Top Business Trends in 2025 and in 2026

 

2025

In 2025, the business landscape was defined by the transition of Artificial Intelligence from experimental pilots to core operational infrastructure, alongside a mandatory focus on sustainability and human-centric leadership. 

1. The Rise of "Agentic AI" and Hyper-Automation

Beyond simple chatbots, 2025 marks the shift to Agentic AI—autonomous systems capable of making decisions and executing complex workflows with minimal human oversight. 

• Operational Impact: Companies are using AI to automate 30%–50% of routine tasks in finance, marketing, and customer service.
• Hyper-Personalization: Businesses leverage real-time behavioral data to tailor every customer interaction, a strategy that is now driving 40% faster revenue growth for early adopters. 

2. Mandatory Sustainability and the Circular Economy

Sustainability has moved from a "nice-to-have" marketing asset to a core business requirement due to new regulations like the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). 

• Circular Models: Leading brands are adopting "product-as-a-service" and buy-back programs (e.g., IKEA) to minimize waste.
• Green Finance: Global ESG assets are projected to surpass $50 trillion in 2025, reshaping how capital is allocated to businesses. 

3. Human-Centric Leadership and "Re-humanization"

As AI handles more technical tasks, the value of unique human skills is rising. There is a strong counter-trend toward re-humanizing marketing and sales to differentiate from generic AI-generated content. 

• Emotional Intelligence: Managers are shifting their focus from results-only oversight to coaching, mentorship, and fostering inclusion.
• Workplace Well-being: High-performing companies are integrating holistic mental health programs as a competitive advantage to attract and retain top talent. 

4. Resilience Amidst Global Volatility

With global GDP growth capped at 3.3% and ongoing geopolitical tensions, operational resilience has become a baseline for performance. 

• Supply Chain Diversification: Businesses are moving away from single-source suppliers and adopting "self-healing" supply chains that use AI to reroute logistics in real-time.
• Digital Trust: Cybersecurity is now treated as a critical risk-control layer rather than just an IT function, with 72% of organizations adopting "Zero-Trust" security architectures. 

5. The Permanent Hybrid Work Paradigm 

Hybrid work is no longer an interim measure but a long-term strategic advantage for 2025. 

• Outcome-Centric Models: Companies are moving away from tracking hours worked to tracking outcomes, supported by AI-powered productivity analytics.
• Upskilling Imperative: To bridge the "skills gap" caused by rapid tech changes, 56% of companies have integrated dedicated upskilling programs into their daily operations. 

2026

In 2026, the global business landscape will be defined by the transition of Artificial Intelligence from an experimental tool to a core "silicon workforce," coupled with a "re-humanization" of leadership and a move toward structural operational resilience in a fragmented geopolitical environment. 

1. The Era of Agentic AI and Autonomous Operations

The primary shift in 2026 is from Generative AI (content creation) to Agentic AI (task execution). 

• The Silicon Workforce: AI "agents" will move beyond simple assistance to autonomously managing end-to-end business processes, such as reconciling complex financial transactions, onboarding employees, or managing multi-stage supply chain logistics.
• Agentic Platforms: Organizations are shifting from individual AI tools to integrated agentic platforms that function as a new layer of operational infrastructure, potentially reducing the need for traditional software licenses.
• Vibe Coding and Innovation: "Vibe coding"—using natural language to build software—is expected to go mainstream, allowing non-technical employees to develop custom applications rapidly. 

2. The "Re-humanization" of Work and Skills

As technical tasks are automated, unique human capabilities are gaining a "digital premium" in the labor market. 

• Power Skills over Soft Skills: Leadership is pivoting toward "Power Skills"—emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and the ability to manage "augmented teams" where humans and machines work side-by-side.
• Skills-First Hiring: 2026 is predicted to be the year that skills-based hiring definitively overtakes degree-based recruitment for many roles.
• The AI Generalist: A new class of workers—AI Generalists—is emerging. These are professionals who understand broad business functions well enough to orchestrate and oversee the AI agents performing specialized tasks. 

3. Structural Resilience and Supply Chain "Geopatriation"

Businesses are moving away from global efficiency-only models toward models built for survival in a volatile geopolitical climate. 

• Near-shoring and Localization: "Globalization 2.0" focuses on supply security over cost, leading to increased near-shoring and the creation of localized "self-healing" supply chains.
• Geopatriation: Organizations are increasingly moving data and digital workloads to sovereign or regional cloud providers to mitigate the risk of geopolitical lockdowns. 

4. Sustainability as a Strategic Asset

Sustainability is shifting from a marketing "add-on" to a mandatory driver of business growth. 

• The Circular Economy: Circular business models—focused on product longevity, recycling, and "as-a-service" options—are becoming baseline requirements to meet strict 2026 regulatory standards like the EU's CSRD.
• AI for Green Returns: AI is being deployed specifically to find "green alpha," such as identifying customers willing to pay premiums for sustainable products or optimizing transport routes to lower both emissions and fuel costs. 

