In 2026, the relevant executive question is no longer “where do we cut costs?” but rather “which critical processes, redesigned through innovation, give our teams back the capacity to look after the customer?”. Costs remain under pressure — yet margin, increasingly, lives in the experience. And it is precisely corporate innovation, applied in a structured way, that builds this bridge.

The end of a false choice

For a long time, operational efficiency and customer experience were treated as parallel agendas — when not opposing ones. Cost reduction was the operation’s priority; customer delight, the marketing department’s. That organisational arrangement no longer holds up against today’s competitive reality.

The figures make the shift clear. Research consolidated by the Harvard Business Review indicates that acquiring a new customer costs between 5 and 25 times more than retaining an existing one — and that increasing retention by just 5% can boost profit by up to 95%, according to seminal studies by Bain & Company. In other words: customer experience has ceased to be the final chapter of the operational plan and has become a margin-generating factor in its own right.

The financial pressure that many boards impose today — cost cuts, structural simplification, productivity gains — does not go away. What changes is the strategic reading: treating experience merely as a line of cost is to deny the most obvious arithmetic of profitability. And this perception has already levelled up between B2B and B2C. According to PwC’s Customer Experience Survey, 86% of buyers say they are willing to pay more for a superior experience, with price premiums of up to 16%.

The gap that still separates perception from reality

Despite this apparent consensus, practical delivery remains far from customer expectations. International studies show that only 8% of customers consider that companies deliver “excellent” experiences — whilst 80% of companies believe they do precisely that. This perception gap is, at once, the largest diagnosis and the greatest opportunity of the coming decade.

PwC’s research, surveying more than 3,000 senior executives, reinforces the point: 70% state that customer expectations evolve faster than their own organisation’s ability to adapt. There is no time for long, linear transformation cycles — which demands a new way of embedding innovation into the core of the operation, rather than as an add-on.

When innovation becomes the infrastructure of experience

The maturity of the Brazilian market on this topic is already visible in concrete cases, across sectors as distinct as retail, mining and financial services.

Magazine Luiza is one of the most well-documented examples. The digital transformation programme launched in the mid-2010s reshaped the company from a traditional retailer into a digital platform with physical touchpoints — including the launch of its marketplace, today with more than 3,000 partner sellers and millions of SKUs. The effect on market value was accompanied by a profound reorganisation of how small teams now iterate directly on checkout, customer service and logistics experiences, in continuous cycles. In 2025, the company announced a fresh US$ 50 million facility to accelerate capabilities in AI, cloud and services for small and medium enterprises — signalling that transformation is not a milestone, but a permanent practice.

Itaú Unibanco stands out in the financial sector for the way it brings together AI, data and customer journey. The bank has been repositioning its technology architecture to deliver personalised service at scale, with predictive models integrated into both digital channels and the work of relationship teams. The strategy treats AI not as an isolated tool, but as a layer that reorganises the entire operation around the customer — something that, in a market where a single poor experience triggers a bank switch, becomes a direct competitive advantage.

Vale, in turn, demonstrates that even asset-intensive sectors place experience at the heart of their innovation agenda — including the experience of B2B customers and suppliers. The Supply Transformation Global Programme, launched in 2024, is redesigning global procurement processes with AI and machine learning, connecting market intelligence, spend analytics and supplier management into a single architecture. The goal is to reach, by 2026, full implementation across an annual procurement volume in the region of US$ 14 billion. As the company’s own leadership has stated, partnership and active listening between teams and the broader ecosystem are the foundation of the programme — innovation is not an event; it is a way of operating.

These three cases share a principle that applies to any sector — from steelmaking to pharmaceuticals, from logistics to financial services: innovation only becomes a margin lever when it stops being an isolated project and becomes infrastructure.

The real role of AI: capacity, not reduction

There is a persistent misconception about the role of artificial intelligence in large corporations. Framed reductively, it becomes synonymous with headcount cuts. Framed strategically, it reveals its true potential: redesigning critical processes to give teams back the time, the data and the clarity needed to focus on what truly generates value — the relationship with the customer.

The operational gains are robust. Recent studies on intelligent automation show that organisations adopting AI to orchestrate workflows achieve, on average, 30% to 50% faster execution, 20% to 40% cost reduction and up to 70% fewer operational errors. Corporate cases show significant specific gains — at SAP, for instance, the application of AI to billing processes is projected to improve efficiency by 32% and halve setup times.

But the number that matters most is not productivity — it is liberated capacity. When the operations team no longer has to resolve repetitive routines, it moves up to the level of analysis, diagnosis and relationship-building. That is where customer experience ceases to depend on “point-in-time effort” and becomes the result of design.

Four questions every innovation leader should be asking today

To translate this view into a concrete agenda, we recommend four structuring questions:

• Where are the critical processes whose current friction erodes the customer’s perception — and how much, in margin terms, does maintaining that friction cost?
• Which capabilities do teams need in order to operate under the logic of experience, rather than mere execution?
• What portfolio and governance structures ensure that innovation does not remain confined to pilot projects, but scales as infrastructure?
• Which partners can accelerate the learning curve, sparing the company from trying to reinvent in isolation what the market has already codified?

These questions naturally connect agendas that tend to sit in silos: strategy, business design, open innovation, corporate venture capital, and the change management that underpins all of them.

The co-creation agenda

At The Bakery, this is precisely the bridge we build with our corporate partners. Streams such as operating model optimisation, innovation and digital transformation strategy, open innovation and venture client programmes, and Corporate Venture Capital governance cease to be isolated initiatives and start to operate as an integrated system — always guided by the right question: how do we give teams back the capacity to deliver the experience that retains customers and expands margin?

The strategic choice facing the next budget cycle is not between cutting and investing. It is between cutting reactively and redesigning with method. The organisations that grasp this distinction will emerge from the next competitive window with something that linear cuts can never deliver: a more intelligent operation, more capable teams, and customers who choose to stay.

About The Bakery A corporate innovation firm supporting large companies in connecting strategy, business design, open innovation, corporate venture capital and organisational enablers. We co-create transformation journeys that translate into sustainable revenue and margin.

Sources: Harvard Business Review; Bain & Company; PwC 2025 Customer Experience Survey; Forrester; public reports from Magazine Luiza, Itaú Unibanco and Vale; sector studies on intelligent automation, 2026.