Digital trends 2026: 4 shifts your organisation wants (needs!) to make in 2026

AI isn't a distant future concept anymore. Yet many organisations are still just playing around with it. They do have AI experiments running but often cannot explain why. A chatbot that primarily frustrates instead of helps, an AI tool that nobody uses, or an 'intelligent' feature that customers navigate around. 

Start with the problem, not with AI 

From what we see day-to-day, the companies getting AI right aren't starting with the tech itself ('we must do something with AI'). Instead, they begin with a concrete business problem that needs to be solved and where AI can be a solution or accelerator. As our Group AI Director Raymond Muilwijk puts it: "Successful AI implementation is less about the latest technology and more about the right starting point." 

The more specific, the better  

Business problems are, for example: reports that take hours to compile, customer questions that must be answered 24/7 or content that has to be manually tweaked for every single channel. That's where AI actually works. Our client Enexis, for example, solved the time-consuming making of instruction videos with a digital version of their own employee. And Port of Antwerp-Bruges made their complex port operations easier to navigate with a human-like AI interface. Practical solutions for real business problems. 

So, what's our recipe for AI success in 2026? Be incredibly specific. Pick one concrete bottleneck where AI can deliver quick results, then build from there.

Launching campaigns at lightning speed, maintaining consistent quality across all markets, and getting the most out of your marketing technology: it might sound like wishful thinking, but what if it's not? 

We work with organisations that manage to achieve exactly this. What sets them apart is that they look at their operations in a fundamentally different way. The difference lies in how they handle complexity. 

Simplify instead of expand 

Most companies solve problems by adding more systems, people or processes. Market leaders do exactly the opposite: they simplify so that employees' time can be used to focus on what really drives results. 

'Operationally excellent organisations', as we call them, focus on streamlining their marketing operations and automating their business processes. 

'Think big, start small, scale fast' 

"Processes should repeat successes, not slow them down. Start, learn what works, then streamline. Otherwise, growth becomes organised chaos," says Steven Van Duyse, Strategy Director Automation at iO. 

A customer calls about a problem, but your customer service can't see their order history because it's stored in a different system. Meanwhile, marketing sends them offers for products they've already bought, because that data sits somewhere else entirely. 

Speed determines success 

Technology is becoming a key factor in how fast you can adapt to what customers want. This affects your competitive advantage. "Every day your technology slows down decisions or innovation, competitors get closer to your customers," states Maarten De Schepper, Commercial Director Belgium at iO. 

Connect, don't replace 

We believe the solution doesn't lie in replacing everything. The solution often lies in better connections between existing systems. 

Companies that tackle this well invest in 2026 in connecting CRM, marketing automation, webshops, customer service, etc., so information can be shared more effectively. And they build their architecture with modular components to use the best software, so they're not dependent on one large supplier. 

From friction to flow 

This creates what we call 'technological flow': being able to respond to opportunities without system limitations. True technological flow takes years, but anyone wanting to maintain competitive advantage really needs to have started modernising their tech stack in 2026.