5. Cybersecurity as Boardroom Accountability

Cybersecurity is no longer just an IT function; by 2026, it is a core survival strategy with direct executive liability. 

• Boardroom Responsibility: Executive compensation and performance contracts are increasingly being tied to measurable cybersecurity outcomes.
• The "Ambient" Defense: Companies are moving toward "Zero-Trust" architectures where security is ambient and built-in, using AI security agents to proactively hunt and neutralize threats at machine speed. 

Modern Operating Model. Part 1.

 

Part 1. What is the Modern Operating Model?

A modern operating model is a flexible blueprint that aligns a company's strategy, structure, processes, and technology to deliver value and achieve objectives in a changing market. It is characterized by agility, a focus on customer outcomes, and the integration of data and technology to enable quick adaptation and continuous improvement. Key elements include cross-functional teams, agile methodologies, and data-driven decision-making to foster collaboration and efficiency. 

Key characteristics

• Agility and flexibility: Modern operating models are designed to be responsive to market changes, replacing rigid structures with more fluid and adaptable systems.
• Customer-centricity: They prioritize delivering value to the customer by organizing around products, services, or customer outcomes rather than internal functions.
• Integration: They seamlessly connect different parts of the business, such as strategy, funding, and execution, into a single flow.
• Digital transformation: Technology is a core component, integrated into all business functions to improve efficiency, customer experience, and innovation.
• Data-driven decision-making: Organizations use data to inform their decisions and track progress, enabling continuous improvement. 

Components of a modern operating model

• People and culture: Involves fostering a culture of continuous improvement, cross-functional collaboration, and employee empowerment.
• Processes: Shifts from traditional, linear processes to more agile workflows that enable faster delivery and adaptation.
• Technology: Leverages technology to automate tasks, enhance communication, and provide insights through data analytics.
• Governance: Includes new forms of governance that empower teams and focus on customer outcomes rather than traditional metrics.
• Structure: Often moves away from hierarchical, siloed departments towards cross-functional teams dedicated to specific products or solutions. 

How it differs from traditional models

Feature	Modern Operating Model	Traditional Operating Model
Structure	Cross-functional, product-focused teams	Siloed, functional departments
Decision-making	Empowered, agile, and data-driven	Hierarchical, centralized
Focus	Customer outcomes and value delivery	Internal processes and performance
Change	Continuous and adaptive	Periodic and project-based

Why the Modern Operating Model is necessary

An operating model drives value creation and strategy execution across an organization. It represents the guiding principles of operations: how different parts of a business should work together to deliver value to customers and stakeholders. It also encompasses how an organization functions to meet core business objectives such as efficiency, growth, and adaptability. Organization structure, culture, processes, technology and decision-making procedures are key parts of an operating model.  

In the modern era, several factors impact how we think about conventional operating models: 

• The lingering strategy execution gap  
• A fast-changing world across all dimensions of life  
• The fourth industrial revolution, the wealth of data and its application 

Considering these factors, an updated, modern operating model is needed to solve the lingering strategy execution gap and unlock the opportunities of an evolving world. In this article, we’re going to outline what the Modern Operating Model looks like. For detailed information on the context, challenges solved, and the opportunities of the Modern Operating Model, we will be releasing a second part to this article.

The Modern Operating Model overview

There are five core components that make up the Modern Operating Model, each with different parts within. 

 1) Define the destination 

Your mission, cultural values, vision, and strategy work together to act as a north star for your organization. This sets the destination and goals that your organization needs to align towards. 

2) Change the business 

Strategic objectives, OKRs, and planning the work quantify and make reaching your destination a tangible proposition. They create alignment, structure, and focus to maximize efficiency, speed, and productive power toward your goals. 

3) Run the business  

Observability of KPI’s through a connected technology stack in addition to OKR reporting gives you powerful insights into what’s happening inside the business, in addition to progress toward goals.  

4) Do the work 

With the organization aligned, the plan is executed through daily work. Proper alignment through organization architecture, culture, and a clear line of sight between strategy and execution empowers your employees to do their best work. 

5) Assess & adapt  

Through continuous monitoring, data-driven decisions are made to incrementally optimize, navigate threats, and seize opportunities. Strong top-down alignment liberates your organization to adapt quickly and move as one. 

Although there’s a chronological logic to the Modern Operating Model, all components of the Modern Operating Model work together in a feedback loop and need to be engaged simultaneously as an ongoing discipline. Let’s now dive into the different components of the Modern Operating Model and their corresponding parts in more detail. 

