There is a growing belief that AI will change everything. Yet when organisations attempt to deploy it, progress stalls. Pilots remain pilots. Benefits fail to scale. Complexity increases. The reason is straightforward. AI needs an operating model. Most organisations do not have one. 

An operating model is not a structure chart or a process library. It is not enterprise architecture. It is not strategy. The operating model is the system that manages the relationship between outcomes and outputs as they change and as they flow through the organisation. It is the mechanism that connects the individual to the function, the function to the organisation, and the organisation to the shareholder. 

Value flows in both directions. 

  • Purpose and expectation flow downward. 
  • Capability, knowledge and workflow upward. 
  • The operating model regulates and aligns this flow so that value is created, not lost. 

This relationship is now under strain. The environment no longer moves in cycles. Conditions change continuously. Opportunity and disruption arrive without warning. To survive in this environment, organisations must be in a permanent state of reinvention and innovation. This means the organisation itself must be mutable. Not periodically transformed. Mutable by design. 

A mutable organisation requires an operating model that can adjust how work is allocated, how capacity flexes, how decisions move, and how value is governed in real time. This is only possible when the operating model sits on top of clear functional architecture. Until now, most organisations have lacked this foundation because the architecture was defined around process and job role, both of which assume stability. 

AI changes this. 

  • For the first time, organisations are able to build Digital Functional Architectures. 
  • Architectures that describe work in terms of capability, intent and value. 
  • Architectures that are intelligent, dynamic and measurable. 
  • Architectures that underpin the operating model and make mutability possible. 
  • This also changes what work is. 
  • Individuals now need to hold their own repeatable knowledge and method. Digital Me. 
  • Functions become systems of shared capability, not repositories of tasks. 
  • The organisation becomes a continuously adjusting network of value flow. 
  • And the shareholder sees performance measured in outcomes, not effort. 
  • This is the fusion of human and digital workers. 

Not AI as a tool. 

  • Human experience and digital capability working as one. 
  • This is FusionWork. 
  • AI does not create trust. 
  • AI reflects the trust that already exists inside the operating model it is placed into. 
  • If you cannot trust your operating model, you cannot trust AI. 
  • And it is only through the operating model that AI can be trusted. 

2026 will be the year where organisations understand that technology does not transform them. People alone do not transform them. Strategy alone does not transform them. The only thing that transforms an organisation is the operating model. Because the operating model governs how value is created, how trust is sustained, and how the enterprise adapts. 

At Bloor Research, this is where we work. 

  • We measure the operating model. 
  • We diagnose at root cause. 
  • We design Digital Functional Architectures that allow organisations to become permanently mutable and ready for FusionWork. 
  • To explore this further or to join one of our closed executive roundtables, contact Donna Lamden in the Bloor engagement team. 
  • If you cannot trust the operating model, you cannot trust AI. 
  • And you cannot build the future using the logic of the past.