SDAV Insights Series 24 insights since 7 July 2026
Data-driven analysis — trends, statistics and studies — and what they mean in practice for entrepreneurs and companies.
SDAV Insight
Eurostat’s second-quarter figures show bankruptcy declarations in the EU at their highest level since early 2019, while new business registrations fell for a second consecutive quarter. What the numbers measure — and what they do not — determines what a company should do about them.
Read the analysisSources Eurostat news article · Eurostat Statistics Explained · Eurostat database
SDAV Insight
Which number will actually shape your freight costs next quarter: global trade growth, or the growth of the corridor you ship on?
SDAV Insight
Anthropic commits to 60 days' notice before retiring a model and OpenAI to six months for generally available ones — and both are executing published shutdown calendars that run into 2027.
SDAV Insight
The June forecast cut Swiss GDP growth for 2026 by 0.1 percentage point; underneath it, the contribution of foreign trade moved by 0.6.
Since 1 January 2026 the flexibility of a Swiss company’s own installations belongs to that company — and a deadline at the end of September 2026 decides who controls it next year.
Sixty-one percent of digitally active SMEs use at least one AI application; among those users, only 5% have customised anything and 3.6% run agentic systems.
SDAV Insight
PwC’s AI Performance Study finds 20% of 1,217 surveyed companies capturing 74% of measurable AI value, and attributes the distance to where AI is aimed rather than to what it costs.
SDAV Insight
Computational screening proposes candidate compounds far faster than laboratories can produce them; a Berkeley Lab model published in Nature Materials now predicts the reaction pathway itself.
SDAV Insight
Agriculture became the first sector to receive a structured dialogue under the EU’s Apply AI Strategy — because what limits adoption there is farm-level economics, not the technology.
SDAV Insight
The AI Act obligation that became applicable on 2 August 2026 is not the high-risk compliance project most companies prepared for — it is a duty to say when a person is dealing with a machine.
Every company assumes it will still have senior experts in ten years. Far fewer can say where those experts will come from.
SDAV Insight
The first randomised controlled trial of artificial intelligence in a national breast screening programme reported its primary outcome on 29 January 2026: AI-supported reading missed no more cancers than two radiologists, using 44% fewer readings to do it.
Producing the same article takes a median of thirteen rounds of instruction in a chat interface and a single prompt in an agentic workflow — and the autonomy gap persists when the model is held constant.
ETH Zurich recognised 46 new companies in 2025 — and the transfer process behind that number is open to established firms, not only to founders.
Switzerland’s policy rate has been at 0% for a year, and the Swiss National Bank’s own company talks show manufacturers with capacity to spare and no plans to expand it.
Construction is among the world’s largest industries and the one whose measured productivity has moved least — which is precisely what makes the arrival of AI consequential there.
AI use in the EU rose from 13.5% to 20.0% of enterprises in a single year, yet 55% of large firms now use it against 17% of small ones.
Family-owned businesses account for more than 70% of global GDP, and the evidence ties their durability to a management system — long horizons, reinvestment, low leverage — that is not confined to family ownership.
Accuracy on Humanity’s Last Exam rose from 8.8% to 38.3% in a single year, while the same models read an analogue clock correctly about half the time.
SDAV Insight
Forty-two percent of regular frontline AI users report saving a full workday every week, two thirds receive little or no guidance on what to do with it, and Swiss hours worked did not move in 2025.
Almost every company now uses AI; about 6% can attribute meaningful profit to it, and the difference is rarely the technology.
Employers rank skill gaps ahead of capital, regulation and infrastructure as the barrier to transformation; in smaller firms the binding constraint is the hours available to learn.
Agents are arriving inside the software SMEs already licence; the decisions that matter are about permissions and approval, not about technology.
Sixty-one percent of digitally active SMEs use at least one AI application, yet in every G7 country measured fewer than three in ten SMEs using generative AI report that their staff receive any AI training.
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