Component 1: Defining the destination

Correctly defining the destination impacts alignment. At the highest level, defining your destination is about where you want to go, why you want to go there, what needs to be done, and how you will do it. If there’s a disconnect between how your team sees the bigger picture, conflict, erosion of trust, and misaligned execution may emerge.  

Defining the destination can be broken down into three core parts: 

1. Mission and cultural values 
2. Vision 
3. Strategy 

Mission and cultural values 

Mission and cultural values play a role in alignment as everyone in your organization needs to approach their work from the same perspective. Otherwise, there will be a disconnect at the execution layer of the organization. For instance, having a common philosophy that prioritizes customer satisfaction over short term revenue will lead to different behaviors and decisions from your team.  

Mission and cultural values also affect engagement, especially in the context of a new generation of workers. Generation Z and Millennial workers aspire to work at organizations that have a greater purpose and more conscious culture. Failure to align your mission and culture with these changing attitudes means you may reduce employee engagement — another key part of effective strategy execution. As these generations value company loyalty less, you may also risk losing key personnel which leads to other execution challenges. 

Vision 

Like with mission and cultural values, your vision is important for alignment. Your whole team needs to see the future in the same way to maximize engagement and work in synchronization. Vision also has an impact on priorities and strategic focus. A clear idea of your destination means you can make better decisions about the relevant work that needs to be done, take advantage of the right opportunities, and importantly, not become side tracked along the way. 

Strategy 

Your strategy is the first tangible link between defining your destination and generating the momentum to get there. Your strategy represents why, what, and how your company will navigate at the highest level and informs how you set strategic objectives and OKRs, which play key roles in the next component of the Modern Operating Model.  

Component 2: Changing the business

The next component of the model is changing and aligning the business. Changing the business is about deciding on the initiatives and goals you want to focus on to reach your destination. Good organizational alignment is about getting the whole organization in sync and moving in the same direction. 

Proper organizational alignment improves strategy execution through: 

• Greater efficiency: working on the right things means less waste in the form of time and resources 
• Higher engagement: having a clear line of sight between strategic objectives and daily execution means employees can see how their work impacts the organization
• Prioritization and focus: alignment means the whole team focuses on the objectives and activities that are mission critical

Alignment plays an important role in organizational adaptability. If there are any big changes or shocks to the business, your organization needs to be able to move together as one unit. If parts of your organization are misaligned, they may lag behind if your destination changes which can lead to operational roadblocks. In addition, the megatrends of remote and flexible work mean getting alignment right has become more difficult due to a more distributed, asynchronous, and multi-cultural workforce.  

Alignment starts with clear top-down communication about the destination and what needs to be done to get there. This is achieved through setting strategic objectives and OKRs, in addition to careful planning of how your team will execute the work. 

Strategic objectives and OKRs  

The first part of aligning the business is setting and communicating strategic objectives and OKRs. In many cases, the communication of strategy can get lost as it filters through the multiple layers of the organization. This is made worse due to strategy being more abstract and high-level, with language that may not be easily understood by the execution layer of the organization.  

Strategy without objectives is meaningless — it needs to be clarified, quantified, and plotted against a timeline. This is what strategic objectives enable — they break down your strategy into tangible goals that can be easily communicated and worked toward as a team.  

With strategic objectives set and communicated, your organization can then set OKRs (objectives and key results). These break down your strategic objectives even further by quantifying the specific outcomes different parts of the organization need to achieve. These also need to be communicated across the organization to ensure alignment. Where strategic objectives work on a yearly or multi-year timeline, tactical OKRs function on a quarterly or yearly basis.  

Strategic objectives and OKRs impact strategy execution by: 

• Plotting ambitious yet achievable goals to stretch the team’s capabilities while preserving morale. 
• Creating vertical alignment so everybody is working toward strategic objectives. 
• Enabling horizontal alignment so interdependencies between departments can be mapped out, increasing collaboration. 
• Boosting efficiency, engagement, prioritization, and focus through bottom-up involvement in goal setting. 
• Creating an outcome focused organization as opposed to activity which doesn’t generate results. 

Planning the work 

With strategic objectives and OKRs set and communicated, planning the governance and execution of work is next. 

A few things to consider during this phase are: 

• Culture design: Your operational culture must be transparent, continuously learning, and braced for constant transformation. This enables effective use of the OKR method and continuous adaptations. At the leadership level, there must be a shift from control and compliance to trust and transparency. 
• Organization architecture: Your organization structure needs to be adaptable to account for asynchronous, remote, and flexible ways of working.  
• Policies and procedures: Decision making should be made at the edge of the network — closer to the source of data and point of execution, as opposed to centrally. In the modern era, there’s no longer time to go up and down the chain of command to make decisions. Greater communication and transparency efforts need to be pushed to eliminate information silos and shadow organizations.  
• Playbooks and processes: Mapping out the strategies and tactics of the work to be done. 
• People: Deciding who will be doing what.  
• Tools: Choosing the right software tools to enable work. With the Modern Operating Model, special emphasis is placed on connecting all your data sources for better observability and assessment.  
• Resource allocation: Setting budgets appropriately to meet different OKRs.  
• Programs and initiatives: Organizing work at a high level in conjunction with strategic objectives and OKRs.  
• Approaches to work: Deciding on how work will be carried out with task management, workflows, projects, sprints, etc.  

