The Age of Agility: Midyear Signals for 2026 - Part 2
episode
The Decisive Podcast: Insights and analysis to empower confident decision-making.
18 min
4 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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What are the three strategic themes of the Age of Agility report for 2026?
You're listening to the Decisive Podcast insights and analysis to empower confident decision making.
Hello and welcome to the Decisive Podcast. I'm your host, Kristen Hallam. This week's episode is the second half of a client webinar I hosted on June 17th with S ⁇ P Global Market Intelligence Experts in Economics, Country Risk, and Trade and Supply Chain. In last week's episode, we revisited the key strategic themes for 2026 from our Age of Agility report, shaky economic foundations, shifting asymmetric power, and adapting to trade realities. This episode picks up where that conversation left off, with a closer look at how AI is showing up across those strategic themes. We also look ahead to the rest of 2026 and into 2027, including what potential conflict resolutions could mean for sanctions and reconstruction opportunities, and how USMCA discussions could shape the future of North American trade.
Admit it, you're already thinking about next year too. So let's get back to the conversation with the Age of Agility, Mid-Year Signals for 2026, Part 2. I'd like each of you to give our audience the ninety second view on how AI is showing up in each of these three strategic themes. Lawrence, since you were just in the hot seat, let's start with you.
We're thinking about the AI from this shift in asymmetric power lens in a couple of different areas. The first is the kind of global regulation piece. And what we said at the start of the year that we didn't expect any of the big players to get complete control of the regulatory environment. So this is we do not think we're going to see a situation where one set of regulatory coherence globally set And that's what everyone needs to adhere to. It's pretty clear that again if we go back to the three kind of big blocks, the US, China and the EU, that they've all got slightly different approaches or radically different approaches in some areas. Why is that important apart from being important in and of itself?
It's important because it means that companies that are out there operating are going to face different regulatory Conditions, different compliance demands, different operational conditions, depending on where they're operating, and quite radically different in some ways. And also clearly, if we're talking about an attempt to get your own regulatory regime out there and be influential elsewhere, that there is competition going on there which may well be affected by other aspirations and goals that these actors have. Probably more prosaic, but I think no less important issue for us is what are the challenges to the rollout of the hardware, and particularly here we're talking about data centers, right?
How possible is it for data centers to be rolled out in certain places? What are the challenges that are going to be faced on the ground? And we think that a pretty significant part of that is about basically local community acquiescence to operation, given some of the considerations that are going on. Eric earlier mentioned El Nino. In some regions, in some places there are very severe water scarcity issues when El Nino hits, that's likely to be a restraint, as is any trajectory that local grassroots routes have had over the years of understanding than how to prove policy levers, political levers, legal challenges to block things that they don't want to see happening in their area. So we're keeping a very close eye across our different regional coverage for areas where we know we see this different kind of confluence of factors coming together.
All right. Eric, your turn. In ninety seconds or less, how is AI showing up in trade and supply chains?
So it's been front and center for me. I am tracking kind of the software that's developed on behalf of supply chain operators and logistics partners. So it's been very much in my view for a long period of time very interesting to see it interact with the physical world more recently. So I I tend to think of it from two different prisms. First, you have the infrastructure perspective that Lawrence just went into and how that impacts freight flows.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What are the three strategic themes of the Age of Agility report for 2026?
0:03–9:02
2
How is AI reshaping asymmetric power and global regulation across the US, China, and EU?
9:02–10:24
3
What challenges do data‑center roll‑outs and local community acceptance pose for AI infrastructure?
10:24–17:59
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Decisive Podcast: Insights and analysis to empower confident decision-making.
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