Most digital transformations succeed at the technology and fail at the business.

Short session examining how organisations are reconsidering AI deployment locations as the technology accelerates, exploring how edge-based AI is transforming cloud design, application performance, and data governance.

John Bradshaw discusses whether AI's competitive advantage in 2026 lies in model size or infrastructure placement, and how financial scrutiny is refining rather than slowing adoption, pushing intelligence toward edge infrastructure for improved performance and cost efficiency.

John Bradshaw, Field CTO Cloud EMEA at Akamai, explains why 2026 is shaping up to be the breakout year for AI inferencing — the process of putting trained models to work — and why the market remains wide open for challengers to hyperscaler dominance.

Why the build-vs-buy decision is never binary, how to think about total cost of ownership, and the hybrid approach that actually works in practice.

The economics of API vs self-hosted AI inference, where the crossover point sits, and why the hybrid approach wins for most production workloads.

The architecture patterns behind AI that takes action, not just answers questions. Single agents, multi-agent orchestration, human-in-the-loop, and a worked example.