Colombus Consulting, in collaboration with Oracle and the Geneva School of Business Administration (HEG), has published the 2026 edition of the Swiss Data and AI Observatory.
The study reveals that strategic conviction around AI is now widely shared among Swiss executives, internal capabilities are structuring themselves, and a new wave is emerging with agentic AI. However, scaling up remains selective and now depends less on access to technology than on the strength of foundational elements: data quality, governance, leadership, and organizational transformation capacity.
This observatory pursues the same objectives as in previous years: providing decision-makers with a navigation tool to understand the present, anticipate future shifts, and benchmark their progress against their sector or the market.
The surveyed panel covers the entire Swiss territory and includes companies from all sectors of activity. The Observatory relies on the same methodology as previous years, organized into several stages:
- The survey, via a detailed questionnaire answered by more than a hundred organizations, focusing on their governance, technological maturity, as well as their ambitions and hurdles in their data transformation projects;
- The complementary gathering of qualitative viewpoints through in-depth interviews with experts and opinion leaders;
- On this basis, the formulation of observations and insights, the main ones being detailed below.
Key Results
Strategic conviction is now established, but execution lags behind
- 81% believe that AI can solve the main problems in their industry.
- 47% (+12 pts) integrate AI into their long-term planning, but only 9% truly place it at the heart of their strategy.
Data foundations are progressing, but in a non-linear fashion
- 82% (+4 pts) consider their ecosystem to be at a low / intermediate level of Data & AI maturity.
- 51% (-10 pts) judge their data quality to be good to excellent—a decline that reflects heightened requirements as use cases become more complex, rather than actual degradation.
Leadership pauses after the 2025 surge, but internal capabilities are strengthening
- 55% (-8 pts) of executive teams have a good to high understanding of AI concepts.
- 65% (+8 pts) of organizations now have at least a small internal AI team.
Organizational transformation remains one of the main hurdles to full AI integration
- 82% view Change Management as critical to AI success, but only 11% are actively redesigning roles around human-AI collaboration.
Generative AI refocuses on use cases with proven value, while agentic AI enters an active exploration phase
- 49% (-7 pts) have identified use cases and are launching active GenAI pilots.
- 46% (-29 pts) have deployed assistants at scale—a drop that reflects a refocusing on value.
- 69% are already exploring or experimenting with agentic AI, but 90% maintain autonomy at “level zero” or “human-in-the-loop.”
Ethics and sovereignty are becoming operational prerequisites
- 72% (+4 pts) state they integrate ethical considerations into their AI-related decision-making processes.
- 62% actively measure their level of sovereignty or consider it a blocking point.
However, training remains an area of concern
- 34% (+14 pts) still do not offer any formal training on ethical issues related to data and AI.
Industrialization remains selective and value measurement remains fragile
- Only 16% declare they have deployed AI at scale.
- 36% of organizations do not yet measure tangible value from their AI projects.
