CIO Brief

Research evidence excerpt

CIO Brief

CIO Brief July 26, 2026

KEY THEMATIC RESEARCH

Global eCommerce: The Agentic Era – Catalyzing Growth and Innovation

Agentic commerce can reduce friction and accelerate the secular shift online by researching, managing, and transacting for

consumers. Our proprietary Agentic Commerce Scorecard and “5 I’s” framework (Inventory, Infrastructure, Innovation,

Incrementality, and Income Statement) indicate that scaled eCommerce platforms can control much of the agentic journey,

contrary to market concerns about disruption. We highlight Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba, MercadoLibre, Sea Ltd., and Allegro

as OW calls favorably positioned for the agentic era. read more

US Software: Assessing Software’s Durability + Growth in the Age of AI

We introduce a “Moat & Journey” framework that evaluates companies on the durability of their current competitive

position and the effort required to succeed in an AI-native, agentic and consumption-driven environment. We believe

infrastructure and cybersecurity are benefiting first as enterprises move from AI experimentation into production, while

application software is likely a later-cycle beneficiary. We maintain an Attractive view on the industry; we favor Microsoft,

Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Shopify, Cloudflare, ServiceNow, Datadog, and Snowflake. read more

The New India – Manufacturing: A More Durable Path to Scale

Success in expanding manufacturing is imperative to India's medium-term growth trajectory, and we believe India’s

manufacturing sector is poised for a durable scale-up. We expect policy support, infrastructure investment, deeper global

value chain integration, and supply-chain diversification to lift manufacturing Gross Value Added (GVA) to about US$1.5tn

by 2035, raising its GDP share to roughly 20%. read more