128 THE LAST WORD Rethinking the enterprise New research from Microsoft indicates business leaders must shift their focus from software deployment to redesigning work and processes A new operating model is emerging that will require leaders to rethink how enterprises are designed, according to the 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report from Microsoft. “As AI moves from assisting with isolated tasks to participating in workflows across functions and systems, leaders must rethink the fundamental design of the enterprise,” says Dr Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School, in his foreword to the report. “Work is no longer organised only around people, processes and applications. Increasingly, it is organised across people, agents, and the systems that connect them. The central task of leadership, therefore, is shifting from deploying technology to leading and enabling their teams to redesign work and processes.” An analysis of over 100,000 chats in Microsoft Copilot revealed that almost half (49 per cent) of all conversations support cognitive work – for example, analysing information, reasoning and making decisions. The remainder are focused on interacting with others (19 per cent), producing work (17 per cent) and information gathering (15 per cent). “People are using AI and agents to expand what they can do and who gets to do it, and new research shows that’s only accelerating,” reads the report. “Call it the new agency equation: as agents take on more of the execution, humans increasingly have more agency – more room to direct the work, make the calls, and own the outcomes. For every firm, the imperative now is to turn that agency into unprecedented value.” AI, therefore, is expanding who can do highvalue work. Data from the Work Trend Index Survey – conducted with 20,000 knowledge workers who use AI by research firm Edelman Data x Intelligence – backs up this finding. Sixty-six per cent of AI users say AI allowed them to spend more time on high-value work and 58 per cent say they are producing work that they couldn’t have a year ago. For frontier professionals – the most advanced AI users – that figure rises to 80 per cent. Most organisations are not yet built to capture the value of this expanded human agency. The report maps survey respondents between their capability with AI, and their organisation’s readiness to absorb it. Just 19 per cent (roughly one in five workers) are in the ‘frontier’ zone, where individual capability and organisation readiness reinforce each other. Around ten per cent of workers are blocked; their individual AI practices are high but organisational AI conditions are low. Half are in an emergent zone in between. The report references a ‘transformation paradox’, where employees are ready to reinvent how they work but are being held back by the system around them – metrics, incentives and norms. “The same forces accelerating AI adoption are holding it back.” Leadership, therefore, must redesign the system to match the work. Conor Grennan, the CEO and founder of consulting firm AI Mindset: “If leaders are totally bought in, especially the absolute top leadership, it changes everything”. The 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/worklab TOBY INGLETON: TECHNOLOGY RECORD “As agents take on more of the execution, humans increasingly have more agency”
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