When investors describe a winning company, they now reach for three ideas: credible AI adoption, resilience, and durable competitive advantage. McKinsey’s latest survey of long-term investors — What matters most to investors in 2026 and what it means for companies — makes the shift plain. Geopolitics is the top concern and the risk investors believe markets are underpricing, AI has gone from absent (in 2022) to the most-cited “winner” characteristic, and disciplined capital allocation remains the constant test across every survey cycle. Read carefully, this is an IP strategy brief. Every element investors say they reward is, in practice, built or evidenced through intangible assets: an AI story is only “grounded in operating economics” if the resulting capability is owned and defensible — patents, trade secrets, data rights — rather than rented from a vendor. “Durable competitive advantage” is not a slide; it is a portfolio that survives scrutiny. And geopolitical resilience includes knowing where your rights sit, where they can be enforced, and what happens to licensed technology when a corridor closes.

The practical move for business leaders is to run their intellectual property strategy through the same three filters investors are applying to the whole company. First, AI credibility: can you show which AI-driven advances have been converted into protectable, owned advantage — a point developed in AI Transformation Is Not a Strategy Problem — It’s an Ownership Problem? Second, durability: temporary rights don’t equal lasting advantage unless you deliberately build on them, as the Bodum design case showed in When the Monopoly Ends, Your Shape Has to Stand on Its Own. Third, discipline: apply the same ROIC logic investors demand of capital allocation to filing, maintenance and enforcement decisions — the preparation-beats-reaction lesson in Built Before the Fight: What May’s IP Decisions Reward. Three questions worth asking this quarter: which of your AI investments has produced an asset you actually own; which of your rights genuinely underpins revenue investors care about; and could you defend your IP spend line-by-line under the scrutiny you’d apply to any other capital allocation? If any answer is soft, that is where the work — and the investor conversation — starts.