Operating in the age of the heart

The COO role was built for a world that no longer exists. The question isn't how to adapt, it's whether you're still the right person to lead if you don't.

In February, Baringa convened a group of senior COOs from across all industry sectors. Our fantastic panel provoked an honest conversation about what it actually takes to run a major institution in 2026. And what it will take by 2035. 

What emerged wasn't a list of trends. It was something more urgent: a recognition that the operating model most COOs inherited is structurally misaligned with the world they're now running. The disruptions aren't arriving one at a time – technology, geopolitics, capital flows, climate and talent are moving simultaneously, each amplifying the other. 

The shift feels different this time because it is different. And the organisations that will win by 2035 won't be those that simply optimise faster, they'll be those whose leaders understand what the role of operations has fundamentally become.

A century of operational evolution

To understand where operations is going, you need to understand where it came from. Baringa's chief economist outlined three distinct eras, each defined not just by technology, but by where value was created and what it meant to run an organisation well.

The Age of the Hand (pre-1970s)

Competitive advantage came from physical execution. Labour, assets and scale were the determinants of success. The COO's job was fundamentally about control: standardisation, efficiency, mass production. The more tightly you could manage what people did with their hands, the better your outcomes.

The Age of the Heart (now)

We are entering a third era. As execution moves further outside the enterprise, what remains at the core is something qualitatively different. It is not execution. It is not analysis. It is the essence of the organisation: the values it embodies, the trust it holds, the judgement it exercises, and the purpose it serves across its full stakeholder map: shareholders, customers, colleagues, and the communities in which it operates.

The parts of your business that cannot be outsourced are the only parts that will define whether you remain a trusted institution in 2035. Protecting them is now the primary operational mandate.

The following themes provide insights into the direction and changing nature of the COO’s role in the Age of the Heart.

Theme 1: Growing the heart in a changing world 

The Age of the Heart is reshaping how and where work happens and the implications go far beyond real estate decisions.

Physical infrastructure is no longer static. By 2035, workplace design will be determined by climate projections, rising energy demand, and the growing requirement to power and cool the vast data infrastructure that underpins AI-driven operations. Green workspaces have moved from aspiration to operational necessity. Institutions that cannot demonstrate environmental credibility will face growing challenges with regulators, talent and institutional investors alike.

But the deeper shift is human. As control over assets and execution becomes more distributed across vendors, platforms and automated systems, the nature of the COO role changes profoundly. It moves away from optimisation and toward something harder to define and harder to delegate: judgement.

In practice, this means three things:

• Making deliberate trade-offs, not just driving efficiency, but consciously choosing what to protect when you can't have everything
• Setting direction across systems you don't fully control, aligning purpose and values across a complex, distributed ecosystem
• Ensuring people, partners and platforms all act in line with organisational intent, even when you're not in the room

In a more distributed world, judgement is not a soft skill. It is a core operational capability and it needs to be designed for, measured and developed, just as process efficiency was in the previous era.

Baringa's view 

Most operational governance frameworks were built for the Age of the Head, where you controlled the assets and measured the outputs. We work with COOs to redesign governance for the Age of the Heart: embedding accountability into distributed models, designing oversight mechanisms for AI and third-party systems, and building the leadership capability to exercise judgement at scale. This is not a technology problem. It is an organisational architecture problem and it requires different thinking.

Theme 2: Protecting the heart in permanent uncertainty

One theme surfaced repeatedly across the evening, expressed in different ways by different leaders:

Volatility isn't a temporary environment. It's the baseline.

The COOs around our table are no longer navigating between periods of stability. They are navigating constant noise, overlapping risks, and compressed decision cycles simultaneously. The risk agenda facing a major financial institution's COO in 2026 includes: 

• Technological sovereignty – who controls the platforms your business depends on? 
• Cyber as an operational risk is not just an IT concern, but a threat to business continuity.
• AI hallucination and decision quality, the reliability of automated outputs at scale.
• Vendor concentration – systemic fragility embedded in your supply chain.
• Regulatory fragmentation diverging requirements across jurisdictions.
• Persistent talent shortages – particularly in the intersections of technology, operations and risk.

These are not edge concerns. They sit at the centre of the COO agenda and they are all happening at the same time.

At the same time, distraction is at an all-time high. The pressure to react to AI hype, to market signals, to competitor announcements has never been more intense. Every week brings a new imperative: be fully AI-ready, reduce your cost base, respond to geopolitical shifts.

