Key Takeaways
- After a volatile 2025, Creative Operations leaders are focusing on two key themes for 2026: strategic alignment and operational excellence.
- Strategic alignment involves synchronizing people and technology. This means getting leadership on the same page about business objectives and AI's role, and integrating the existing tech stack rather than adding new tools.
- Operational excellence aims to drive business value by rebuilding best practices. This includes creating new, flexible operational models and linking creative and marketing efforts directly to revenue.
- The goal is to help Creative and Marketing Teams move beyond a chaotic “wild west” approach to AI and instead adopt a more intentional and impactful strategy.
The avalanche of change in 2025 brought exciting new possibilities, a terrifyingly volatile job market, and huge disruptions to operational best practices. While striving to keep up, Creative and Marketing Teams have become more fragmented than ever. On the bright side, Creative Operations leaders are energized and ready to move their organizations forward—and collaborative growth is their specialty!
When we gathered 40 Ops leaders in our InsideOut Leadership Community to share their top 2026 priorities, two themes emerged: alignment and operational excellence. While those may sound familiar, this year brings unprecedented challenges.
Last year, layoffs and pressures to invest in AI led to over 1 million displaced workers, leaving behind leaner teams with increased workloads and tighter deadlines. As directionless change accelerated, failure to address operational issues became a recipe for disaster. That’s why Ops leaders intend to become orchestrators of excellence this year by doubling down on what they do best.
Strategic alignment: Synchronizing people and tech
Bringing teams together has always been a strength of Creative Operations leaders, but the race to extract value from generative AI has led to “wild west” behavior and put strategy in the back seat. Since operational excellence requires clear strategic direction, these leaders must first align humans to move forward.
But not so fast. The rapid introduction of new tools and technologies over the past 12 months disrupted every process, system, and measurement. Ops leaders must simultaneously assess and realign their tech stacks to move forward. Without the alignment of people, process, and technology, another year of chaotic change is guaranteed.
Strategy and shared goals
Study after study has found that success with AI is more about leadership than technology. So before tackling the tool and systems challenge, Ops leaders must aim to secure alignment across leadership teams. One leader’s priority is to work directly with senior leadership to clarify business objectives and bridge the AI expectation gap, ensuring that bold, ambitious corporate initiatives are achievable—and adopted.
At the peer level, Ops leaders are assembling leadership councils to consolidate constantly shifting business direction and build a bigger picture of what’s required. At the team level, another leader plans to ensure their Design Team is tightly aligned through best practices so they are ready to be deployed wherever the business heads next. By redesigning roles for flexibility, leaders can focus on acquiring skills and improving outcomes.
Systems integration and optimization
With humans aligned on roles and responsibilities that support a shared strategic vision, Operations leaders can shape an efficient, cost-effective tech stack for their teams. But instead of continuing to add more shiny new tools like last year, leaders plan to quiet the noise by fully integrating existing tools to optimize performance.
As they continue their AI journey, leaders are asking: What are we investigating, what are we testing, what are we implementing, and what’s working? They aspire to connect tools, automate repetitive tasks, and eliminate manual steps. One leader is focused on unifying disparate systems to synthesize project and staffing metrics into actionable insights.
Drawing on learnings from two tumultuous years of experimentation, Ops leaders aim to amplify wins, identify new levers, and scale technology usage to deliver greater results.
Operational excellence: Driving business value
With teams, tools, and techniques aligned, Creative Operations leaders can rebuild those broken best practices that have halted meaningful progress. But this year they’re not looking to return to the status quo. Leaders are redefining excellence and exploring uncharted paths to deliver more business value through operations.
From building new models that move at the pace of transformation to linking creative and marketing efforts to revenue, they are laser-focused on generating greater impact this year.
Resetting the bar
Creative Teams long strived to be seen as strategic advisors to their internal stakeholders. However, as those stakeholders scrambled to show impact from AI investments, often questioning the need for Creative Teams at all, any progress made in shifting perception from order taker to business partner has been lost.
To reverse this trend, Ops leaders are using AI and automation to unearth new ways to yield returns for their partners that demonstrate the power of creative work. They are also leading the way toward AI literacy by wielding their knowledge of tools and ability to inspire change to upskill their own teams.
Here's how these leaders are rethinking their workflows:
- Bringing in AI for enterprise-wide enhancements.
- Evolving Project Managers into Program Managers to provide more strategic guidance.
- Creating hybrid roles for their centralized Creative Team while using and embedding AI to build bench strength.
By making these changes, they are repositioning their teams as the consultative, tech-forward business partners needed to achieve results.
Exploring new models
Throughout our sessions, we heard eager Operations leaders poised to unleash their teams to design unimagined solutions that fit today’s challenges. Always a pain point, planning is ripe for reinvention, as Creative Teams utilize data to produce higher-quality work faster and make better decisions on prioritization and spend.
One leader is establishing Centers of Excellence (CoEs), introducing varied support models, ranging from full-service to self-serve, to provide the right support for the right needs and maximize resources. Another is partnering with Marketing and Sales to review sales pipeline operations so they can stop losing business to inefficient tech and processes.
Finally, there’s an interesting trend on the rise: Many companies are elevating the Creative Operations leader role to oversee Marketing Ops Teams and functions. By bridging the disconnected workflows and priorities of these teams, organizations can develop frictionless processes based on strategic goals that focus on outcomes, not preferences.
Conclusion
There’s zero doubt that 2026 will bring more change, but one thing is certain: Creative Ops leaders are ready. Invited or not, they intend to lead the charge this year to drive business impact and effectively advocate for their teams. By aligning people and technologies, resetting the bar for operational excellence, and exploring new models built for transformation, they’re sure to find success.
While this article outlines initial plans, expect updates throughout the year as these leaders develop the specific strategies and tactics that solidify their status as indispensable business partners. Stay tuned.
Why do we care? Our mission is to connect leaders to find solutions. If you're a senior design, experience, or creative operations leader of an in-house team at a high-profile brand and want to connect with others who share your unique challenges, let's talk. Our InsideOut community hosts small-format roundtables to support the learning and growth of our members, and we’re honored to facilitate those discussions.
About the author
Susie Hall is Aquent's Community & Customer Engagement President. In 1999 she joined Aquent as an interactive Agent. Over the past 21 years, she's led regional teams, developed a robust interactive design practice and launched Aquent's Vitamin T brand in 2011 to address the rapidly evolving digital talent needs of agencies and mid-sized companies. With 15 Best of Staffing service awards and hundreds of thousands of connections made, she brings a deep understanding of creative, design, and leadership. In 2019, Susie launched Aquent's InsideOut Design Leadership Community, connecting senior in-house design, experience, and operations leaders from high-profile brands through facilitated peer discussions based on real-world challenges.
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