In short
- According to IoT Analytics’ latest What CEOs Talked About update, AI remained the top topic in CEOs’ minds in Q3 2026.
- Discussions around tariff refunds rose sharply, while discussions about the tariffs themselves dropped slightly.
- Recent reports of AI agents breaking safeguards and hacking companies have CEOs discussing the risks (and, for some, opportunities) of rogue agents.
- Geopolitical discussions declined in Q3, though the US–Iran conflict (and its impact) enters its 8th month.
Why it matters
- The prioritization of specific topics by CEOs may influence investment in these areas.
In this article
- The big picture: AI brings the CEO digital agenda to new highs
- Rising topics
- Declining topics
- Further analysis
- The 10 key takeaways from the report (Insights+ Exclusive)
- The CEO digital agenda by sector (Insights+ Exclusive)
- AI discussions by region (Insights+ Exclusive)
- How CEOs discussed inference (Insights+ Exclusive)
- Common manufacturing challenges (Insights+ Exclusive)
The big picture: AI brings the CEO digital agenda to new highs
AI stayed dominant as CEOs shifted toward frontier models and AI incidents. For the 4th consecutive quarter, AI remained the top boardroom topic, rising 6.5% QoQ to 55.7% of earnings calls in Q3 2026, according to IoT Analytics’ 94-page What CEOs Talked About Q3 2026 report (published September 2026). Across the 18 industries covered in the analysis, 14 of 18 mentioned AI more often than in Q2 2026. Only agriculture, accommodation, and arts declined.
Notably, while AI discussions climbed, mentions of specific AI tools/architectures (e.g., agentic AI, MCP, Claude, and ChatGPT) and vendors (e.g., Perplexity) generally declined. Some CEOs turned their attention to 1) new frontier AI models, like Astra, which entered the stage with 0.2% of earnings calls; 2) Hugging Face, up 674% QoQ to 0.5% of calls thanks to recent rogue agent reports; and 3) open architecture, like open models, up 213% QoQ to 0.5% of calls.
CEO digital agenda
Data centers move up in digital priority. CEOs continue to emphasize digital topics during earnings calls. The CEO digital agenda remained the 2nd-highest agenda topic in Q3 2026. Within the CEO digital agenda, the top 3 digital topics were:
- AI – 55.7% of calls
- Data centers – 23% (up 21% QoQ)
- Software – 22.7% (down 3.7% QoQ)
For the first time since we began this analysis in 2019, mentions of data centers supplanted software as the #2 topic in the CEO digital agenda.
Insights from this article are derived from
Quarterly Trend Report: What CEOs talked about in Q3 2026
A 94-page report on the trends that emerged in Q3 2026 earnings calls. The report is based on data from 120,000+ earnings calls of US-listed companies from Q1 2019 through Q3 2026.
Already a subscriber? View your reports and trackers here →
Rising topics
1. AI
As mentioned, AI mentions rose 6.5% QoQ to 55.7% of earnings calls in Q3 2026.
3 key themes arising from the Q3 calls
1. AI now writes most of the code – Companies quantified how much of their software AI now writes (typically 50–90%+ for technology companies) and how much faster they ship.
Key executive quote on AI writing most of the code
“By the end of this year, we’ll have half a dozen products that are going to be 100% written with AI. By the end of next year, we’ll be like 70% of our portfolio will be 100% written with AI, no human lines of code.”
Jeetendra Patel, President & Chief Product Officer, Cisco, September 2026
2. Growth decoupled from headcount – Executives said AI lets revenue and output grow while headcount remains flat or shrinks. Many framed it as slower hiring, not mass layoffs.
Key CEO quote on growth being decoupled from headcount
“Our engineering organization was 30% smaller than it was a year ago, but it delivered substantially more product output.”
Charles Cohn, Founder, Chairman & CEO, Nerdy, August 2026
3. Pricing moves beyond the seat – As AI does the work, software and IT-services vendors shifted from per-seat/effort pricing to consumption-, value-, and outcome-based models.
Key CEO quote on pricing moving beyond seats
“The customer is operating with a smaller workforce, which historically would have resulted in a seat contraction. Instead, the investment in AI Studio and AI Teammates more than offset a smaller footprint.”
