Strategic Leadership Guidance

For the past decade, AI leadership hiring has been dominated by one question: Who can build the best models? In 2026, that question is no longer enough. As AI systems move from research environments into real-world production, competitive advantage is increasingly determined by infrastructure – the hardware, systems, and platforms that turn models into reliable, scalable machines.

For much of the last decade, the AI talent conversation centered on model training – larger models, bigger datasets, and ever-expanding data centers. That phase is now maturing. In 2026, the real constraint has moved downstream to AI inference: the ability to deploy, scale, and run models efficiently in production.