Digital Times reported in its 2026 global ranking of AI innovators that AI is now reshaping the world across infrastructure, enterprise applications, personal enablement, and vertical industries.
AI is no longer just a tool. It has become infrastructure. This is not merely a technical upgrade. It is a rewrite of the underlying logic of entire industries.
Within this wave of change, two critical shifts are taking place at the same time: one at the industrial foundation level, and one in the labor market.
1. Computing competition is becoming platform competition
As AI factories rise, demand for computing power is growing explosively. The market has mainly followed two paths: general-purpose GPUs and highly efficient custom ASICs. In the past, these two approaches competed directly. But Nvidia, through its investment in Marvell and the launch of NVLink Fusion, has begun pulling competitors into its own ecosystem.
The key shift is that competition is moving from product competition to platform competition. This means companies can gain near-custom-chip performance within a shared platform without having to build chips themselves.
- Lower technical barriers for enterprises
- Stronger platform stickiness
- Greater control over the ecosystem
In other words, competition in AI infrastructure is no longer fundamentally about raw hardware performance. It is about control over the ecosystem.
2. The rise of a hybrid economy
According to McKinsey, about 57 percent of working hours have the potential to be automated. Unlike previous waves of automation, this one is moving forward on two tracks at once.
AI agents are taking on knowledge work and non-physical tasks such as document generation, analysis, and decision support. Robotics is taking on manufacturing, logistics, and high-risk operations. The future workplace will therefore be a hybrid economy where humans, AI, and robots collaborate rather than compete.
- Humans shift from executors to supervisors
- From operation to judgment
- From completing tasks to defining problems
The core of work value is shifting from execution capability to decision capability.
3. AI literacy becomes a core capability
Skills are not disappearing. They are being transformed. More than 70 percent of existing skills will need to be redeployed in new ways. Writing is shifting toward prompt design and content orchestration, while data analysis is shifting toward interpreting AI outputs and making decisions from them.
At the same time, demand for AI literacy is rising rapidly. AI literacy does not simply mean knowing how to use AI tools. It means integrating AI into workflows, collaborating effectively with it, and judging the quality and risks of its outputs.
The winners will not simply be people who can use AI. They will be the ones who can direct and govern it. AI literacy has become a baseline capability across industries and roles.
4. Taiwan’s next critical transformation
Taiwan enters the AI era with strong advantages in semiconductors, supply chain integration, and its global strategic role. But the next phase of competition will not be centered on hardware alone. It will depend on talent. By 2030, human-machine collaboration could create as much as 2.9 trillion US dollars in economic value.
To capture that opportunity, businesses need to push forward at least three priorities in parallel.
- Invest in AI literacy so employees can collaborate with AI effectively
- Redesign workflows around human-machine collaboration
- Build trust mechanisms to keep AI decisions transparent and controllable
Competition over the next decade will not be only about technology. It will be about the ability of people and organizations to collaborate with AI effectively.