Effective work planning increases the efficiency of your strategy execution. Conducting work in the right manner means time and resources are saved through error reduction, in addition to faster and better work outputs.  

Component 3: Running the business

As work is conducted, there needs to be continuous monitoring of both data and information. In a Modern Operating Model, monitoring incorporates and goes beyond traditional management check-ins and annual and quarterly performance reviews. KPIs are gathered from all parts of the business in addition to the application of the OKR method. Working in conjunction, OKRs and KPIs create a more powerful picture of what’s happening in the business and how it affects progress toward strategic goals.  

As part of the internal monitoring aspect of The Modern Operating Model, KPIs are pulled from a connected technology stack to provide business observability. With the right tools, you can sync your KPIs to continuously update alongside your OKRs, in addition to gaining insight about potential risks and opportunities. To add to this, OKRs provide quantitative data in the form of key results and confidence assessments toward meeting objectives. They also provide qualitative information in the form of weekly OKR reviews and quarterly retrospectives.

External monitoring is also a necessary part of the Modern Operating Model. This involves constant surveillance of your business environment to identify changes, threats, and opportunities. This could be in the form of understanding megatrends such as the next wave digitization or keeping tabs on startups that could potentially disrupt your space. 

Together, internal and external monitoring are used to compress learning feedback loops and boost business observability, which can then be used to make more accurate decisions about changes and adaptations to your strategy execution. 

Component 4: Doing the work

The next component of the model is doing the work. At the surface level, this involves the basics of completing tasks, inputs, transformations, and outputs. But under the Modern Operating Model, the essence of how the work is done is different. 

When applied correctly, the ideal state of work should look like this: 

• Fully engaged employees who expend discretionary effort to improve their craft and solve problems. 
• Collaboration and communication between teams to work toward common objectives. 
• Continuous learning and feedback based on regular OKR reviews and KPI observability. 
• Greater ownership and accountability of work through transparency. 
• Decisions made locally in a data-driven way. 
• Greater focus on outcomes, as opposed to tasks and activities.  
• More experimentation and embracing failure. 
• Recognition and reward based on merit and adherence to company values.  

Although this ideal state of work doesn’t happen overnight, the components of the Modern Operating Model are designed to optimize your strategy execution over time, bringing this ideal closer to reality over time.

Component 5: Assessing and adapting

With the right data and information through business monitoring, assessments can be made to adapt strategy execution to help you stay the course. The process of assessing and adapting involves looking at the data and information you have collected, extracting the insights and narrative, and turning them into knowledge which can be used for decision making.  

At the macro level, the purpose of this component is to help you navigate the threats and opportunities of a fast-changing world. This means you may need to make changes to your destination and how to get there at a strategic level. In addition to the points mentioned above, these could include navigating changing economic, political and social conditions, adapting to innovation, and ESG (environment, social, and governance) concerns.  

At the micro level, you want to assess and adjust your strategy execution for: 

• Overall effectiveness: Optimizing the different components of the Modern Operating Model such as how work is done. 
• Progress towards OKRs: Looking at key results metrics for each objective and uncovering the reasons for possible underperformance. Deciding whether the OKRs set are still relevant in terms of achievability and being critical to current strategic objectives. 
• Internal warning signs: Gaining insight and foresight, as opposed to hindsight, about operational problems through AI and KPI data. This could be technical issues such as servers going down or business challenges such as a high churn rate among a customer demographic.  
• Internal opportunities: Spotting patterns and trends to map out new opportunities. For instance, looking at customer support data to identify unmet or emerging customer needs. 

As adaptability is central to the Modern Operating Model, you will continuously adjust different components of your strategy execution based on the data and information you collect. You may only need to make small changes to a work tactic, for instance, or realize there is one threat or opportunity you need to focus on. But as time progresses and the business environment changes, you may need to adjust at the strategic level. Full adaptiveness of strategy execution at both the macro and micro level is the promise of the modern operating model. 

Why use the Modern Operating Model?

Optimizing your strategy execution is relevant to every company regardless of size, stage, or industry. Working together, all components of the Modern Operating Model boost alignment, focus, adaptability, and efficiency in your strategy execution. 

Through adopting the Modern Operating Model, you can better navigate the threats and opportunities of a fast-changing world, in addition to achieving your strategic goals faster. To learn more about the broader context, challenges solved, and opportunities of using the Modern Operating Model, we will be releasing a second part to this article.

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