove that vulnerability is real, understand how an attacker would actually use it, and decide what to fix first. Machines generate the possibilities. People confirm the truth.
The organizations getting this right are not choosing between security researchers and AI. They are pairing them. Speed from the machine, judgment from the human. That is what continuous security now demands.”
Anthony Verna, Senior Vice President and General Manager, DTECH Mission Solutions, Cubic Defense
“AI is changing how defense organizations improve adaptability and generate decision advantage in complex operational environments. Modern operations require mission teams to access, process and act on mission-critical data locally without assuming constant connectivity.
The next phase of AI adoption will center on greater speed, autonomy and data operationalization at the tactical edge. We will continue to see accelerated adoption of AI-enabled edge compute, software-defined communications and integrated mission systems that support distributed operations, faster coordination, resilient communications and rapid intelligence processing.
AI is helping reshape how operators turn mission-critical data into operational advantage through faster and more informed decisions. That role will continue to grow as defense organizations prioritize technologies that improve mission effectiveness, wherever the fight goes.”
