After the AI Wake-Up Call: What Innovation Leaders Learned in 2025 – and How to Win in 2026

During our Elevate Innovate 2025 session series we saw one clear trend emerge across the CEOs, product leaders, and AI practitioners, that we spoke to: the companies making real progress were not chasing tools, they were anchoring innovation to outcomes, execution discipline, and human adoption. 

If you are planning priorities for Q1 2026, this article may serves as quick look up – a way to quickly revisit the key signals industry leaders were highlighting as AI moved from experimentation to expectation.

As we look toward 2026, the question is more about how to win when everyone has access to the same technology.

This article is based on insights shared during Lion People Global’s live Elevate Innovate events held in 2025.

From Incremental Change to Outcome-Driven Innovation

What stood out in 2025: Incremental improvement is no longer enough

Many organisations believe they are innovating. However, in reality, they are optimising yesterday’s assumptions.

Incremental improvement feels safe. It improves efficiency, reduces friction, and rarely upsets the status quo. But safety, as several Elevate Innovate speakers warned, is also a growth limiter.

As Giulia Tarditi, Head of Language Experience at Revolut, put it bluntly during the February session:

“True innovation requires adoption and it requires impact. If you don’t let yourself think outside of the realms of what has been up until right now, the transformation is not possible.”

Outcome-driven innovation flips the traditional logic. Instead of asking “How can we improve what we already do?” it starts with “What outcome must we achieve – and what would it take if constraints didn’t exist?”

This shift matters. Leaders who anchor innovation in outcomes unlock:

• Clear prioritisation in a noisy AI landscape
• Alignment between strategy, technology, and execution
• A path to transformation that is ambitious but grounded

As discussed in the session, incremental innovation moves the needle. Outcome-driven innovation moves the business.

Check out these and other recordings from the Elevate Innovate sessions here. 

AI Adoption Is a Change Management Challenge – Not a Technology One

What leaders learned in 2025: AI adoption rises or falls on people

One of the most persistent myths exposed in Elevate Innovate 2025 was that AI success depends primarily on technology maturity. The reality, according to practitioners, is far messier, and far more human.

Cristina Anselmi, reflecting on a six-year enterprise AI deployment journey, described how everything began with experimentation, not certainty. What followed was not a technical roadmap, but a sustained effort in communication, trust-building, and incremental adoption.

“Disruption makes people uncomfortable… but somebody has to convince people to overcome resistance and promote adoption in the change management process.”

Her experience highlighted a critical leadership insight: AI programmes fail not because models underperform, but because people disengage.

Successful enterprise adoption depended on:

• Breaking initiatives into digestible, non-threatening steps
• Involving stakeholders early and often
• Making progress visible, measurable, and reversible

In 2025, the organisations scaling AI fastest are not those with the biggest budgets, but those that treat adoption as a cultural journey rather than a rollout.

The Innovator’s Dilemma Has Arrived, and Timing Is Everything

By the end of 2025, it was clear: Waiting for certainty is now a strategic risk

If AI has forced one question to the surface, it is this: When is the right time to act?

Act too early, and the market may not be ready. Wait too long, and relevance slips away quietly.

This tension – the classic innovator’s dilemma – framed April’s Elevate Innovate discussion. John Tinsley, serial entrepreneur and innovation leader, described the risk of standing still with characteristic clarity:

“If you keep going like you’ve always done, what you’re facing is potentially a shrinking story.”

The challenge for leaders is not simply agility, but directional agility. Being busy is no longer enough. Innovation must move organisations upstream – closer to where value is created – rather than reacting downstream once decisions are already made.

In an AI-driven economy, value is shifting:

• From execution to orchestration
• From translation to content creation
• From reactive delivery to proactive partnership

The dilemma is real, but the message from Elevate Innovate was unambiguous: waiting for certainty is no longer a viable strategy.

Taming the AI Beast: Why Most Pilots Never Reach Production

A defining insight from 2025: Experimentation without structure does not scale

By mid-2025, experimentation fatigue had set in. Many organisations had AI tools in use, but few had them reliably embedded in production environments.

During the May session, Simone Bohnenberger-Rich, Chief Product Officer at Phrase, explained why:

“An LLM is not a solution out of the box. It looks easy, but when you turn it into a reliable solution that manages risk, it falls short.”

The problem is not ambition; it is underestimation. Moving AI from pilot to production requires:

• Clean, proprietary data as a foundation
• Robust quality and risk frameworks
• Clear rules around where automation is safe, and where it is not

Without these, AI introduces volatility instead of advantage.

One of the most striking insights from the session was this: AI does not eliminate risk; it redistributes it. Leaders who acknowledge this early, and design for it are the ones converting experimentation into enterprise value.

Crossing the Streams: Where Customer Outcomes, AI, and Product Strategy Meet

Worth carrying into 2026: Innovation without customer outcomes loses momentum

If outcome-driven innovation has a north star, it is the customer.

June’s Elevate Innovate session explored what happens when organisations align customer needs, product strategy, and AI execution instead of treating them as separate domains.

Bryan Murphy, CEO of Smartling, framed innovation in simple but uncompromising terms:

“Innovation always starts with desired outcomes – customer desired outcomes.”

This perspective demands discipline. Not every idea deserves to live. Not every experiment should scale.

High-performing innovation organisations:

• Define success before they build
• Use gates, metrics, and confidence scores to advance or kill ideas
• Maintain velocity by being ruthless about focus

This is how creativity survives structure – not despite it.

What Elevate Innovate Signals for 2026

Looking across all five sessions, a clear pattern emerges. The next phase of innovation will not reward speed alone. It will reward clarity.

As we move toward 2026, several themes stand out for business leaders:

• Outcome-driven innovation will replace experimentation theatre
  Pilots without impact will lose credibility at board level.
  
• AI governance will become a competitive differentiator
  Trust, risk management, and quality will separate leaders from laggards.
  
• Human-AI collaboration will define productivity gains
  Roles will evolve, not disappear – favouring those who embrace augmentation.
  
• Structure will enable speed, not constrain it
  Cadence, prioritisation, and execution discipline will outperform chaos.

This is not a prediction piece. It is a checkpoint – a way to revisit what mattered last year, pressure-test current plans, and ensure innovation efforts are anchored in outcomes that genuinely move the business forward.

The organisations that win next will be those that suspend disbelief, think beyond legacy constraints, and then execute – relentlessly – toward outcomes that matter.