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When Execution Becomes a Commodity

My take on the trend hiding in plain sight that will reshape how you lead in 2026

For twenty-five years, the operating-system gospel for growth-stage companies has said the same thing: execution is what separates the winners from the rest. Strategy and vision matter enormously, but the companies that pull ahead are the ones with the discipline to run regular meeting rhythms, hit quarterly priorities, and turn good plans into completed work. Scaling Up, EOS, Rockefeller Habits, Objectives & Key Results. Different vocabularies, same conviction.

Verne Harnish built an industry on that idea. So did Gino Wickman. So, frankly, did I. And it was right — until 2026.

Here is the trend I believe will reshape your results this year more than anything else, and the one almost no one in our community is taking seriously yet: the AI wave is not commoditizing knowledge work. It is commoditizing execution itself. The very discipline we spent a decade building into our companies is becoming something competitors can buy off the shelf.

The numbers are not subtle

NVIDIA’s 2026 State of AI report found 64 percent of organizations actively deploying AI in operations, up from mostly testing a year ago. Eighty-eight percent report measurable revenue gains. Gartner expects task-specific AI agents to jump from under 5 percent adoption in 2025 to 40 percent by year-end. RSM’s Workforce 2026 study shows middle market firms naming AI and skills training as their top two workforce investments — ahead of hiring itself.

The pattern is clear. The work that filled our operations meetings five years ago — pipeline development, contract reviews, support systems, scheduling, reporting — is moving inside software. Not in a Silicon Valley demo. In our competitor’s company. This quarter.

The uncomfortable question

What happens to your advantage when a solo founder with four well-configured agents can match the throughput of your twenty-five-person operations team?

The instinct is often to “double down.” Tighten the scorecard. Push harder. I have watched many founders do this, and I want to say it plainly: it does not work. You cannot out-execute a machine that does not sleep, does not need a 1:1 meeting, and does not lose a Tuesday to a head cold. The execution race, as we have defined it for a generation, is one most mid-market companies are now structurally set up to lose.

Where the premium is moving

When execution becomes inexpensive and abundant, the scarce resource becomes judgment. The questions that compound in value are no longer “how fast can we ship?” and “did we hit the number?” They are:

• What should we be working on at all?

• Which customers are worth saying yes to, and which are worth firing?

• Where does our product need to go in eighteen months that no agent can yet see?

• What is the judgement that distinguishes our work from the commoditized version a competitor can generate in an afternoon?

Those are not execution questions. They are pattern-recognition questions, and they have always been the actual job of a founder or CEO. Our operating systems obscured that for a generation because execution discipline really was the rate-limiting factor. I do not think it is anymore. The rate-limiting factor in 2026 is the quality of the thinking that points your machinery in the right direction.

Intent becomes the unit of leadership

This is where David Marquet’s intent-based leadership work comes back into view for me. When people doing the work have context and authority to act on intent, the leader’s job moves upward into judgment, framing, and standard-setting. Replace “people doing the work” with “agents doing the work,” and the framework still holds. The leader who can articulate intent with precision — and recognize when something has drifted off — is the leader whose company grows. The leader still grading the execution itself is doing work the software will do better, cheaper, and at three in the morning.

A diagnostic for the quarter ahead

None of this means throwing out your operating system. The weekly meeting, quarterly priorities, the scoreboard — those rhythms still matter. What is changing is the content inside them. Less “did we ship it,” more “should we have shipped it.” Less “are we hitting the number,” more “is the number we picked still the right one.”

Here is the diagnostic I would offer. Look at your last four operations meetings. Estimate honestly what percentage of the conversation was spent on execution versus judgment: which bets to make, which to kill, what the market is telling you. If execution is more than half, your operating system is still tuned to a world that is fading. Not gone. Fading.

Here’s my take: Am I right on this — or not?

I will be honest that I do not know exactly how this plays out. The companies that get it right may find that smaller, sharper teams with strong judgment and well-configured tools outperform more process-heavy organizations of the same size. They may find that the next real advantage is not process discipline but judgment about what to do and what not to do — which work to take on, which to refuse, and the standard you hold it to.

They may also find, harder still, that some of the leaders who built the current generation of mid-market companies are not the leaders who can run them under the new conditions. I do not think the answer is to panic. I think the answer is to notice — and to talk about it with people whose judgment you trust.

So, tell me: am I right on this, or am I over reading the trend? Are you seeing execution becoming a commodity inside your own company, or is the change still mostly hype where you sit? Hit reply, or chime in on LinkedIn. I read everything, and your answers will shape where I take this next.