How the Best Businesses Are Using AI: What Leaders Do Differently

by Staff Writer

The businesses making real money from AI in 2026 stopped experimenting and started executing. They picked specific workflows, deployed agents that run them end to end, and measured the results. The playbook is out there. The question is whether you're using it.

OpenAI went from $200 million to $13 billion in annualized revenue between early 2023 and August 2025. Anthropic jumped from $87 million to $7 billion in the same window. But the bigger story is what happens when companies actually deploy this stuff at scale. Telus put AI in the hands of 57,000 employees and is saving 40 minutes per interaction. Suzano built an agent that turns plain English into SQL queries, cutting data retrieval time by 95% for 50,000 workers. These aren't marginal wins. They're operational breakthroughs that create real competitive separation.

The pattern across top performers is consistent. They're using AI to run entire workflows, not just answer questions. Customer support gets triaged automatically. Supply chains adjust in real time. Financial forecasts update themselves. This shift from assistant to teammate requires different infrastructure. Token costs dropped 280-fold in two years, which opened the door for companies to scale usage fast. The smart operators built hybrid setups early: cloud for flexibility, on-premises for consistency, edge for speed. That infrastructure choice is what lets them move faster as adoption grows.

What separates the businesses seeing real ROI is ruthless focus. Broadcom's CIO put it clearly: without targeting a specific business problem and the value you want, AI investment won't deliver. The best teams pick their biggest bottleneck, deploy AI against it, measure impact, then move to the next challenge. They run top-down programs where leadership sets priorities, redesigns processes around AI, and holds teams accountable to hard metrics. That's how you turn potential into performance.

Security is the other unlock. The businesses scaling AI successfully are embedding autonomous security agents that catch threats and respond instantly. Every AI agent gets the same protections as a human employee: identity, access controls, data governance, threat monitoring. Security built in from the start means you can scale without creating new vulnerabilities. The companies that figured this out are moving faster because they're not constantly firefighting breaches.

The pattern is clear. AI works best when you rebuild operations around it, not bolt it onto what you're already doing. The companies embracing that shift are building advantages that compound over time.

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