The AI leap year: How 2026 will split the market into leaders and followers
Most years are incremental. The calendar flips, the slogans change and the same companies stay in roughly the same positions. 2026 won’t behave like that.
The year 2025 has been one of artificial intelligence (AI) curiosity—pilots, workshops, “innovation committees,” a few shiny demos and plenty of executives quietly hoping the whole thing would slow down so they could catch up. But the market doesn’t wait for comfort. In 2026, AI stops being a conversation and becomes a compounding advantage. And compounding is brutal: small daily gains turn into an uncatchable lead.
This is the leap year effect. Not because AI is new—but because AI becomes operational. The winners won’t be the companies with the best slide decks. They’ll be the ones using AI every day in the trenches: faster decisions, faster output, faster learning, faster recovery from mistakes. And the separation will become visible.
Practical AI or cosmetic AI?
Cosmetic AI looks impressive in meetings and useless in reality. It’s a chatbot nobody uses. It’s a dashboard that updates … but doesn’t change a single decision. It’s “we tried it” without any redesign of how work actually gets done. Practical AI is different. Practical AI lives inside workflows.
Sales teams use AI to prepare for calls, summarize meetings, draft follow-ups and spot deal risk early.
Customer service uses it to resolve tickets faster, route issues correctly and surface the real root causes behind repeat complaints.
Finance uses it to explain variances, detect anomalies and speed up monthly reporting without sacrificing rigor.
Operations uses it to reduce rework, predict bottlenecks and keep standards consistent across locations and teams.
Leadership uses it to compress research time and stress-test decisions before they become expensive.
The difference isn’t technology. It’s the leadership intent. The companies that win in 2026 will treat AI like electricity: not a department, not a project, not a trend—an infrastructure layer that changes the cost and speed of everything.
2026 rewards speed, but it punishes chaos
Here’s the paradox: AI can make you dramatically faster—and it can also make you dramatically messier. If you pour AI into a sloppy organization, you don’t get transformation. You get accelerated confusion. You get 10 times more output and half the clarity. You get a flood of content, reports, messages, proposals and “insights” … and nobody knows what matters.
So the real advantage in 2026 belongs to companies that combine AI with operational discipline: Clear priorities. Clean data. Defined decision rights. Simple processes. Ruthless accountability.
AI doesn’t replace management. It exposes it. If your organization suffers from vague goals, political decision-making and weak execution, AI won’t save you. It will simply shine a brighter light on your dysfunction—at a higher speed.
The companies that pull ahead will master three ‘unfair advantages’
1. Decision compression. High-performing businesses already make better decisions. In 2026, they’ll also make them faster.
AI compresses the time between question and clarity: competitive research, market signals, customer patterns, internal performance trends and scenario analysis. That doesn’t mean AI is always right. It means leaders can arrive at a more informed starting point in minutes instead of days—and reserve human intelligence for the judgment calls that actually require it.
2. Output multiplication. A single strong employee becomes two. A strong team becomes a small army.
Not because AI magically produces genius—but because it eliminates dead time: first drafts, summaries, translations, formatting, rephrasing, baseline analysis, routine documentation, repetitive reporting. Multiply that across 200 employees and you’ve changed the economics of your company.
3. Learning loops. The winners will run faster feedback cycles than their competitors.
AI helps you capture and interpret signals: customer objections, churn reasons, product complaints, pricing sensitivity, lead quality, employee engagement friction and supplier performance. The faster you learn, the faster you adapt. And the faster you adapt, the harder you are to beat. In 2026, learning speed becomes a competitive moat.
The AI board member
One of the smartest moves I’m seeing among serious operators is the creation of what I call the AI board member.
The concept is simple: treat AI like an always-available executive advisor—an additional voice in the room. Feed it the right information (confidentially and securely), including your goals, constraints, context, current challenges, customer feedback themes, meeting notes, strategic options and operational realities. Then use it to pressure-test thinking, generate alternatives, surface blind spots and sanity-check assumptions.
Done properly, it’s like adding a logical, tireless strategist to your boardroom—your own “Dr. Spock” who doesn’t get tired, doesn’t get emotional and can process an insane volume of context. But—and this is where CEOs must stay awake—AI is not an all-knowing god. Modern AI can hallucinate. It can sound confident while being wrong. It can miss critical nuance. It can invent details. If you treat AI like a flawless oracle—whether for medical diagnosis, legal decisions or strategic bets—you will eventually pay tuition in the currency of embarrassment or losses. Treat it like a human board member: valuable, sometimes brilliant, sometimes wrong, always requiring oversight.
Here’s the sports analogy that makes this real. Think of your company like a basketball team. You don’t take a phenomenal point guard and demand he plays center. You don’t put your best shooter in the paint and complain he can’t rebound like a seven-footer. You put people in positions that match their strengths—then you build the system around them.
AI is the same. Put it in the right role: Use it for drafting, summarizing, pattern recognition, scenario generation, knowledge retrieval and preparation. Do not outsource accountability, ethics, final judgment or high-stakes decisions without verification.
AI is a powerful player on your roster. Not the coach. Not the owner. Not the referee. And just like a talented new player, you only learn how to use it by using it consistently. Daily interaction teaches you where it shines and where it stumbles. That fluency becomes a hidden advantage over time—because your team stops guessing and starts executing.
Five to thrive—Where to start if you want the win in 2026
1. Make AI operational, not inspirational. Choose three to five workflows and redesign them end-to-end.
2. Install the AI board member. Feed it context, use it daily and treat it like a smart but imperfect advisor.
3. Build verification habits. Assume hallucinations are possible; cross-check anything high-stakes.
4. Train your people like athletes. Weekly reps beat one-off workshops. Fluency wins.
5. Measure outcomes, not activity. Speed, cost, quality, cycle time, customer satisfaction, margin—track what matters.
Tom Oliver, a “global management guru” (Bloomberg), is the chair of The Tom Oliver Group, the trusted advisor and counselor to many of the world’s most influential family businesses, medium-sized enterprises, market leaders and global conglomerates. For more information and inquiries: www.TomOliverGroup.com or email Tom.Oliver@inquirer.com.ph.
