Way forward: leadership imperatives 6 Realizing the value of intelligent operations demands bold leadership to sequence capabilities and scale up autonomy across operations. As manufacturing and supply chains move towards more autonomous operating models, progress is diverging sharply across industries and organizations. According to a global Accenture survey,12 only about 25% of companies have begun their autonomy journey, embedding automation and AI more deeply across operations, while many others remain constrained by fragmented capabilities and manual decision-making. This growing divergence signals that the way forward will require more than incremental improvement. It requires a clear set of leadership imperatives that help organizations translate technological capability into sustained operational and financial impact. The roadmap below outlines how leaders can sequence these imperatives to move from foundational readiness to scaled, network-level autonomy regardless of where they start.13 Intelligent Industrial Operations Outlook 2026 52