To understand the landscape of 2026, we must revisit the trajectory of the experience economy over the past few years. In the immediate post-pandemic period, we witnessed the phenomenon of the “Revenge of Presence”: an explosion of mass events, festivals, and performance-driven wellness—marathons, triathlons, and frenetic networking agendas in crowded cafés. However, this excess gave rise to a new pathology: sensory fatigue. The executive of 2026 arrives at events saturated by screens, shallow networking, and endless promises of productivity.

Over the past decade, sustainability shifted from the periphery of corporate reputation to the core of business performance. Artefact’s new ebook, ESG in Action, How to convert Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data into business intelligence, documents this transition through semi-structured interviews with C-suite leaders from global companies such as Accor, Legrand, Tarkett, Ardian, Heineken, Siplec and Schenker, as well as insights from the OECD and Artefact’s sustainability and data experts.

When OpenAI announced Atlas, its new ChatGPT-powered browser, it didn’t just launch another product. It opened a door, one that leads into the next era of human-computer interaction, and, inevitably, into a new frontier for advertising.

Most companies are not ready to replace a dashboard era data stack with an AI stack. Salesforce's latest State of Data & Analytics indicates that 84% of data and analytics leaders say their strategies require a complete overhaul before AI ambitions can succeed. Leaders estimate that 26% of their data is untrustworthy, only 43% report formal data governance frameworks, and around 50% are not confident in their ability to generate and deliver timely insights. At the same time 70% believe the most valuable insights are locked in unstructured data. The conclusion is straightforward: the obstacle is not enthusiasm but foundation, and that foundation must change before agentic systems can scale.