Daniel Rogers, CEO, Asana, September 2026
Meanwhile, several other AI-related topics saw notable climbs in mentions in Q3 2026 as well:
- Data center – up 21% QoQ to 23% of earnings calls
- Open source – up 58.3% QoQ to 2.4% of calls
- Inference – up 2% QoQ to 3.9%
- Hugging Face – up 673.7% QoQ to 0.5% of calls (more about this jump below)
- Open model – up 213% QoQ to 0.5% of calls
- Astra (new OpenAI model) – 0.2% of calls
Key CEO quote about data centers
“We added 31 new data centers across 5 continents this quarter, bringing the total to 88 this year as we expand our footprint in response to accelerating demand.”
Satya Nadella, Chairman & CEO, Microsoft, July 2026
Key CEO quote on Astra and inference
“Now we have crossed 10 trillion, and there is no sign of stopping. And you look at the latest Astra model that came out was trained on more than 100,000 GPUs. Inference is driving a lot of new workloads, including longer context windows and so on. And even for inference, now you need racks of compute.”
Jitendra Mohan, Co-Founder & CEO, Astera Labs, September 2026
2. Tariff refunds
CEOs discuss tariff refunds as mentions of tariffs dropped slightly. While the topic of tariffs continued to decline from its Q2 2025 peak of 74% of calls (now only 22%, down 0.4% QoQ), more companies discussed tariff refunds, up 213.4% QoQ to 6.8% of Q3 earnings calls. Mentions of IEEPA, the law that the Trump Administration attempted to use for its sweeping tariffs that the US Supreme Court later said could not be used as the basis, rose 28% to 3.2% of calls.
3 key themes for how CEOs discussed tariff refunds
1. Reinvested in price – Retailers put the refunds toward lowering prices, and refunds fund promotions across the sector.
Key executive quote on reinvesting refunds in pricing
“We were eligible for approximately $2.9 billion of tariff refunds […] we’ve taken a disciplined approach to investing these funds back into customer experience and price leadership, prioritizing investment in grocery and general merchandise categories.”
John Rainey, Executive VP & CFO, Walmart, August 2026
2. Passed back to customers – Firms that passed tariffs on to customers saw the refund as not theirs to keep and handed most or all of it back.
Key CEO quote on passing refunds back to customers
“So our philosophy has always been that we are going to be very transparent with our customers. […] if we’ve passed through or pushed a tariff through and we’ve gotten a refund as a result about it, it’s not our money to keep. […] So everything we’ve done has been a direct pass-through.”
George Wilson, President, CEO & Chairman, Quanex, September 2026
3. New tariffs will refill the bill – Refunds cut this year’s net tariff bill, but the run rate will rise again in 2027.
Key CEO quotes on the refunds being a one-off
“Our assumption is that, that will then return the tariff environment kind of where it was under IEEPA. It remains to be seen. I think that that’s going to be now the when is the big question.”
Christopher Nelson, President, CEO & Director, Stanley Black & Decker, September 2026
3. Rogue agents
AI agent security incidents drew CEO attention. In July 2026, AI agents from US-based AI research company OpenAI reportedly broke out of secure testing sandboxes and hacked US-based open-source AI platform Hugging Face. This followed the US government’s restrictions on US-based AI research company Anthropic’s Fable 5 model (a guardrail version of Mythos) in June 2026 after alleged jailbreaking of its safety measures, which we covered in our Q2 2026 What CEOs Talked About update. Most recently, in late September 2026, the Australian government announced that an OpenAI agent had hacked its website.
Events like this put the risks and business potential of these agents in many CEOs’ minds in Q3 2026. Mentions of Hugging Face rose by a steep 674% QoQ to 0.5% of earnings calls. Meanwhile, though mentions of Mythos declined 31% QoQ, it still appeared in approximately 1% of calls.
4 collective themes about Hugging Face and rogue agents:
1. Risk: Agents can go rogue without a bad actor – CEOs cited the Hugging Face incident as proof that autonomous agents can act outside of their own guardrails.
