Over the past several weeks, a clear pattern has emerged across our conversations with investment, research, and consulting teams. Many are already using chat interfaces, saving prompts, and stitching together small automated workflows on their own. But these setups remain manual and fragile, relying on copy-paste steps, ad hoc prompting, and disconnected tools that never integrate with the firm's internal systems in a secure or organized way.

This is why so many leaders are shifting their focus from chat to true workflow automation. The priority is no longer just generating answers. It reduces manual effort, improves alignment, and accelerates time to insight by enabling processes to run reliably without constant human prompting.

Teams consistently describe the exact high-value needs:

• automated document ingestion and extraction
• routing deal materials into the right systems
• generating summaries
• connecting research and client communication
• surfacing relevant information across platforms

Chat helps with part of the journey, but it can't deliver real leverage unless the underlying data is connected and structured.

A new report published this month by OpenAI reinforces this shift. The State of Enterprise AI 2025 highlights a sharp rise in structured workflows and saved custom GPT automations. According to the report, enterprise use of workflow-driven GPTs has increased more than 19 times year to date. Companies are moving beyond experimentation and building repeatable, structured processes that AI can execute without manual intervention.

This matches what we see in the market. Teams want a single environment where their internal data is organized, secure, and accessible to AI. When that foundation is in place, they can finally build, save, and run automated workflows without hacking together prompts or juggling multiple tools. This is where the real productivity gains appear.

Chat is becoming baseline. The next phase is about unifying data and enabling agents that can run the work, not just describe it. This shift is accelerating and already shaping executive roadmaps for next year.

Gearing Up for 2026: What Firms Can Do Now

As planning season picks up, many firms are asking what they should prioritize in 2026 to stay ahead. Based on what we're seeing:

1. Organize internal data
Workflows depend on clean, structured information. Without this foundation, automation breaks down.

2. Identify three high-leverage workflows
Automations that deliver daily time savings consistently outperform one-off use cases.

3. Map where work actually happens
Research notes, emails, meetings, models, CRM activity. AI needs to move across systems, not sit in one spot.

4. Shift from prompts to processes
The real ROI comes from agents that execute steps end-to-end, not from ad hoc prompting.

5. Establish a cross-functional steering group
The most successful firms align research, technology, and leadership early to accelerate adoption.

Teams that begin this work now will enter 2026 with a strategic advantage. The gap between firms experimenting with AI and firms operationalizing it is widening quickly.

We'll continue sharing insights as this shift becomes the norm.

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