Analyst and press narratives around 2026 converge on specificity: narrow models tuned on proprietary workflows; integrations that respect permissions; analytics that tie deployments to operational KPIs. Generic “Ask AI” shells rarely survive contact with procurement.
Risk management as table stakes
Enterprises formalize model governance — change review for prompts and tools, incident response when outputs go sideways, and alignment between legal, security, and product. That overhead is the price of durable adoption.
The winners instrument everything: baselines before automation, deltas after, and honest postmortems when gains don’t land.
Signals we track
Vertical solutions with measurable SLAs, partnerships that bundle implementation muscle with models, and procurement templates that bake evaluation harnesses into contracts — so vendors compete on verified uplift, not roadmap vapor.