A decade ago, operational excellence meant value-stream maps, gemba walks, Kaizen events, and Green Belts tracking cycle time and defects. Today, the best process-improvement tools don’t live in binders; they live in your AI sidebar. As organizations navigate faster markets, greater complexity, and a talent-and-time squeeze, they’re adopting a hybrid model: proven methods paired with generative AI and real-time analytics. The result: shorter improvement cycles, deeper insight