Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a futuristic buzzword. In 2026, it’s become a powerful tool reshaping everything from legislative halls in Kansas to the boardrooms of global tech giants like Salesforce. While opinions on AI’s ultimate impact are as varied as the fields it touches, one thing is clear: AI is moving from experimentation to real-world deployment, and the world is racing to keep up.
Take the Kansas Statehouse, for instance. According to reporting from the Kansas News Service, lawmakers there are increasingly turning to AI chatbots to help with the dizzying pace of legislative work. With sessions moving at what some describe as a “dangerous breakneck speed,” AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot are being used to summarize bills, provide background research, and even draft remarks for committee meetings. Republican Representative Sean Willcott put it plainly during a February committee meeting: “I use AI on a regular basis. I used AI to help write some of these components.”
Willcott isn’t alone. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle admit to using chatbots for everything from answering constituent emails to writing press releases. The reason? Time. During one particularly hectic week in February, the Kansas House voted on 113 bills in just two days. “By necessity, I think a lot of people are turning to these chatbots and chat tools in order to legislate because they have no other choice,” said Democratic Representative Stephanie Sawyer Clayton. She’s a self-described “legislative purist” who prefers to read testimony and analyze legislation herself, but she acknowledges the pressures that are pushing her colleagues toward AI.
Still, this rapid adoption hasn’t come without concern. There are currently no official guidelines for how Kansas legislators should use AI. Some, like Willcott, warn about the technology’s limitations. “Just because something sounds really, really intelligent and gives you an answer, doesn’t necessarily make it a correct answer,” he cautioned. Republican Representative Nick Hoheisel, an early adopter of AI for legislative work, echoed those concerns. He’s experienced so-called “hallucinations”—AI-generated false information—especially when researching case law. “I would strongly encourage folks to double and triple check their work,” Hoheisel advised.
Hoheisel has also been at the forefront of efforts to regulate AI in Kansas. In 2025, he supported a law making it a crime to create, possess, or distribute child sexual abuse materials generated by AI. This session, he introduced a bill to establish an AI task force to study the technology and make recommendations to the legislature. That bill, however, will not advance this session, as more time is needed to select members for the task force. In the meantime, the state’s digital infrastructure overhaul is still catching up. Altaf Uddin, chief information technology officer for the Kansas legislature, noted that while states like Iowa, California, and Utah have integrated AI-powered bill tracking systems, Kansas isn’t ready to rely on AI for drafting bill or amendment text. “Dropping a ‘not’ or adding a ‘not’ can actually change what the interpretation of that bill is,” Uddin explained, emphasizing the risks of relying on probability-based answers for high-stakes legal language.
While Kansas lawmakers wrestle with how best to use AI, the business world is already capitalizing on its potential. Salesforce, the global leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software, reported robust financial results for fiscal 2026, with revenues climbing 10% year over year to $41.5 billion, according to The Motley Fool. The company’s remaining performance obligations—a measure of future revenue pipeline—stood at $72 billion, with $35.1 billion expected to be recognized within the next year, up 16% from the previous year. These numbers suggest customers are making long-term commitments to Salesforce’s offerings, particularly its AI-driven platforms.
At the heart of Salesforce’s AI strategy is Agentforce, a platform designed to build, manage, and deploy AI agents capable of automating tasks across business workflows. By the end of fiscal 2026, Agentforce had reached an annual revenue run rate of about $800 million, marking a staggering 169% year-over-year increase. In just 15 months since its launch, Salesforce closed approximately 29,000 Agentforce deals. More than 75% of Salesforce’s top 100 deals in the fourth quarter included both Agentforce and Data 360, the latter being a platform that unifies customer data across enterprise systems for AI applications.
Salesforce’s aggressive push into AI was further underscored by its acquisition of Informatica, a move aimed at enhancing cloud management and data integration for more effective AI use. Together, Agentforce and Data 360 (including Informatica) reached annual recurring revenue of over $2.9 billion by the end of fiscal 2026, up more than 200% year over year. This isn’t just about adding AI features to CRM software—it’s about building an integrated, secure platform that connects enterprise data, business applications, and AI agents into a single, seamless system.
The commercial success of these tools is evident in customer deployments. Wyndham Hotels, for example, rolled out over 5,000 Agentforce AI agents across more than 8,300 hotels, resulting in a two-percentage-point increase in direct bookings thanks to AI voice agents. SharkNinja, another early adopter, reported that its Salesforce AI agents managed nearly 250,000 customer interactions shortly after their deployment in late 2025. The sheer scale of Salesforce’s AI operations is impressive: its systems have processed more than 19 trillion tokens—the basic units of text used by large language models—and completed 2.4 billion Agentic Work Units by the end of the fourth quarter, with 771 million in that quarter alone.
What sets Salesforce apart, according to The Motley Fool, is its 26 years of accumulated customer data. This extensive data asset gives the company a significant edge, as effective AI agents depend on the quality and relevance of the underlying data. As the CRM industry continues to evolve, Salesforce appears well positioned not only to benefit from AI, but to fundamentally transform how businesses engage with their customers.
Meanwhile, the broader investment community is also waking up to AI’s transformative potential. As reported by Bloomberg, Maxence Visseau, founder of investment firm Arkevium, turned to AI in the early days of the Iran war to make sense of market implications. By leveraging Anthropic’s Claude AI, Visseau was able to cut his research time by about 80%, stress-test multiple scenarios, and map out potential ripple effects across asset classes. This kind of AI-driven analysis is becoming increasingly common among investors seeking an edge in turbulent times.
Of course, not everyone is ready to declare AI an unqualified good. As one analyst wrote in Seeking Alpha, “artificial intelligence is a blessing rather than a curse”—but that sentiment comes with the caveat that past performance is no guarantee of future results, and that investment advice should always be taken with a grain of salt.
The debate over AI’s role in society is far from settled. Whether in the halls of government, the offices of corporate America, or the fast-paced world of global finance, people are grappling with how best to harness its power while guarding against its pitfalls. As AI continues its rapid march into every corner of our lives, the challenge—and the opportunity—will be to ensure that this technology serves the public good, even as it transforms the way we work, govern, and invest.