AI Agents and Factories Are On the Rise
One area that is of strong interest to many IT decision-makers and business leaders is the continued expansion of agentic AI. While there’s a lot of hype and promise about what could be with AI agents, many IT leaders heading to NVIDIA GTC 2026 are looking for tangible, actionable, and scalable best practices and success stories.
“I'm hoping that we get some direction on how organizations are going to truly start adopting agentic AI,” says Marc Litten, manager for data center solution strategy at CDW. “I'm hoping we’re going to hear some paths to success for customers to have more adoption around truly starting to run agents in their environments, and how that’s going to transform their businesses.”
This tracks with the general dilemma facing many organizations, even those that are optimistic about the potential productivity gains to be gleaned from agentic AI. This is supported by a McKinsey report on the state of AI released in November 2025 that notes 88% of survey respondents “report regular AI use in at least one business function, compared with 78 percent a year ago,” but that only but that only one-third had started to scale their efforts.
The conference offers a variety of agentic AI-focused sessions at varying levels and targeted at specific industries, including “The Future of Industrial Autonomy,” “Agentic AI 101” and “Build Agentic Workflows for Financial Applications.”. But regardless of your familiarity with agentic AI philosophies and best practices, or your industry needs and use cases, many in business and IT are seeking a glimpse of how these technologies might lead to lasting success and growth.
“There's a few sessions that I've bookmarked specifically around agentic adoption where I’m eager to hear about autonomous workflows. I’m seeing more customer interest in enabling that use case through agentic AI,” says Joe Chenevey, AI solutions strategy lead at CDW. “For our enterprise customers and CDW, that’s where everybody’s minds are going and asking what that’s going to look like.”
Additionally, there’s considerable traction around the conversation on “AI factories.” In the simplest terms, AI factories are processes and technology infrastructure that allow and enable AI and automation at scale. The Harvard Business School notes that AI factories have four distinct components: a data pipeline, algorithm development, software infrastructure and an experimentation platform.
Many IT leaders expect to see and hear a lot more about the nascent and emerging concept of AI factories during and after GTC 2026.
“There’s a lot of content in GTC this round about building and scaling AI factories, and that's going to be important for our business as well,” says Ron Pickar, AI factory manager at CDW.
Robotics, Physical AI and Sci-Fi–Inspired Innovation
While AI is serious business in many ways, the truth is that there’s also a lot of imagination and sci-fi–inspired magic in the air around NVIDIA GTC 2026. Perhaps no session captures this more than the one being put on by Disney, titled, “Disney’s Robotic Characters: From the Screen to Reality via Physical AI.” In the session, the company will reveal how the company is using AI-powered humanoid robotics to do what it has always done best: create unforgettable experiences and memories.
The session abstract establishes the horizon:
The translation of animated characters like Olaf, or the design of characters like our BDX Droids, requires balancing artistic fidelity with the constraints of the physical world. This talk explores how these robotic characters achieve that balance through the integration of modular mechatronics and deep reinforcement learning. Leveraging GPU-accelerated simulation to handle complex mechanisms, we train control policies that enable our characters to self-balance and self-regulate temperature. We further demonstrate progress in believable, autonomous navigation and human-robot interaction driven by onboard perception.
Physical AI is absolutely an important frontier in the maturation of AI in general, and humanoid robotics represents merely one slice of that category.
“I think physical AI in general is going to be really interesting to hear about,” says Litten.
Above all else, for many people who grew up with images of Rosie the Robot or C-3PO, the fact that we might be on the horizon of humanoid robotics becoming a fact of life in the way that videoconferencing — imagined on The Jetsons back in the 1960s — is just fun and exciting. And excitement is perhaps the most accurate emotion to describe what surrounds NVIDIA GTC 2026.
“Overall, GTC, I describe it as the Woodstock of technology. It’s always fun. There’s going to be robots running around. It’s going to be a blast,” says Jeff Myers, principal enterprise strategist for human intelligence/AI advanced computing at CDW.