Key CEO quote about agents autonomously going rogue
“This includes the recent Hugging Face incident in which we saw an autonomous AI agent exploit a zero-day vulnerability and gain unauthorized access to live systems, all without human direction. This clearly demonstrated both halves of the risk companies are grappling with, an AI-orchestrated attack moving faster than any human-speed response and an agent operating well outside the guardrails anyone intended for it.”
Bipul Sinha, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman, Rubrik, August 2026
2. Risk: Rogue agents turn agent identity into a security priority – Summer incidents of rogue agents at frontier labs and discoveries of thousands of unknown agents make agent identity/governance a new budget line.
Key CEO quote about agentic identity becoming a security priority
“Agents are also human and machine risk multipliers with access to data, continuous operational capability and limited judgment. We’re seeing agents go rogue, swarming to attack and moving beyond their guardrails to autonomously harm.”
George Kurtz, Co-Founder, President, CEO & Director, CrowdStrike, August 2026
3. Risk: The patch window collapsed – AI finds and chains flaws faster than anyone can patch, so spend shifts to exposure management, shielding, and machine-speed recovery.
Key CEO quote about the patch window collapsing
“And Mythos and frontier AI models have been a huge inflection point for our industry. What Mythos has demonstrated is the vulnerability chaining will make a low-priority vulnerability into a P0 problem. And as a result, these models are so smart that there is no real time between intrusion and breach. So you cannot stop breaches.”
Bipul Sinha, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman, Rubrik, August 2026
4. Business potential: Incidents are driving security demand – Security vendors say the incident, together with Mythos, raised CISO urgency and converts into customers and pipeline.
Key CEO quote on AI-based security incidents creating business potential
“There’s just a recent story about the OpenAI model attacking Hugging Face, etc.; there’s Mythos. I think there’s a very large alert on the CISO level, security organizations. We definitely see that creating demand for our security services.”
Roy Zisapel, Co-Founder, CEO & President, Radware, July 2026
Declining topics
1. Geopolitics
Geopolitical discussions declined overall. As the conflict between the US and Iran enters its 8th month, oil prices remain elevated and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains restricted. However, CEOs mentioned geopolitical topics less in Q3 2026.
- Middle East – Down 24% QoQ to 23.7% of earnings calls
- Oil – Down 23% QoQ to 21.6% of calls
- Geopolitics – Down 25% QoQ to 21.1% of calls
- Iran – Down 43.6% QoQ to 7.9% of calls
- Strait of Hormuz – Down 30.7% QoQ to 3.5% of calls
In general, CEOs appear to accept that the conflict will be a prolonged, stop-start one, with several noting their companies are diversifying sources, building alternative routes, and expanding domestic capacity.
Key CEO quote on the US–Iran conflict
“We have changed the premise that we had last quarter in which we believe or at least the base case scenario for our guideline was given with a short resolution of Hormuz opening. […] we’re changing the premise on which we give our guidance for the second semester of the year. And what we are considering that the opening of the Strait of Hormuz in the short term will be an upside to our scenario.”
Gabriel Podskubka, CEO, Tenaris, August 2026
2. Specific AI models
Overall, mentions of individual models and their vendors have declined in Q3 2026:
- Claude – Down 27.4% QoQ to 2.9% of earnings calls, though up 512% year-over-year (YoY)
- ChatGPT – Down 22% QoQ to 2.9% of calls; up 16% YoY
- Gemini – Down 32.3% QoQ to 1.6% of calls, up 33% YoY
- Cursor – Up 2.6% QoQ to 0.5% of calls, up 70% YoY
- Perplexity – Down 47.8% QoQ to 0.2% of calls, down 53% YoY
- Mistral AI – Up 4.4% QoQ to 0.2% of calls, up 135% YoY
Further analysis
Below, in our Insights+ Exclusive section, we share more analysis from the What CEOs Talked About in Q3 2026 report, including:
- The 10 key takeaways from the report
- The CEO digital agenda by sector (with key digital themes and trends)
- AI discussions by region
- How CEOs discussed inference
- Common manufacturing challenges discussed
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