Jeff Kagan: AI separating broadcast winners from losers at NAB 2026

Independent telecom and media analyst Jeff Kagan published a pre-show preview arguing that NAB 2026 marks a decisive AI inflection point comparable to the commercial internet wave of the 1990s. Kagan writes that AI "has quickly moved onto the radar of investors, customers, and employees. It is transforming the world as we know it, and doing so at an unprecedented pace." He expects the show to produce clearer competitive strategies from carriers including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, as well as from cloud infrastructure providers AWS, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA.

Kagan notes that many senior executives across broadcast and telecom organizations still lack AI training and are moving quickly to hire Chief AI Officers to manage the transition. His framing treats AI adoption not as a technology evaluation problem but as an organizational readiness problem: who moves earliest and most decisively will gain durable competitive advantage, while laggards face accelerating disadvantage.

The preview aligns with the dominant pre-show analyst consensus heading into the week: AI is no longer a future-looking conference topic but a current execution challenge, with NAB 2026 expected to surface both credible deployments and the inevitable gap between vendor marketing and production-ready tooling.