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A Field Guide to the Distributed AI Economy

Sources & methodology

Statistics are attributed to their original publishers; this guide has not independently verified these figures.

Evidence current as of July 2026 — sources are listed with every figure.

The primary source

WhitepaperOpenTeams / Nebari PlatformThe Distributed AI EconomyIntelligence Hubs, Frames, Cogs, and OpsJuly 2026 · Revision 7

The Distributed AI Economy: Intelligence Hubs, Frames, Cogs, and Ops

OpenTeams / Nebari · July 2026 · Revision 7 · 35 pages

The primary source this guide interprets: the complete architecture — Frames, Cogs, Ops, the validation layer, the Intelligence Hub, and the economy thesis — in the company's own words.

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The whitepaper's source registry

Drawn from the whitepaper's Sources section. Citations are listed by publisher and date; full reports are available from the publishers' websites.

Attribution correction: The whitepaper attributes this survey to Deloitte. PwC's official report establishes PwC as the publisher. The canonical whitepaper remains unchanged.

  1. McKinsey & Company. “The Sovereign AI Agenda.” (opens in a new tab) December 2025.
  2. McKinsey & Company. “Sovereign AI: Building Ecosystems.” (opens in a new tab) March 2026.
  3. PwC. “29th Global CEO Survey.” (opens in a new tab) January 2026.n=4,454 CEOs, 95 countries
  4. Deloitte. “TMT Predictions 2026.” (opens in a new tab) November 2025.
  5. Deloitte. “State of AI in the Enterprise 2026.” (opens in a new tab) 2026.n=3,235 senior leaders
  6. Deloitte. “Tech Trends 2026.” (opens in a new tab) December 2025.
  7. PwC. “Digital Trends in Operations Survey 2026.” (opens in a new tab) 2026.n=767
  8. Stanford HAI. “AI Index Report 2025/2026.” (opens in a new tab) Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.
  9. Brookings Institution. “Is AI Sovereignty Possible?” (opens in a new tab) February 2026.
  10. Open Source Initiative. “2026 State of Open Source Report.” (opens in a new tab) 2026.n=700+
  11. Financial Times. “Sovereign AI is a Bet on the Economies of Anti-Scale.” (opens in a new tab) March 14, 2026.
  12. World Economic Forum. “Rethinking AI Sovereignty.” (opens in a new tab) 2026.Davos remarks by Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO
  13. Tony Blair Institute. “AI Infrastructure and the Geography of Compute.” (opens in a new tab) January 2026.
  14. Hugging Face. “State of Open Source on Hugging Face: Spring 2026.” (opens in a new tab) 2026.
  15. NBER (Brynjolfsson, Li, Raymond). “Generative AI at Work.” (opens in a new tab) Study of 5,179 customer-support agents.
  16. NBER. “Working Paper 34984: AI, Productivity, and the Workforce.” (opens in a new tab) March 2026.n=750 executives
  17. PEX Network. “PEX Report 2025/26 on AI Governance.” (opens in a new tab) 2025/26.
  18. Dataversity. “AI Governance in 2026.” (opens in a new tab) February 2026.
  19. AlixPartners. “2026 Enterprise Software Predictions.” (opens in a new tab) December 2025.
  20. Gartner. “SaaS Pricing Model Projections (cited in Deloitte TMT Predictions 2026).” (opens in a new tab) 2025.
  21. Robert F. Smith, Vista Equity Partners. “Public remarks on enterprise software sovereignty.” (opens in a new tab) 2025.
  22. European Union. “EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689.” (opens in a new tab) Effective August 2024; high-risk requirements active 2026.
  23. US State Legislatures. “AI Legislation Tracking.” (opens in a new tab) 2025–2026.1,100+ bills across 45 states
  24. TechTarget / ESG Research. “Enterprise Storage and AI Pipelines.” (opens in a new tab) 2026.
  25. Linux Insider / Industry Analysis. “Open Standards for AI Agents.” (opens in a new tab) January 2026.
  26. NIST. “AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0), January 2023; and Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile (NIST-AI-600-1), July 2024.” (opens in a new tab) 2023 / 2024.
  27. European Union. “EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Articles 12 (Record-Keeping), 14 (Human Oversight), and 19 (Automatically Generated Logs).” (opens in a new tab) High-risk human-oversight obligations in force August 2026.
  28. ISO/IEC. “ISO/IEC 42001:2023 — Information Technology — Artificial Intelligence — Management System.” (opens in a new tab) December 2023.
  29. OWASP Foundation. “OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025.” (opens in a new tab) November 2024.
  30. McKinsey & Company (QuantumBlack). “Seizing the Agentic AI Advantage.” (opens in a new tab) June 2025.
  31. Gartner. “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025: AI Governance Platforms.” (opens in a new tab) October 2024.

Featured statistics, with provenance

Every statistic surfaced outside the guide's own text (on the overview and status pages) is registered here with its publisher, publication, and as-of date.

  • 56%of CEOs report zero financial impact from AI— PwC, 29th Global CEO Survey, January 2026 (n=4,454 CEOs, 95 countries) · as of 2026-07
  • 12%of CEOs achieve both cost and revenue benefits from AI— PwC, 29th Global CEO Survey, January 2026 (n=4,454 CEOs, 95 countries) · as of 2026-07
  • $581.7Bglobal corporate AI investment in 2025, up 130% year over year— Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2025/2026, 2026 · as of 2026-07
  • $500–600Bpotential sovereign AI market by 2030 — sized broadly, compute and infrastructure included; the share addressable by Hub-style deployments is not separately estimated— McKinsey & Company, The Sovereign AI Agenda, December 2025 · as of 2026-07
  • 8 in 10companies had deployed generative AI — while roughly the same share reported no material impact on earnings and fewer than 10% of use cases made it past pilot— McKinsey & Company (QuantumBlack), Seizing the Agentic AI Advantage, June 2025 · as of 2026-07
  • 1 in 5organizations has a mature governance model for autonomous AI agents— Deloitte, State of AI in the Enterprise 2026, 2026 (n=3,235 senior leaders) · as of 2026-07

Reading, organized by the question you might be asking

Organized by the question you might be asking. Entries marked ⊕ are this guide's additions for background; everything else is cited by the whitepaper itself. Links to publishers' sites are stable; specific reports may require registration.

The guide's own reading list lives at Further Reading; its seven question-shaped groups draw on the registry above, plus the guide's clearly marked additions.