Topic: Artificial Intelligence / Industry Trends Read Time: 18 Minutes I. Welcome to the Era of Action If 2023 was the year of wow  defined by the initial cultural shock of ChatGPT and 2024 through 2025 were the years of "pilot purgatory" and "chatbot fatigue," then 2026 is undeniably the year of action . For two years, enterprises were stuck in a loop of experimentation. They built thousands of "chat with your PDF" prototypes that were fun but fundamentally useless for real work. The friction of mediating every single step typing a prompt, waiting for text, copy pasting that text into Excel, noticing an error, and pasting it back proved too costly for complex workflows. The promise of AI as a productivity booster was stalling against the wall of human micromanagement. In boardrooms, creative studios, and software labs, the conversation has shifted fundamentally. The question is no longer "What can this model write?" or "How well can it su...