From 'Model Race' to 'Settling Accounts': What Competition in the AI Industry Now Looks Like — Answers from WAIC 2026

At WAIC 2026, experts noted a paradigm shift: the AI industry is moving from demonstrating model capabilities to strict financial accounting ('settling accounts'). Three key cost areas are discussed: infrastructure (total investments exceeded $700 billion with revenue of only $50 billion), inference (cost per token dropped 8–10 times, but total costs rose), and capital (investors demand real economics). Models remain important, but the focus shifts to product, agent capabilities, infrastructure, and trusted data.

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Smartsheet builds remote MCP server on AWS for integrating AI agents with enterprise data

Work management platform Smartsheet has built a remote MCP server on AWS, providing AI agents with structured access to data and functions. The architecture includes AWS Fargate, Amazon Bedrock, and Neptune, supporting both internal AI assistants (Smart Assist) and external clients (Amazon Quick, Claude Desktop). Optimizations have saved over 3 billion tokens, and an access management system is implemented for enterprise customers.

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