At IBM Think 2026 in Boston, RedMonk co-founders James Governor and Stephen O’Grady discuss the conference’s central theme: the shift from AI proof of concepts to real-world implementation and tangible business use cases. Rather than theoretical discussions about AI’s potential, attendees are now focused on practical applications across diverse industries. James and Steve highlight several compelling examples, including an eyewear company, bag manufacturer, and an insurance company. A standout moment was tennis legend Andre Agassi presenting his AI-powered coaching application, which allows users to receive personalized tennis coaching through their smartphone camera—a practical demonstration of how AI can democratize expert advice and personalized guidance. Organizations are moving beyond asking “what can AI do?” to asking “what are we actually building with AI?” and finding concrete ways to apply the technology to solve real business problems. This focus on actionable use cases, rather than speculative capabilities, represents a significant maturation in how enterprises are approaching AI adoption and implementation.

This RedMonk Quick Take video is sponsored by IBM.

Transcript

James Governor (00:02)
Hey, it’s James Governor from Redmonk. It is Stephen O’Grady from Redmonk. And we are here at IBM Think 2026. It is in Boston. Loving this conference center, by the way. This is awesome. Boston’s great. Yep, Boston is great. Great place to run your mid-sized conferences. This is great. I would definitely highly recommend it. The logistics from IBM have been flawless. Really happy about that. And the fact that I could fly in from London, I arrived, got through customs, and onto the Silver Line, I was here at the hotel in the conference center with intent

minutes, so like 20 minutes all told, amazing. So that was great. So I like a bit of efficiency. I like something that’s going to be a great experience. Now one of the things that we’ve been asking ourselves from an AI perspective is use cases. We’ve actually got to be building things now. One of the big themes of the conference has been, hey, this is not a proof of concept anymore. This is about what you’re actually building. And so use cases, what have you been looking at?

Stephen O’Grady (00:59)
I mean, think the sort of as you just mentioned, one of the things with the conversations with AI has always been, we have this technology, we have these abilities to do things and you show up in a business and they’d say, OK, great, what do I do? And you’d look at them and say, I don’t know. I don’t know your business. Like, how do we apply this? And again, I think that will continue for a long time. But I think one of the things that we’ve seen here is that there’s a whole range of businesses, you know, from tennis to eyewear to, you know, sort of the sort of more traditional insurance examples where people are actually

finding ways to put this stuff to work now. They’re finding ways to say, no, no, this is actually useful. We are actually doing something with it. It’s not a theoretical.

James Governor (01:37)
Day bags. We sell bags and we’re using this for our product discovery. So pulling in requirements. You think about when you do focus groups, are you able to automate the findings? So actually using that in product design for making bags, that’s kind an impressive use case again.

Stephen O’Grady (01:57)
Yeah, we’re just, there are actually concrete use cases. It’s not a, hey, you know, we have this sort of super advanced computer that can do all these wonderful things and we’ll figure out what to do. And think people are figuring that out now.

James Governor (02:08)
From our perspective, spend so much time, our use case is software development. So we spend all of our time thinking about how does AI change the SDLC, how are agents used in that context. And so I think it’s probably been valuable for us to have a bit of that CIO, top level speak, and get some of those.

Stephen O’Grady (02:27)
Well, one of the examples this morning was that, know, essentially, you know, they had employees for an insurance company that were going outside the company to apply for the jobs because they were so inefficient from a retention standpoint. So it’s like we now have an agent that sort of, you know, is sort of geared towards internal retention. Those are not the kinds of things that we think about. And it’s not the kinds of things that are necessarily obvious for a lot of these AI use cases. But I think one of the things that’s happened is that the more that the technology sort of makes its way into the world, people are finding different ways to apply it and use it and do cool things with it.

James Governor (02:57)
So, was one of the cool things. must admit, so they had Andre Agassi come to present. So he has a startup now. I was really, I was quite taken with that. mean, think he’s a charming fellow, although he did go off script quite a lot. But here’s the thing.

When he spoke with passion about, it was actually about how he had analyzed Roddick. So he knew that he was going to be competing against him. has this young kid, just an unbelievable serve, 150 miles an hour serve. How are you actually going to respond to that? How are you going to compete? He gave this great story about seeing a video of Roddick and thinking, OK, here are all of the things that I can do and break it down in order that I can respond.

Stephen O’Grady (03:39)
Yeah, it was crazy. was the strength of the two hands on his back hand. I was like, I have no idea what’s going on. Yeah, exactly.

James Governor (03:46)
The grip on the other hand exactly what would be in order to compete. So what he’s doing is creating an app, coaching app, that your phone is your coach. And that sort of stuff is super interesting. Obviously, if you can get a fraction of Andre Agassi advising you in how to become a better tennis player just by putting your phone on a tripod, that’s going to be amazing.

And yeah, so Think 2026 here in Boston, a lot to like and yeah, we got good sort of technical stuff around the SDLC, but very much these use cases that were business use cases, that’s what we came away with.

Stephen O’Grady (04:17)
Yeah, that was neat. Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. Cheers.