The vision and ability to innovate strategically can give businesses a significant competitive advantage, especially in highly saturated and rapidly evolving markets. With the new year underway, forward-thinking executives are prioritizing transformative initiatives to strengthen customer relationships, product offerings, company culture, and more. Below, Zoho experts share some of the new year's resolutions every enterprise should make to drive high-value innovation in 2026.
Find the right place for AI in your organization
Hardeep Chawla, Director of Enterprise Sales
In 2025, we discovered a lot of ways to use AI to enhance employee work. We also saw some very public proof that handing over the reins entirely can backfire. I think the big innovators of 2026 will be the businesses that can balance the productivity and analytics capabilities of AI with the empathy, nuance, and creativity of their human employees.
In the coming year, businesses should continue to push person-to-person interactions. That's where you're going to see customers—and employees—opening up about their big-picture goals, elaborating on the challenges they're facing, and collaborating with stakeholders to come up with potential solutions.
When it's time to deliver on those solutions, AI can be invaluable, but you've got to be strategic about its implementation. Use to it run an objective analysis of your project proposal, to handle routine tasks, to track and monitor outcomes—but resist the urge to over-automate. Instead, focus on augmenting employees' critical and creative problem solving skills to drive successful innovations forward.
Strengthen connections between your apps, your people, and your data
Laura Burrus, Head of Enterprise Marketing
When data is shared, viewed, and put to work across departments, it has a profound impact on the ways teams innovate, and the outcomes they're able to achieve. Imagine how much more customer-focused your products could be if your R&D team had access to support data. Think of how personal and engaging your campaigns could be if marketers could tap into real insights from sales call logs.
To clear a path for powerful innovations in the new year, look for ways to improve data visibility across the organization. This could mean bringing key initiatives onto a unified project management platform, finding opportunities to streamline inter-departmental communication, or integrating a broadly-accessible analytics tool across your tech stack. A rich data pool not only helps teams recognize where innovation is needed; it helps them go from concept to reality by predicting the challenges they'll face, the resources they'll need, and the factors that will impact success.
Make data hygiene a top priority
Kevin Kenney, Director of Enterprise Sales
Good data is the foundation of meaningful innovations. Inaccuracies, incomplete records, duplication, and corrupted files can make it difficult to identify real opportunities for growth. And they can prevent you from realizing the full potential of your AI systems and tools. AI needs good data to generate actionable insights, make reliable predictions, and successfully automate key processes. The saying “garbage in, garbage out” still holds true, so it’s important to make sure you’re running your systems on clean, trustworthy data.
The start of the new year is an excellent time to launch a data cleanup initiative. Consider appointing a dedicated stakeholder or team to lead the project and equip them with an AI-powered data preparation tool to simplify the process. Once the initial cleanup is complete, schedule regular system audits to maintain data quality over time. This will make a significant difference in your ability to drive innovations that have a real and measurable impact on your organization.
Sunset low-value projects to free up talent and resources
Julie Doris, Key Accounts Director
If you've let your project portfolio get a little too bloated over the past year, trimming things down is a good resolution for 2026. You can't move high-impact innovations forward if your talent and resources are all tied up in low-value projects. Now is the perfect time to focus more on what's working, and prepare to move on from what isn't.
Plan to spend the next few weeks or months evaluating the projects in your portfolio, and compare what they're costing your team against what they're delivering. Your analytics tools can help with this—and you can use them to get some insights into how your project will fare in the new year. If a project no longer seems viable, start moving toward responsible sunsetting. Ideally, that will include a post-mortem with your relevant stakeholders, so you can learn more about what did and didn't work. That will help your team make informed decisions—and avoid missteps—as they tackle the next initiative.
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