Is a new wave of process excellence coming?

It's a strange question to ask in 2026, when agents are at the top of most companies' agendas and calling yourself "AI-native" has become almost mandatory. Against that backdrop, process excellence sounds like a phrase from another era, when any system rollout was preceded by a separate phase: processes were described, aligned on, and prioritized, and only then would anyone decide what to actually automate.
And yet, the closer you look at how companies are currently deploying AI, the more you get the sense that we might be about to rediscover something we quietly skipped.

