7 things every leader must do to prepare their organization for 2026

2026 will be a crucial inflection point for businesses. The data are striking—the proportion of employees using AI in their role in the U.S. doubled between 2023 and 2025. Across the Atlantic, 30% of EU workers are already using AI in their jobs. And according to Gartner, by 2026 more than 100 million workers will collaborate with “robo-colleagues.”

The question for the coming year, then, is no longer whether AI will transform your organization, it’s whether your leadership team will guide that transformation thoughtfully or let it happen haphazardly, tool by tool and team by team.

I have spent much of the past year working with my research team and industry partners to think through the most pressing challenges organizations face as they implement AI at scale.

Drawing on this work, I have identified seven key priorities for leaders preparing for 2026. These aren’t isolated tactics but interconnected imperatives that, taken together, provide a road map for building resilient, adaptive, and human-centered organizations in the age of AI.

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1. Embrace Regenerative Leadership Principles

Traditional leadership models that focus on efficiency and extraction are creating burned-out workforces and fragile organizations. As AI increases the temptation to pursue short-term gains, leaders must shift toward regenerative approaches that actively restore and enhance human, environmental, and technological resources.

Regenerative leadership means moving beyond sustainability to create systems that actually improve over time. This involves:

Adopting systems thinking to see your organization as an interconnected ecosystem
Prioritizing employee well-being alongside productivity
Measuring impact beyond profit to include ethical AI usage and community impact

Companies like Patagonia, Interface, and Unilever have demonstrated that this approach doesn’t sacrifice performance. Rather, it enhances it through improved brand loyalty, employee engagement, long-term resilience, and higher growth.

The key is recognizing that AI should augment human potential, not exploit it. Leaders who build purpose-driven, people-centered strategies will create organizations that don’t just survive disruption but evolve through it.

2. Transform Your Organization, Not Just Your Training

Most organizations treat AI reskilling as a training problem. But AI will cause systemic change that affects virtually every function and workflow, so preparing employees for the coming revolution requires more than just teaching them how to use AI tools. Fundamentally, it requires organizational redesign—reimagining what work looks like in the AI age and transforming the organization to enable that work.

Success requires working in three interconnected dimensions:

Rebuilding the infrastructure of work (providing the tools, data access, and workflow redesigns that make AI adoption possible)
Redesigning interconnected roles across the organization simultaneously (because when one role changes, every connected role must shift)
Cultivating a learning culture that prizes experimentation over perfection and treats failure as data rather than disgrace

3. Master the Art of Leading AI-Augmented Teams

Throughout history, the core competence of leadership has always been guiding humans to achieve defined goals. But in the age of AI, leadership will take on a new meaning: leading hybrid teams in which humans and AI systems work side by side. Leaders must learn how to leverage the unique strengths of each while creating the context in which those unique strengths multiply by working in concert.

In order to succeed, leaders must:

Personally engage with AI tools themselves, so they can understand and eventually model effective collaboration
Cultivate clarity of purpose to discern what is actually worth doing in a world in which AI makes everything possible
Become moral agents capable of navigating urgent ethical questions surrounding the use of AI
Develop the enhanced emotional intelligence needed to guide teams through an often unsettling transition

4. Build a Balanced AI Portfolio: Moonshots and Mundane Wins

Successful AI transformation requires a well-balanced innovation portfolio—a deliberately diversified mix of initiatives spanning different risk levels and time horizons. Leaders must grapple with big-picture questions about industry transformation while simultaneously identifying tactical opportunities for near-term deployment. The immediately practical projects create the foundation—and funding—for more ambitious undertakings.

Evaluating which initiatives deserve resources requires systematic assessment across multiple dimensions: technical feasibility, true investment costs (including organizational attention), risk-reward balance, alignment with core purpose, and realistic timeframes. In our book Transcend and a companion piece in Harvard Business Review, we provide comprehensive tools—the OPEN and CARE frameworks—for this strategic evaluation and portfolio management.

Critical to all of this is engaged leadership at the C-suite level. CEOs cannot simply delegate AI projects to technical leaders. Instead, they must orchestrate the entire innovation portfolio to maintain strategic coherence.

5. Protect Your Organizational Uniqueness

When everyone uses the same AI tools that have been trained on the same public data, outputs converge toward generic mediocrity. The quirks, the specific language, the unique ways of thinking that define your organization get smoothed into statistical averages.

Competitive advantage in 2026 will come from authentic difference—leaning into what makes you, you. You can do this by:

Auditing your uniqueness: Identify what is different and distinctive about your organization.
Creating proprietary datasets: Whenever possible, use internal data rather than generic datasets that everyone has access to.
Establish AI-free zones: Maintain places where only humans get to operate.
Adversarial prompting: Use AI to critically evaluate your conclusions rather than to confirm them.

The goal isn’t to reject AI but to use it strategically while preserving the distinctive elements that make your organization valuable.

6. Reinvent Middle Management for the AI Era

AI is eliminating traditional middle-management functions at an unprecedented rate. Gartner predicts that through 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of current middle-management positions. And by 2028 and 2029, AI-driven “jobs chaos” will force organizations to reconfigure, redesign, split, or fuse more than 32 million jobs every year.

There are significant efficiency gains to be made here. But organizations must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rather than simply trying to eliminate as much of middle management as possible, the task is to streamline it intelligently—middle management is still important, but its role must be fundamentally reimagined.

Orchestrating AI-human collaboration: Understanding how to integrate AI with humans
Serving as agents of change: Guiding organizations through continuous AI-driven disruption
Coaching for a new era: Mentoring employees through constant reskilling and role evolution

To successfully navigate this transformation, organizations must reskill middle management to enable them to succeed in their reimagined roles.

7. Know When to Change—and When to Hold Steady

In a profoundly uncertain world, and a business environment in which the only constant is disruption, the most critical leadership skill of all might well be discernment: the wisdom of knowing what to preserve and what to transform.

Effective leaders distinguish between their organization’s core identity (the “what” that they must not compromise) and their methods (the “how” that can be endlessly reimagined). In times of change, it is essential for leaders to be steadfast about the former while being completely flexible about the latter.

An Integrated Path

Not every organization will need to emphasize all seven priorities equally. A company with a strong and adaptable middle-management culture may focus elsewhere; one already grounded in regenerative principles can move quickly to portfolio building. The point is not to tackle everything at once but to recognize that these are the dimensions along which the AI transformation will play out, and to make deliberate choices about where to invest attention.

What leaders cannot afford is drift. Organizations that treat AI adoption as something that happens to them—tool by tool, team by team, without strategic intent—will find themselves shaped by the technology rather than shaping it. The difference between leading and following in 2026 will come down to whether these choices are made consciously or by default.

The leaders who prepare their organizations for 2026 by tackling these priorities won’t just survive the AI revolution. They’ll shape it—building organizations that are more resilient, more human, and more capable of creating lasting value in an age of unprecedented technological change.

source https://www.fastcompany.com/91462416/leaders-prepare-organization-2026-ai