Welcome to the 2026 CNBC AI Forum
CNBC is hosting its second annual AI Forum today in Dallas, Texas — highlighting that Dallas has become a hub for enterprise-minded AI development.
Dallas now boasts one of the country’s largest tech workforces, driven by local universities’ focus on expanding AI and engineering programs and by Texas’s lower cost of living, which has been drawing talent away from Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, key industries, from telecom to healthcare to financial services, are embedding AI into existing infrastructure in Dallas or setting down new roots to build AI systems that can solve real-world problems for their customers.
—Ian Thomas
OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor to speak at CNBC’s AI Forum
Bret Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Sierra, speaking to CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 22nd, 2026.
Oscar Molina | CNBC
OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor is one of the most anticipated speakers at the CNBC AI Forum in Dallas.
Taylor, the co-founder of AI startup Sierra, will be joined on stage by Saul Van Beurden, Wells Fargo co-CEO of consumer banking & head of AI, for a conversation with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin about how organizations can scale AI to create value.
It’s been a big week for OpenAI: the company held its annual DevDay developer conference Tuesday, where the AI company unveiled a number of new products and developer tools.
This year’s DevDay took place amid intense pressure on OpenAI to address safety concerns after it disclosed several incidents where models behaved in unintended ways.
—Colleen McKown
The latest on AI regulation
US President Donald Trump, from center left, US House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, and Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speak to members of the media following a meeting with tech executives on artificial intelligence at the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026.
Tierney L. Cross | Bloomberg | Getty Images
At the CNBC AI Forum last year in Nashville, Senator Marsha Blackburn kicked off the event, pushing for federal regulation of AI, saying that her constituents were growing increasingly concerned about safety and privacy.
However, now a year later, no such federal regulation has emerged, even as concerns have escalated over the rapid pace of AI development as cases of agent-driven attacks grow and major researchers have raised warning signs about the serious consequences for humanity.
The White House hosted several tech leaders this week, and U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters that he’s “seeing tremendous self-policing” from the AI industry. Trump also continued to maintain that the government would not halt AI development.
“There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that,” he told reporters after the afternoon luncheon, flanked by CEOs. “But the self-regulation is very important.”
—Ian Thomas
