Welcome to the third inning of the modern AI era and welcome to this week's theCUBE Research Insights, powered by ETR. In this special Breaking Analysis we assess the shift from the shock of “what is this Gen AI thing?” to “how do we make it work for us?” And how can we get agents to reliably take action to deliver the productivity gains the tech industry has promised.

To do so, we're pleased to host our fifth annual data predictions power panel with collaborators from the Cube Collective, members of the Data Gang and some of the industry’s leading data analysts. With us today are five industry experts focused on data and related topics. Sanjeev Mohan of Sanjmo, Tony Bear of DB Insight, Dave Menninger of ISG Research, Kevin Petrie of BARC, and Andrew Brust of Blue Badge Insights.

At CES 2026, Jensen Huang once again reset the economics of AI factories. In particular, despite recent industry narratives that Nvidia’s moat is eroding, our assessment is the company has further solidified its position as the hardware and software standard for the next generation of computing. In the same way Intel and Microsoft dominated the Moore’s Law era, we believe Nvidia will be the mainspring of tech innovation for the foreseeable future. Importantly, the previous era saw a doubling of performance every two years. Today Nvidia is driving annual performance improvements of 5X, throughput of 10X…driving token demand of 15X via Jevons Paradox.

In this Breaking Analysis, David Floyer and I set forth our thinking around what we believe is a misplaced narrative in the market. We’ll explain what we think the market is missing and why NVIDIA’s forthcoming product lineup will reset the narrative. We’ll also look at the economics of search, LLMs and chatbots and share why OpenAI, while facing many challenges, is in a stronger position than many believe; and why Google, while clearly a leader in AI, remains challenged to preserve what many believe is the greatest business in the history of the technology business.