Most companies are finalizing their 2026 budgets. Few can answer the most critical operational question: What is your technology actually doing?
For the modern Chief of Staff or Head of Operations, the challenge of the 2026 budget cycle isn’t just a matter of rising subscription costs. It is a matter of “operational drift.” As companies scale, their software stacks often expand faster than the systems designed to govern them.
The result is a new kind of leadership blind spot: a total lack of visibility into the tools that power the daily output of the organization.
Ghita El Haitmy, founder of Eli by Techbible.ai, has spent the last several years studying this shift. Working at the intersection of technology and organizational design, she has observed that while leaders deeply understand their people and their processes, they rarely possess a reliable map of the technology sitting under those operations.
“Most leadership teams believe they have a handle on their tools,” El Haitmy says. “But once you centralize the data, the reality is stark. You find redundant platforms added during a single busy quarter, licenses tied to former employees, and massive overlaps in functionality that no one is tracking.”
The Rise of the Operational Blind Spot
For Founders and COOs, the stakes are high. Software is no longer just a record-keeping expense; it is a workforce participant. It drafts, analyzes, routes, and automates. In many roles, software now completes a measurable percentage of a person’s core responsibilities.
However, because most companies lack a “central source of truth” for their tech stack, they are forced to make hiring and restructuring decisions based on partial information. This is why Eli was developed—not as a simple budgeting tool, but as a strategic lens for leaders to see how work is actually being executed.
“Without visibility, you cannot make accurate decisions about automation or investment,” El Haitmy explains. “If you don’t know where the work is being done by a human versus where it’s being handled by a system, your 2026 headcount planning is essentially guesswork.”
Where Hidden Inefficiencies Live
Through her advisory work with high-growth leadership teams, El Haitmy has identified four recurring themes that threaten 2026 margins:
- Inventory Drift: A team may believe they utilize 15 tools, but the actual number is often closer to 30. These “ghost tools” are usually inherited from past projects or former employees and remain active simply because there is no review cadence.
- The Underutilization Gap: Companies often pay for “enterprise-grade” automation features while their teams continue to perform those same tasks manually. The tool is there, but the operational bridge was never built.
- Structural Silos: HR focuses on staffing, IT focuses on security, and Finance focuses on invoices. No one is connecting the tasks to the tools. This creates a vacuum where leadership is unsure when to hire or when to optimize.
- Friction Costs: Beyond the invoice, the true cost of a bloated stack includes fragmented workflows and duplicated effort. This “tax” on productivity rarely appears on a P&L but slows down the entire organization.
The 2026 Mandate: From Guesswork to Clarity
As 2026 budgets take shape, the most successful Founders and Ops leaders are moving away from reactive cost-cutting and toward proactive visibility. El Haitmy recommends a four-step audit before finalizing next year’s plans:
- Centralize: Consolidate every active tool into one view, regardless of department.
- Audit Activity: Identify platforms with low engagement versus high cost.
- Bridge the Gap: Match manual workflows against existing software capabilities to find “free” automation wins.
- Role Mapping: Connect job descriptions to the tools that support them to ensure hiring reflects the actual tech-augmented reality of the work.
Visibility as a Competitive Advantage
Software spend has become one of the least examined yet most expensive parts of the modern enterprise. For a Chief of Staff or Head of Ops, bringing clarity to this area is more than a financial exercise—it is a leadership responsibility.
“The companies that thrive in 2026 will be the ones that treat software visibility as a core discipline,” says El Haitmy. “It’s about moving from ‘What do we own?’ to ‘What is actually driving value?’”
As organizations enter a year defined by tighter margins and the acceleration of AI, software clarity is no longer a back-office concern. It is a budgeting decision, a strategic advantage, and the only way to lead a lean, high-output organization into the future.
