4 Ways to Improve Your Strategy in 2026

I was inspired by the grit and power of the world’s best athletes at the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games. While solo performances were easy to admire, the strongest display came from the unity within teams. Take the bobsled competition, for example. These teams showed the power of coming together with clear purpose, demonstrating how true alignment creates extraordinary results. Moving with precision and shared intention, each athlete synchronized their effort to act as one. This level of teamwork is a powerful model for our strategic planning.

Organizations can’t win when each department operates in their own lanes. For decades, we’ve seen IT, Marketing, Retail, and Operations each stay on their own “track,” hoping everything would come together at the finish line.

In 2026, success requires a new level of alignment with cross‑functional teams designing strategies that deliver the customer experience we’ve been chasing for years. When alignment is missing, organizations rush into solutions without a shared understanding of the real problems they are trying to solve, often leading to poor implementation and disappointing outcomes.

We saw this last year as companies rushed to implement AI. Many companies automated what looked promising, only to discover that these applications demanded more effort than expected. Others followed tech partners who overpromised and underdelivered. A 2025 MIT study found that nearly 95% of generative AI initiatives failed to deliver measurable ROI. Experimentation is not a strategy. We can’t afford another year of technology that looks good on paper, but fails to move the needle.

Consider incorporating these ideas into your 2026 strategy:

1. Prioritize Your “Top Two”

Instead of chasing the next shiny object, anchor your strategy to the top two sources of customer friction in your business. If a technology isn’t removing a known thorn and reducing costs, it isn’t advancing your vision. The right solutions should also make work easier for the teams who serve customers every day. When both customer and employee experience improve, your organization is better positioned for long‑term success.

2. Deploy Agentic AI Where It Performs Best

Most organizations will deploy some version of AI this year. Jump to the front of the line by deploying agentic AI to handle the multi‑step, resource‑draining work with long turnaround times. To make agentic AI truly effective, start by distinguishing between complicated work and complex work.

Complicated: Multi‑step, repeatable processes with predictable outcomes.

This is where agentic AI excels in navigating workflows, taking action and closing the loop with minimal oversight.

Complex: Moments requiring nuance, empathy and human judgment.

When AI handles the complicated, your teams can focus on the complex, human‑centric experiences that differentiate your organization.

3. Declare Coaching as Non‑Optional

As AI absorbs repeatable work, we must elevate the skill sets of teams and leaders. Coaching is no longer something done “when time allows.” It is essential.

For Team Members: Critical thinking and sound judgment are advanced skills that must be intentionally developed as work evolves.

For Leaders: Coaching must be structured, consistent and tied to clear outcomes. Leaders need targeted development so their time with teams directly improves both customer experience and engagement, with defined accountability for results.

4. Evolve Your KPIs

Historically, the contact center was the single point of customer contact, so metrics like OCR and AHT were built for that world. Today, customers engage across many channels, and those metrics no longer reflect the full customer experience.

Looking ahead, “Cost per Customer Journey” will emerge as a core efficiency metric, measured across the entire journey rather than individual channels.

A second key metric is Customer Adoption. Technology creates value only when customers use it, and tracking interactions handled through automation versus human support offers the clearest view of how frictionless the customer experience was. As we all know, low customer friction drives higher satisfaction and better outcomes such as higher customer loyalty and retention.

As we step into this year, I encourage you to think differently and challenge long‑held paradigms. Technology can’t lead on its own. Our creativity, talent and thought leadership must be the anchors of a winning culture.