The most innovative business services companies for 2026

Bet you’ll never guess the main theme running through all 10 of this year’s Most Innovative Companies honorees in the business services category. Yep: artificial intelligence.

AI is rewiring the world as we’ve known it—and these companies are helping businesses harness the power of AI to tame the kinds of chronic inefficiencies that inhibit growth. 

A year after launching its AI Factory, Dell introduced Project Lightning to help clients manage proliferating data. ABM Industries is bringing smart-home technology to massive commercial sites, and Smartling’s enhanced platform is enabling companies to improve their own language translation systems on whatever tech stack they’re currently operating. Ironclad’s Jurist is streamlining some of the most laborious and tedious aspects of legal work, and QuickFi reduces the onerous process of financing expensive equipment from weeks to minutes for smaller businesses. Energy management giant Schneider Electric has deployed AI to simplify the process of assessing carbon emissions in the supply chain. Zenoti, HubSpot, Pattern, and Epique Realty are each finding new ways to deploy agentic AI to improve business operations.   

It’s an AI world. These ten companies are demonstrating how to thrive in it.

1. Dell Technologies

For addressing storage bottlenecks from increasing AI demand

Dell launched its AI Factory two years ago, in May 2024, and its impact was practically instantaneous. Samsung, McClaren, and Hugging Face were a few early adopters of the platform created in collaboration with Nvidia to help businesses scale their own AI initiatives. In the year since, momentum has continued to accelerate: Through the first three quarters of 2025, Dell had seen an increase in sales of its AI servers of 56% over the previous full year.

Last May, Dell announced it was beginning to offer select customers, including Cambridge University, access to Project Lightning: a super-fast storage upgrade that lets thousands of AI computers (GPUs) grab huge amounts of data at the same time without slowing down. In February, the company said that Project Lightning is on track to expand to general customers sometime in the first half of 2026, and also reported more than 4,000 global AI Factory customers. In its February full-year financial report, Dell for the first time broke out its AI server revenue as a separate line item: $24.7 billion, a 166% increase over the previous year. Overall, the company reported what it described as the highest annual revenue in its four-decade history: $113.5 billion, a 19% increase over the previous year.

2. ABM Industries

For integrating smart tech into commercial spaces

Originally founded in 1909 as a San Francisco window-cleaning business, ABM Industries now offers broad facility services to thousands of companies worldwide—about 20,000 clients, the company says, including more than half of the Fortune 500. With more than 100,000 employees and 350-plus offices around the world, ABM serves 19 industries and manages approximately six billion square feet of space daily. ABM Connect, a high-tech smart home system for commercial buildings and campuses, had its first major deployment in June 2025 at Miami International Airport, providing real-time data to support optimize maintenance of restrooms and other public areas of the terminals. ABM says it has also reached new long-term agreements with other companies, including Orlando International Airport and the Chelsea Football Club. The company reported a record $2.3 billion in revenue in Q4 2025, and its annual revenue of $8.7 billion represented a 4.6% year-over-year gain.

3. Smartling

For transforming translation technology with AI

For better or worse, there are not many business sectors that have been immune from AI, but the new emerging technologies have driven a surge of activity among Translation Management Systems (TMS) providers. In August of last year, Smartling released a new system that lets AI apps plug directly into its translation platform. The system harnesses a standardized framework developed by Anthropic. This lets companies build their own translation workflows into the AI tools they’re already using, instead of having to bolt additional third-party apps onto their existing tech stack.

Smartling (which ranked #8 in the 2025 MIC Business Services category) says it surpassed 40% growth last year, with AI-powered translations accounting for 60% of its total service delivery. Smartling works with many companies, including InterContinental Hotels Group, Pinterest, Shopify, State Farm, and British Airways. Last year, Smartling’s new system enabled Coinbase to expand translations of its crypto content into 21 languages, while Lyft expanded into eight new languages without having to hire additional staff.    

4. Ironclad

For creating an AI legal assistant that works throughout the contract life cycle

Like everybody else these days, legal teams are under intense pressure to do more with less, while the volume of work continues to rise. AI tools are becoming increasingly essential in reviewing documents, helping to parse complex contracts and gnarly regulations. Jurist is Ironclad’s AI‑powered legal assistant designed for legal professionals to draft, edit, review, summarize, research, and collaborate on legal documents within a single, seamless interface. Launched publicly in late 2024, Jurist is powered by Ironclad’s visual programming environment, Rivet, and uses sophisticated multi‑agent AI together with leading large language models to automate and accelerate a wide range of legal workflows. The company says that since its launch, Jurist usage has increased more than 600% quarter-over-quarter, and that the large majority of Jurist users now occupy positions outside centralized legal teams in functions such as sales, procurement, and operations.

5. QuickFi

For giving small businesses a more efficient way to finance expensive equipment

More than 35 million businesses exist in the US, but only 2% of them them have more than 100 employees. Many of that remaining 98% rely on expensive equipment—from heavy construction machinery to fleet vehicles, sophisticated diagnostic tools to computers—to compete and survive in their sectors. The annual equipment finance and leasing market in North America exceeds $1.3 trillion, but financing that equipment has traditionally been a protracted headache, requiring days or weeks. That’s time that many modest-sized businesses cannot afford to waste.

QuickFi promises to reduce the equipment financing process for SMEs to a matter of minutes, providing 24/7 access to low-rate bank financing right at the point of sale. By making it easier for banks to participate in small business lending, QuickFi is basically harnessing agentic AI to serve as a financial matchmaker, and the company says it has facilitated more than half a billion loans since July 2018. Last year, the company launched the QuickFi Innovation Labs, releasing new tools that expedite many of the cumbersome chores related to equipment financing, such as insurance, customer support, and competitive analysis. QuickFi PRIME, also new last year, creates a line of credit for approved customers. The company has a 4.8 out of 5 rating on online review platform TrustPilot, based on nearly 300 responses and has earned many industry accolades, including three consecutive awards for innovation from the Business Intelligence Group and last year’s Fintech Breakthrough Award as the best overall lendtech company.

