13/08/2026
Where should your team's effort actually go in 2026?
Our State of the Route to Live 2026 research is clear on one thing: AI doesn't fix a broken delivery pipeline, it amplifies it. High-performing teams get faster. Everyone else just ships their dysfunction quicker.
So before your team commits to another 12 months of AI tooling, ask the harder question: which initiatives are actually worth the investment?
We plotted close to 30 real AI-era delivery initiatives — from foundational governance moves like a Central Model Gateway and Dynamic Tool Discovery, to fast, low-effort wins like Secret Vault Setup — against Expected Business Value and Investment/Effort.
The result is the Route to Live Prioritisation Matrix below:
→ Quick Wins (high value, low effort) — do these first → Big Bets (high value, high effort) — sequence deliberately → Fill-ins / Incrementals (low value, low effort) — nice to have, not urgent → Time Sinks / Reconsider (low value, high effort) — question before you fund them
Look at what's sitting in "Reconsider": ungoverned AI tool sprawl and a hasty microservices migration — two of the most common places we see engineering budget quietly disappear.
This snapshot comes from four years of Route to Live assessments across financial services, retail, healthcare, media and tech. But it's OUR map, not yours. Your value/effort picture depends entirely on your own maturity, tech debt and where AI is already embedded in your pipeline.
That's exactly why we built a fillable 12-Month Roadmap Framework — plot your own initiatives, find your own quick wins, and walk into next year with a sequenced plan instead of a backlog.
👇 Access it now (link in the comments)
