2026, the year in which AI and organizational design come together

If we take one thing away from 2025, it is this: AI will become a commodity and organizational design will not. But 2026 will add a new layer to that. In our conversations with decision-makers, IT teams, and boards, we see five clear movements emerging that determine whether organizations accelerate or stall.

1. From single agents to agent ecosystems

In 2025, we saw many individual agents as pilots. In 2026, this will shift to networks of agents who work together.

Not one smart assistant per team, but a digital "crew" that divides tasks, feeds each other with context and works together towards an outcome.

The new strategic questions arise:

• Who designs and manages these agents?
• Who is ultimately responsible for decisions made together with AI?

Organizations that don't design this will end up with digital chaos instead of digital power.

2. Transparent decision-making becomes a requirement

With the growth of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents, a new norm is emerging: explainability. In 2026, it will become self-evident that organizations will be able to account:

• Why an officer came to a certain choice
• Which data was used
• What human checkpoints are built-in

This directly affects governance, compliance and trust of customers, employees and regulators. Decision-making is not only faster, but also more visible.

3. AI costs are becoming a boardroom topic

Whereas AI was often still financed from innovation budgets in 2025, this will shift to structural costs in 2026. Agents, data processing and computing power are increasingly affecting the primary process. This raises questions such as:

• What is the ROI of our AI strategy?
• Which processes can be "AI-intensive" and which cannot?
• How do we manage costs without inhibiting innovation?

Financial governance is thus becoming just as important as technological governance.

4. Skills over functions

Job titles fade. Skills become leading. In 2026, more and more organizations will no longer organize their workforce around job roles, but around capability clusters. In doing so, we see a growing emphasis on: 

• Decision-making with AI
• Creative problem-solving
• Data interpretation and context understanding
• Ethical and legal awareness

The central question is shifting from "who has this job?" to "who has this skill?" This is changing how organizations recruit, develop and set up their remuneration system.

5. AI as part of your customer promise

Customers experience AI less and less as internal efficiency, but as part of your brand. In 2026, we will therefore hear other questions:

• Why is this still taking so long, while you are using AI?
• Why isn't this answer more personal?
• Why is this process reactive and not predictive?

AI becomes visible on the outside. And therefore a direct competitive factor.

What this requires of leadership

These trends make one thing clear: 2026 will be the year when AI strategy and organizational strategy merge.

Not as an IT issue, not as an innovation project, but as a design question for:

• Structure
• Decision-making
• Culture
• Responsibility
• Value creation

The organizations that lead the way are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones with the sharpest picture of the future.

Do you want to go back to 2025? The year in which AI finally entered the boardroom and organizations learned the first lessons about leadership, skills and design choices. Read more about this in the blog "From AI hype to leadership and redesigning your organization".