Dentons’ January 2026 webinar on global artificial intelligence trends positions 2026 as a critical inflection point, as organisations move from artificial intelligence ambition to real-world adoption and focus on scaling tools responsibly within fragmented legal regimes. The firm identifies six key developments that will shape the next phase of artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on legal, regulatory and governance priorities that enable safe, scalable and compliant deployment across the US, European Union, UK, China and Latin America. A core message is that artificial intelligence is no longer an emerging technology, and that the central challenge has shifted from whether it works to how to embed it into daily operations with robust human oversight and accountability.
The first development is the transition from experimentation to operational artificial intelligence, where tools are already delivering measurable productivity and efficiency gains, such as tasks previously expected to take days now being completed in hours using artificial intelligence tools, provided they are used responsibly and with human oversight. Organisations are urged to define clearly how artificial intelligence fits within their culture and workflows, and to ensure that outputs are always reviewed, validated and owned by human professionals, whose emotional intelligence and contextual judgment remain essential. The second development is the emergence of fragmented but converging regulation, with the US seeing rapid growth in state-level rules, the European Union moving ahead with the EU artificial intelligence act and core obligations applying from August 2026, the UK maintaining a pro-innovation, sector-led model, China enforcing a layered regime through the cyberspace administration of China and mandatory filing or registration of large language models, and Latin American countries such as Peru, Brazil, Chile and Colombia advancing principle-based laws influenced by data privacy frameworks.
The third development is the growing role of artificial intelligence standards as a practical compliance anchor in this fragmented landscape, where tools such as OECD principles, the NIST framework and ISO 42001 are used to build governance programmes, map requirements and, in some cases, obtain certifications aligned with existing standards like ISO 27001, which has 65,000 companies around the world certified to it, and many more considering it. The fourth development focuses on artificial intelligence literacy and transparency in the European Union, where regulators are treating literacy as operational governance, using a governance cycle that identifies use, sets expectations, implements controls and evaluates performance, while transparency obligations are being detailed through a draft code of practice on marking and labelling of artificial intelligence generated content, including human-facing labelling, technical watermarking and workflow governance across platforms and value chains. The fifth development addresses key trends for multinational businesses in China, including a shift toward localised models built on Chinese open source foundations, easing of telecoms licensing rules in pilot areas such as the Beijing free trade zone, Shanghai free trade zone, Shenzhen and Hainan free trade port, and dual-track deployment strategies that combine domestic Chinese models for local services with strictly internal use of overseas models supported by strong data segmentation. The sixth development highlights emerging regional approaches in Latin America, where Peru has enacted the region’s first comprehensive artificial intelligence law, Brazil and Chile are expected to advance legislation, and Colombia and others are building principles-based frameworks, pushing organisations to adopt unified risk-based governance backbones with national overlays, align to global standards, strengthen vendor and supply chain governance, and invest in training, transparency and continuous regulatory horizon scanning that can be leveraged for global programmes.
