The Great Rewiring: How “AI-Native” is Redeveloping Heavy Industry, Pharma, and Energy - AI Vision World Forum London 2026
The Great Rewiring: How “AI-Native” is Redeveloping Heavy Industry, Pharma, and Energy
Between 2023 and 2025, the corporate world was obsessed with “low-hanging fruit.” Companies deployed AI copilots to help coders write faster, used generative tools to draft marketing emails, and summarized endless meetings. These were efficiency gains, certainly, but they were incremental.
In 2026, we have entered the phase of transformational structural change. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. Now, AI is climbing the tree and reshaping the entire orchard. The theme for industry leaders at the upcoming AI Vision World Forum in London is “The Great Rewiring.” We are moving beyond overlaying AI onto existing processes and are beginning to redesign fundamental business models around an AI-first reality.
The Rise of the “Physical AI”
The most significant shift in 2026 is AI leaving the screen and entering the physical world. This isn’t just about self-driving cars. It’s about the convergence of advanced robotics, IoT sensors, and multi-modal foundation models.
In heavy industry and manufacturing, we are seeing “lights-out” factories managed by AI systems that predict maintenance needs before machinery fails, reconfigure assembly lines on the fly for custom orders, and optimize energy consumption based on real-time grid pricing. The challenge discussed at the Forum won’t be the technology itself, but the immense capital expenditure and cultural shift required to retrofit legacy infrastructure for this new reality.
Pharma’s new Golden Age
Perhaps no sector has been as radically transformed as pharmaceuticals and biotech. The time-to-discovery for new drug candidates has collapsed. In 2026, generative biology models are designing novel proteins not found in nature to target specific diseases with pinpoint accuracy.
AI is running virtual clinical trials, simulating patient populations to predict efficacy and toxicity before a single human is dosed. The conversations in London will focus on the regulatory bottlenecks keeping pace with this astonishing speed. How does the FDA or EMA approve a drug designed by an algorithm that no single human fully understands?
The Energy Transition Grid
The global push for net-zero is inextricably linked to AI in 2026. Managing a renewable energy grid, with its intermittent sources like solar and wind, is an impossibly complex mathematical challenge for humans.
Across Europe and the UK, decentralised AI grids are balancing supply and demand over milliseconds, integrating millions of electric vehicle batteries as temporary storage devices, and predicting weather patterns to optimize wind farm output. The Forum will showcase how energy giants are transitioning from fossil fuel extractors to data-driven energy managers.
The Divide: AI-Native vs. Legacy Adapters
A stark divide is emerging in the 2026 business landscape. On one side are “AI-Native” companies built from day one with autonomous workflows and data-centric cultures. On the other are legacy giants struggling with siloed data, outdated IT stacks, and workforces resistant to change.
The AI Vision World Forum 2026 is the crucial meeting ground for these two worlds. It is where the legacy giants come to learn how to survive the rewiring, and where the AI-natives come to scale their innovations. The industrial landscape is being redrawn; London is where we will see the new map.