Verdantix 2026 Global Industrial Transformation Survey: Turning Signals Into Action For Industrial Agility

In December 2025, Verdantix published its annual industrial transformation survey. Against a backdrop of persistent cost pressures, workforce constraints and rising expectations of operational resilience, the report benchmarks the budgets, priorities and technology preferences of industrial leaders in 2026. It draws on interviews with 333 decision-makers across 22 industries and 16 countries and regions, with 74% of respondents representing firms with revenues above $1 billion. The data point to three standout lessons:

Leaders are focusing industrial transformation spend on outcome-led initiatives: safer operations, higher uptime, lower energy use and better yield.
Industrial firms are prioritizing initiatives on safer operations, improved asset uptime, reduced energy consumption and optimized production yield. As firms align investments to the metrics that plant leaders and executives can defend, transformation initiatives are increasingly judged on measurable operational performance, rather than digitization for its own sake. Productivity, safety and reliability – previously run in parallel – are now being treated as a connected system. In practical terms, this raises the bar for industrial technology vendors: point solutions that do not integrate into how work is planned, executed and governed will struggle to demonstrate value in a world where buyers are prioritizing linked outcomes.

Industrial AI innovations are transforming optimization across core workflows from ‘insight’ to execution.
Survey respondents indicate increased industrial interest in AI and AI agents, with adoption focused on use cases that map directly to operational pain points. Firms explicitly cite predictive maintenance and production optimization, but the same logic extends to adjacent workflows where latency and variability carry real cost – such as quality management, supply chain execution and workforce safety. The important nuance for 2026 is that buyers are not looking at AI as a bolt-on analytics layer. Instead, buyers want capabilities that sit inside day-to-day processes and reduce the effort it takes to get from ‘something looks wrong’ to ‘here is the action we are taking’, keeping decisions moving when downtime is expensive.

Maintenance is shifting from reactive to proactive, but the transition will be won in operationalization, rather than pilots.
The Verdantix survey highlights that industrial maintenance is transitioning from reactive to proactive approaches. That shift is easy to agree with in principle, but difficult to deliver at scale. In the real world, proactive maintenance demands asset context, and disciplined planning, scheduling and closed-loop execution, so that recommendations translate into work orders that are executed on time. This is where AI and agentic tooling will play a pivotal role in 2026: they will triage signals and prioritize interventions while clearly communicating actionable insights to the user. Firms that treat proactive maintenance as an operating model shift, rather than a condition monitoring rollout, will be the ones that see the biggest sustained improvements in uptime and cost.

In 2026, industrial transformation outcomes will be judged by how reliably firms can convert intelligence into action. The data point to a clear shift towards embedded, workflow-level capabilities that help teams execute actions faster amid workforce constraints, while tying transformation investments directly to the plant outcomes of safer operations, higher uptime, lower energy use and better yield. This shift is also redefining industrial agility: the ability to sense, decide and act quickly as conditions change. The winners will be the firms that operationalize at scale by integrating signals, decisions and execution into an operating model that consistently delivers measurable performance.

To gain more Verdantix market insights on industrial transformation, explore our Industrial Transformation Leaders research or schedule an analyst inquiry.