Is 2026 the Year of the COO? 

News cycles from Venezuela and Tehran to the US Federal Reserve and Mercosur’s EU deal give me the feeling that anything is possible this year. The age of AI is decisively graduating from youthful infatuation to an urgent search for scalable use cases in the unglamorous world of operations. And yet, we’re on the edge of our seats, wondering what crazy geopolitical twist we’ll have to cope with next week. 

Right now, nothing feels more refreshing than a level-headed, metrics-driven approach to merging AI with existing systems to make operations both smarter and faster. Productivity gains should provide the ROI, but operational agility will allow CEOs to turn instability into opportunity by strategically pivoting faster than rivals. This combination is what resilience really means heading into the late 2020s. 

Why wait for answers from an old-fashioned crisis response team working around the clock for days when an agentic AI system could provide better answers in minutes? This is buildable, but it is not easy. 

AI Is a Massive Reset of the Tech Stack for Operations

Jim Rowan, former CEO of Volvo and now Zero100 Executive in Residence, spoke last year at our Dublin event about six interconnected technologies driving the next industrial revolution. We’re going deep on these six (see here for more) to understand how their trajectories affect the world of operations. The big takeaway is that information technology is no longer just a service to “the business” but is now integral to operations in every way imaginable. 

The old model, where “business users” wait for corporate IT to stand up a system, is too slow. Fusion teams combining technology development capability with functional operations skills are in high demand as digitization permeates products, processes, and even people. 

Pioneers of this trend include Amazon, Shein, Google, BYD, Samsung, Cummins, Nike, and Walmart. They appreciate the links between tech and ops well beyond application software to the entire tech ecosystem, including compute, connectivity, data, and energy. 

They also all have some form of COO leading the charge on AI and agentic systems. 

Why the COO?

Technology follows a natural hype cycle that helps fund the capital investments needed to launch everything from railroads to e-commerce. Financial investors, tech vendors, and many buyers (mostly CIOs in our world) share a desire to boost the new tech during its buildout phase.  

Each of these constituencies cares about use cases, to be sure, but not the way operations people do. Operations people live (or die) with the tech in battle, as anyone who scrambled to respond to last April’s Liberation Day tariff announcements can attest.  

Operations research (OR) as a discipline is about the mathematics of objectives and constraints: physical constraints, materiality, human beings, bandwidth, and time. COOs are understandably hard to impress with anything other than proven, scalable examples of AI that can make material workflows dramatically better. 

We recently surveyed 100 COOs from billion-dollar-plus companies about AI implementation, operational readiness, and risk priorities. The results tell a convincing story about this moment of huge opportunity and global uncertainty – one that balances optimism with pragmatism in ways that might surprise both AI evangelists and skeptics alike. 

The world is on edge while fortunes are being made, and COOs are staying cool under fire. We’ll be releasing the full findings in a new report next month. 

Embrace Radical Change

Turmoil and transition often go hand in hand. Technology disruptions have historically destroyed jobs, companies, and fortunes even as they create whole new industries and professions. Political tension at these times is natural because people can see the near-term cost more clearly and certainly than any future payoff. Think of the tension as evidence that people truly believe in the transformational power of AI – both for good and ill. 

For operations leaders, the takeaway is that most teams comprise all kinds, some of whom will thrive in stormy times, and others who’ll struggle. AI means role eliminations in functions like planning, sourcing, and logistics. AI will also put mind-blowing information tools in the hands of your quickest-thinking, most creative people. 

Identify and empower those who thrive in chaos. You might look back on 2026 as the start of something great.