Today, 16 July, marks AI Appreciation Day (also recognised as National AI Day), celebrating the growing impact of artificial intelligence on business and society.
News in the Channel gathered the views of 3 industry experts, who explain why the next phase of AI is focused on execution, trusted data and governance to deliver measurable business value rather than simply boosting productivity, and they give us more insights into what’s ahead beyond today.
Alex Shumway-Jones, Head of EMEA at Zoom, comments:
“Artificial intelligence has moved well beyond the experimentation phase, but for most businesses, it hasn’t delivered on its promises yet. European enterprises are projected to spend nearly $290 billion on AI by 2029. But investment is one thing. If you ask leaders whether it’s fundamentally changing how work gets done, you’ll hear a lot of cautious optimism – and quiet frustration.
“Here’s why: most AI tools today add cognitive overhead. More summaries to read, more suggestions to review, more output to sift through. They help individuals work faster – drafting emails, summarising meetings, surfacing information – but they don’t address the real bottleneck. Work gets stuck in handoffs, decisions stall, follow-through falls through the cracks. Meanwhile, people are spending their time on operational busywork instead of the tasks that actually require human judgment.
“That’s where true ROI lives. Not in making individuals slightly more efficient, but in getting the entire organisation to execute faster. AI now has the capabilities to go beyond answering questions and generating content – it can turn conversations into completed actions, automatically. And by handling the transactional load, it frees up human capacity for what actually matters: the creative thinking, the meaningful conversations, the decisions that require understanding context and nuance. That’s the shift from AI as a productivity assistant to AI as a business accelerator. And that’s when the investment starts paying off.”
James Hall, Vice President & General Manager UK&I at Snowflake, comments:
“AI Appreciation Day 2026 follows yet another milestone year in AI innovation, in which companies are shifting from AI experimentation to larger agentic deployments that better align to business priorities, and ensure it delivers business outcomes.
“Across industries, organizations are moving toward a future where employees and intelligent agents work side-by-side to accelerate decisions, automate complex workflows and unlock entirely new levels of productivity and innovation. This evolution is creating the need for an AI Control Plane, the governance layer where intent becomes action, grounded in the customers’ enterprise data, business context, AI models, applications, workflows and security policies. Having the right data foundation will be critical to achieving this goal.
“This year’s AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that the ability to maximise the potential from AI investments will depend heavily on the quality of the data that powers it. In 2026, the most advanced companies are no longer those that use AI for AI’s sake, but rather those who deploy AI strategically with reliable, governed and contextualized data to generate trusted results and concrete business impact.”
Mel Schemith, UK and EU Managing Director of Jeen, comments:
“This year’s National AI Day highlights an emerging corporate issue: the era of AI free-for-all is now over, with the truth being that it is steadily eating up corporate budgets. Companies are experiencing a very rude awakening as they realise through experience that if they continue to implement AI agents without adequate governance over the usage of their tokens, they will encounter exponential, non-linear growth in costs to run those AI agents.
“Therefore, in order to move on to this next stage of scaling AI, every organisation must implement FinOps for AI immediately. The real question now is not how fast an organisation can adopt AI but rather how effectively that organisation can match the complexity of a task to the model that is appropriate, and in the case of using a multi-billion dollar frontier model to do a job no more complex than basic classification, that organisation is truly throwing money away.”
