If 2025 was dominated by pilots and proofs of concept, early 2026 is already signaling something else: agents are moving from demos into core operations.
Alongside Microsoft and Salesforce positioning “agentic” systems as a new operating layer, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork makes the shift accessible to noncoders and scarily normal: you provide access to a folder, set an outcome and the agent executes multistep work across files rather than just responding in chat. In parallel, moves like theOpenAI–ServiceNow partnership suggest organizations are actively preparing for agents to execute tasks, not merely answer questions.
So what does that mean for leaders? The point isn’t simply that AI is getting better. It’s that AI is starting to reshape behavior both inside and outside organizations. Customers will adopt AI faster than the brands selling to them. AI-empowered employees will move more quickly than the hierarchies they sit in. And inside organizations, agents will begin coordinating work in ways that quietly rewrite processes, interfaces and accountability.
In 2026, senior leaders need to start thinking about AI as a behavioral force, not a static asset.
With agents (not humans) increasingly emerging as primary users of software, here are six shifts that will reshape business and leadership this year:
1) The ‘thinking organization’ will flourish.
With most companies now accessing the same frontier models, the question shifts from “what model do we use?” to “how intelligently does our organization behave when we are not in the room?”
The competitive moat in 2026 will come from building the thinking organization: creating an internal intelligence architecture that determines how a company interprets signals, anticipates what they mean, reasons about options, composes decisions and executes through a mix of people, workflows and agents.
And because every organization’s behavior is unique, this becomes its true strategic advantage. Models are increasingly commoditized; organizational behavior is not.
2) AI-empowered customers will outpace brands.
The power balance between customers and brands will shift in the customer’s favor. Consumers will accelerate their use of AI far faster than the businesses trying to sell to them. With no compliance or governance barriers, individuals can instantly adopt personal agents that request refunds, compare prices, cancel subscriptions and negotiate upgrades.
Businesses, by contrast, move slowly, constrained by privacy, security and internal bureaucracy. The result is a growing asymmetry: buyers race ahead, sellers lag behind.
In B2B, procurement agents will scan vendors, benchmark pricing, interrogate reviews and machine-readable metadata, and quietly filter out suppliers who don’t appear in their model’s worldview. The risk isn’t just being left behind; it’s being disintermediated, as customers shift their trust from brands to their own AI.
If your organization isn’t searchable, interpretable and optimized for AI agents, you’re already negotiating from a disadvantage.
3) AI will collapse corporate hierarchies.
AI is being adopted bottom-up — by individuals, not by leadership committees. Employees who use AI to compress processes from input to output to outcome will become disproportionately valuable. Those who rely on politics, gatekeeping or process ownership will lose relevance. Power will shift from those who manage information to those who can move fastest from idea to impact.
Middle layers built on knowledge hoarding or controlling workflow steps will be under pressure as internal knowledge becomes searchable, accessible and automated. As a result, the organizational pyramid will flatten.
This isn’t just an HR story; it’s an operating model story. The leaders who do well here won’t simply “roll out AI.” They’ll redesign decision rights, incentives and workflows so that speed, clarity and execution are rewarded, and so that humans move upstream into judgment, intent and orchestration.
4) AI agents are now the interface.
Most 2025 conversations focused on AI features. In 2026, the shift is more radical: AI agents, not humans, will start becoming the primary users of software.
Apps will begin talking to other apps, agents will navigate systems on our behalf, and multistep workflows will happen in the background without anyone clicking through a screen. Human interaction will shift from navigating interfaces to validating outcomes.
This will trigger a new kind of design revolution. UX stops being about screens and becomes about behavior choreography. Instead of designing interfaces purely for people, organizations will start to design and manage how agents sense, reason, decide, interact and hand tasks to one another. And if the “user experience” is now the sequencing, guardrails and coordination of agent behavior, organizations will need a discipline dedicated to defining and governing that behavior: Agent Ops.
5) Agent Ops will emerge as the next frontier discipline.
Agent Ops goes far beyond monitoring. It requires designing the playbook for how agents sense, decide and act; setting constraints and incentives; defining escalation paths and ensuring multiagent and human-agent workflows run safely and predictably.
Because agents can be nondeterministic, the upfront behavioral design (almost like a form of game design) will be as important as oversight. Without it, organizations risk agents making decisions no one can fully explain.
What’s still unclear is where Agent Ops will sit. Ownership could fall under the chief information, digital or operating officer — or require an entirely new role. But its importance is clear: Agent Ops will do for agentic systems what DevOps did for software, only with far broader organizational impact.
6) Regulators will need to build AI agents just to keep up.
In 2026, regulatory bodies will struggle even more to keep pace with the explosion of agentic systems. My prediction is that regulators won’t just need better frameworks; they’ll need their own regulatory agents: AI systems that can interpret behavior, detect risks, test compliance and monitor multiagent ecosystems in real time.
In practice, this means more automated scrutiny, more continuous monitoring and a greater emphasis on traceability and control. Regulators who fail to build their own agentic capability will fall dramatically behind the technology they’re supposed to oversee, and organizations that can’t evidence how their agents behave will find themselves exposed.
Where this leaves leaders
All told, 2026 is a turning point: processes will matter more than models. Interfaces will rewire as agents take on more of the “click work.” New roles will appear, including in Agent Ops, and governance will become less about policy documents and more about observable behavior.
Most of all, in an era where customers use AI as a proxy for life and work management, the winners will be the companies with the most useful, trustworthy and legible systems — to humans and to machines.
By Yemi Olagbaiye, Director of AI Strategy and Innovation, Softwire