Guest: Danielle Cook (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai
Show: 2026 Predictions
Topics: Cloud Native, Kubernetes 

User expectations are no longer evolving incrementally—they are being reset wholesale. As AI-powered interactions become embedded in everyday digital life, business and technology leaders face a new and urgent challenge: the standard for what “good” looks like has fundamentally changed, and the window to catch up is narrowing.

Danielle Cook, Senior Manager at Akamai and CNCF Ambassador, addressed this shift head-on in a recent conversation with TFiR, offering a clear-eyed view of what 2026 demands from organizations operating at scale.

At the heart of Cook’s message is a deceptively simple observation: AI has changed what users believe is possible. “AI is fundamentally resetting user expectations,” she said. “Once people have different experiences—getting responses instantly and wanting real-time information—that raises the bar.”

This isn’t a gradual trend. It’s a threshold event. Once a user experiences near-instant, intelligent responses in one context, that becomes the minimum expectation everywhere else. For organizations still operating on legacy delivery architectures or lagging AI integration strategies, the risk isn’t just a poor user experience—it’s relevance.

Akamai’s position in this landscape is to serve as the infrastructure layer that allows organizations to actually meet that elevated bar. As Cook described it, Akamai powers and protects businesses online, helping them “deliver fast, intelligent AI and digital experiences at a global scale.” That framing—powering and protecting—is intentional. Speed without security, or reach without reliability, doesn’t move the needle in an environment where users have been conditioned by best-in-class AI experiences.

The global scale component is equally significant. AI-driven experiences don’t respect geography, and user expectations don’t either. An enterprise operating across markets can’t afford inconsistent performance. The pressure to deliver uniformly fast, intelligent interactions—regardless of where the user is—adds another layer of operational complexity that organizations must solve for in 2026 and beyond.

Cook’s message carries a clear implication for technology and business leaders: the question is no longer whether to invest in AI-enhanced digital experience delivery. The question is whether your infrastructure can support the experience your users now take for granted. The bar has been reset. The organizations that treat this moment as an infrastructure problem—not just an AI strategy problem—will be the ones best positioned to lead.

Akamai is making the case that this is exactly the kind of problem it was built to solve.