6. Schneider Electric

For helping suppliers reduce their carbon footprint

For the past half decade, the 190-year-old Paris-based energy management and automation conglomerate has been working to help the company’s top 1,000 suppliers reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. By Q3 2025, Schneider had exceeded its original 50% reduction target by achieving a 53% reduction. Last July, the company launched the Zeigo Hub as the first product in an AI-native ecosystem to employ agentic AI to automate supplier emissions data entry, manage decarbonization programs, support disclosures, and scale across more than 2,700 suppliers at no cost to participants.

While the initial phase of Schneider’s Zero Carbon Project focused on Scope 1 (direct) and 2 (purchased electricity, heat, or steam) emissions, the Zeigo Hub aims to help suppliers reduce Scope 3 impact. Those are emissions that result from upstream activities, like those related to purchased goods and services, and downstream activities, such as the carbon impact from the end-of-life treatment of sold products. In its most recent Q4 financial report, Schneider announced it had saved and avoided 862 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, exceeding its original goal of 800 million metric tons.  In 2025, for the third consecutive year, Schneider Electric ranked number 1 on Gartner’s Supply Chain Top 25, and the company’s full-year revenues surpassed 40 billion euros for the first time.

7. Zenoti

For powering the salon industry with state-of-the-art AI tools

The global beauty/wellness/fitness sector, a multi-trillion-dollar revenue generator, has traditionally been plagued by inefficiencies that can cripple a business. Missed appointments. Poor customer retention. Operational errors.  Poor inventory management. Cloud-based enterprise software provider Zenoti has been addressing those challenges since 2010 and for the past two years has been upgrading its platform with AI. In June 2024, it introduced its AI-powered assistant, Zeenie, to streamline management tasks, enhance user engagement, and provide real-time data access, contributing significantly to operational efficiency. In 2025, it more than doubled down by introducing what it calls “the industry’s first AI workforce,” including AI Receptionist, AI Concierge, AI Lead Manager, AI Marketer, and AI Scribe.  In December 2025, the company reported it had helped its 30,000 global clients generate more than $1 billion in incremental revenue. That same month, it earned its seventh consecutive Deloitte 500 Fast Technology Award.

8. HubSpot

For providing small businesses an affordable, easy-to-use, state-of-the-art CRM platform

In the two decades since its founding, HubSpot has established itself as a pioneer in digital marketing, sales support, and customer service. If it didn’t invent inbound marketing, HubSpot certainly refined it. The company has pioneered techniques and tools in email tracking, sales automation, and harnessing machine learning to help generate leads. Last year, HubSpot launched more then 200 product innovations at its Inbound 2025 conference, including a data hub that allows businesses to blend and analyze structured and unstructured data seamlessly and Smart Insights, which harnesses AI to highlight important data trends and actionable recommendations without needing manual analysis. The company also says that last year it became the first CRM to launch connectors for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. HubSpot generated $3.13 billion in total revenue in 2025, a 19% increase over the previous year, expanding its total customer count to 288,706, a 16% year-over-year increase.

9. Pattern

For offering brands a free tool that provides insights into AI-driven commerce

Media companies aren’t the only businesses scrambling to adapt to the search gap that’s resulted from consumer flight toward generative AI. Brands that used to appear near the top of Google search results are experiencing up to a 58% drop in click-through rates when AI overviews are present. In the 12 years since its founding, Utah-based e-commerce accelerator Pattern has helped brands grow and manage their online sales through search engine optimization and other techniques. Over the past two years, Pattern has been focused on cracking the code to help businesses thrive in the age of AI-powered search.

In early October 2025, Pattern launched its Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Scorecard, a free tool that provides brands insights into how AI platforms showcase their products. The tool assigns a score based on how often and how well a brand appears in AI responses to consumer questions and also identifies missing information on a brand’s website that may be preventing AI models from recommending their products. It provides specific recommendations, like FAQ updates, blog topics, and URL optimizations, to enhance AI discovery.

In March 2025, Pattern opened a new fulfillment facility in Las Vegas, which the company says is delivering a 75% faster turnaround from receiving to marketplace and a 99.9%-plus accuracy rate in prep, labeling, and tracking. Pattern completed an IPO in September 2025, and while the stock price has since declined 19% from its initial price, the company generated nearly $2.5 billion in 2025 revenue, a 39% increase over the previous year.

10. Epique Realty

For arming its agents with powerful AI tools

In terms of competitiveness, residential real estate agency work probably ranks somewhere between scoring the last 50-pound bag of rock salt at the Home Depot during a blizzard and a UFC cage fight. Agents compete with each other for listings and then compete to make sure their properties attract potential buyers. Sophisticated and glossy platforms, like Redfin and Zillow, have raised consumer expectations. To give scrappy independent agents a fighting chance, Epique Realty introduced Epique.ai: a free public toolset that offers instant AI-driven content creation, market insights, and workflow automation. The platform can generate property descriptions, social media posts, email campaigns, newsletters, and agent bios in seconds. While Epique isn’t the only realty harnessing AI to automate workflow for agents, its freemium model eliminates barriers of entry and reportedly helped increase the number of its agents by 342% in 2025. After joining Epique, agents enjoy exclusive perks, such as Broker Advice AI, state-specific Legal AI, and Transaction AI. The company says it now has more than 4,000 agents across all 50 states using the tool.