The goal of every business is to bring in more revenue than it spends on overhead. While boosting your sales is essential, fine-tuning your operations is where the real magic happens. When you invest in workflow improvements, new systems, and better tools, you and everyone on your team can work better, faster, and more efficiently than ever. They can do more with less and, if those systems are properly implemented, can do all that without feeling the pressure and burning out.
Don’t fall into the pitfall of piling on the workloads. Be smarter, and invest in these top productivity solutions to ramp up your operations in 2026:
Outsource with MDR to Streamline Your Security
Security is going to be one of the areas that you’ll want to invest in the most. Threats are skyrocketing, and alerts are only going to increase in frequency. If you want your security teams to be mentally ready for a serious, real threat that comes your business’ way, you need to remove those unnecessary alerts from the equation. The majority of security alerts are non-actionable, meaning your security system has already dealt with them, or they’re low priority.
Either way, using managed detection and response services is key. Think of them as your business’s emergency response unit. They’re there to sort through the low-priority and non-actionable alerts and send your team the real threats, boosting productivity by up to 95% and reducing alert fatigue by 90%.
Know When to Use Automation and AI
One of the biggest pitfalls businesses are falling into is using LLM-based AIs when automation would do. You don’t need an LLM or agentic system when If This, Then That (IFTT) automation is more effective. Rely on more traditional automation to automatically complete tasks with fewer errors, since it’s essentially just sending workflows down a pre-set pathway. Then use LLM-based AI, such as chatbots, for more creative collaboration as a personal assistant for your staff.
Centralize Your System
Older businesses run on a Frankenstein mix of legacy systems, cloud solutions, APIs, plugins, and more. It’s easy to end up with a network of programs that are on different servers, locations, and are drawing in data (and even storing it) in several other locations.
If you want to fully make use of automation and AI tools, you need to centralize all those systems. Putting them into a single enterprise system, or, at a minimum, ingesting all your data into a single data warehouse (and, most importantly, cleaning that data) will make it faster to access information and, most importantly, make it easier for all your tech solutions to seamlessly integrate together, with fewer mistakes.
Remove Unnecessary Steps
Work with your teams to help understand their workflows. They’ll know, intimately, just what steps aren’t necessary and ways that you can streamline their productivity. Work with them to find new software solutions, trust them if they say a certain program isn’t necessary, and so on. They know what is and isn’t necessary, so working alongside each team will allow you to, one, boost productivity and output, and two, improve the company culture and the well-being of your employees.
