"Building with Intelligence" is the second report in DXC's Q1 2026 Field Report series. It examines three structural forces reshaping how enterprises build products and what that means for design leadership in practice.

The cost logic that funded teams has shifted from labor to compute, and that shift is now a board-level conversation at our Council's organizations. The product development lifecycle is being rewritten from the bottom up through individual tool adoption, leaving a governance vacuum. And workforce restructuring is happening in real time, with organizations reducing headcount and rehiring for entirely different capability profiles simultaneously.

The report documents what our Council is navigating across different vectors of change, where early experiments are producing results, and what remains unresolved.

AI has reset the playing field. The rules that once shaped how enterprises build, staff, and measure value are being rewritten all at once. This report stays close to the ground, examining what is actually changing in the work itself: how products get built, who owns quality when anyone can ship, and how workforce decisions are being made in real time, without a settled model to follow.

What makes this moment different is the scope of what is up for grabs. This report is more operationally specific than the first. The tensions it documents are ones members are navigating now. At the operating level, the questions are still open: who sets the problem, who builds the solution, who judges what ships. The leaders who bring human-centered judgment to how organizations restructure are shaping the next operating model — not just responding to it.

The ground is open. What follows is what Council members are navigating: what has shifted, what is breaking, what is emerging, and what remains genuinely unresolved.