The COOs who will perform best by 2035 will be those who resist this noise most effectively. Our network was unambiguous on this point:

The COO must act as the anchor, holding the line on long-term priorities when short-term pressure would erode them.

This is particularly acute given the structural shift in ownership. With the proportion of PE-backed institutions likely to grow further by 2035, the pressure to prioritise short-term optimisation over long-term resilience will intensify. The COO who understands this tension, and can navigate it without losing organisational integrity, is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable.

Baringa's view

Resilience architecture is not a crisis response. It is a design discipline and most organisations have not invested in it systematically. We help COOs build what we call 'protected core' models: identifying which operational capabilities are truly non-negotiable, designing the governance structures that insulate them from short-term pressure, and ensuring that when disruption arrives, and it will, the organisation's essential function remains intact. The ability to maintain the heart of the organisation under pressure is what separates institutions that endure from those that don't.

Theme 3: Growing a healthy heart with a new workforce

The workforce of 2035 will look fundamentally different: smaller, more specialised and deeply intertwined with machines, vendors and AI systems. The shift was captured with striking economy by one leader around the table:

We've moved from running functions to stewarding systems.

Comparative advantage will no longer come from headcount or functional expertise alone. It will come from the quality of oversight, the ability to understand, challenge and govern 'black box' capabilities delivered by others. This raises a set of questions that have no established answers yet:

• When do you trust automation and when do you intervene?
• How do you design for graceful degradation when AI confidence drops?
• How do you embed clear override pathways and maintain meaningful human decision rights?
• How do you enable the speed of innovation without losing control of intellectual property?

One observation stopped the room: 

The risk isn't AI failing. It's AI failing silently.

At the same time, a new generation of professionals is entering the workforce – instinctively comfortable with AI, open with information, and accustomed to moving fast. This is, on balance, an asset. But it comes with real risk. Progress cannot come at any cost. COOs must make conscious, deliberate choices about what is shared, how intellectual property is protected, and where control must remain within the organisation, not with the platform.

There is, however, perspective to be found in history. Technology has always displaced work. Organisations have always adapted. The task now is not to resist that change, but to be intentional about where human judgement, accountability, trust and purpose remain irreplaceable.

These are the heart jobs. And they will define what it means to be a high-performing institution in 2035.

Baringa's view

We are already working with COOs to redesign workforce models for the AI era, not by cutting headcount, but by clarifying what human capability is actually for. The organisations getting this right are those that can answer three questions clearly: What decisions must remain human? Where does AI augment rather than replace? And what governance sits between the two? Getting these boundaries wrong is not just a risk management problem. It is an existential reputational risk for any institution that holds public trust.

The COO diagnostic: five questions for 2035 readiness

For all the change, some fundamentals are constant. Customers still expect resolution, personalisation, and transparency and they expect it faster than they had to ask. The bar is rising, not resetting.

The opportunity for COOs is clear but it is not about doing more with less. It is about governing better with less direct control. Protecting the operational heartbeat of the organisation. Ensuring it remains resilient, trusted, and relevant.

To stress-test your readiness, we ask every COO we work with five questions. Few can answer all five with confidence. The gaps are where the work begins.

1. Can you name the five operational capabilities that are truly non-negotiable and demonstrate that they are structurally protected from short-term commercial pressure?
2. Do you have a governance framework that is genuinely designed for a distributed operating model, where accountability is embedded, not assumed?
3. Can you articulate exactly where human judgement is required in your AI-assisted decision flows and verify that override mechanisms are actually used?
4. Is your resilience architecture a live capability, or a document that has never been stress-tested against the actual shape of your risk portfolio?
5. Do your COO-level talent and succession decisions reflect the skills required to steward systems or are they still selecting for the skills required to run functions?

Operating in the Age of the Heart

The COOs around our table were not debating a distant future. They were grappling with decisions they need to make now, decisions that will determine whether their organisations remain trusted, resilient and competitive as the decade advances.

The shift to the Age of the Heart is not a technology story, though technology is its catalyst. It is a story about what organisations are actually for, and what it means to lead them well under conditions of permanent uncertainty.

The COOs who will define the decade ahead are those who can govern with less direct control and do it with more rigour, more accountability, and more humanity than the models they inherited.

That is what it means to operate in the Age of the Heart. And the time to build for it is now.