PwC's 29th Annual Global CEO Survey found that only 30% of CEOs are confident about revenue growth over the next 12 months, down from 38% in 2025 and 56% in 2022 (PwC, 2026). Alongside that, EY's 2026 CEO Outlook found that priorities have moved from aggressive expansion toward tightening execution, sharpening capital allocation, and reinforcing resilience (EY, 2026).
Leaders aren't retreating; they're becoming more deliberate. The difference matters.
Key Takeaways
- CEO confidence in revenue growth is at a five-year low, and AI is not yet delivering the returns leaders expected.
- Investment in people is declining while expectations of them are rising.
- Most CEO time goes to short-term decisions, not long-term ones.
- The leadership qualities most needed in 2026 are the ones women consistently demonstrate, yet women remain underrepresented at the top.
- Geopolitics has moved from external risk to internal strategy.
AI is urgent, the returns aren't yet
40%
of leaders named AI adoption as their primary focus, ahead of revenue growth (31%) and talent (27%) (SHRM, 2025)
12%
of CEOs say AI has delivered both cost and revenue benefits, while 56% report no significant financial impact to date (PwC, 2026)
Urgency and results are running at different speeds.
Only one in 50 AI investments delivers transformational value, and just one in five delivers any measurable return (Aykens, 2026). The pressure to move fast on AI is real. So is the risk of moving without the right foundations in place.
The CEOs who are seeing returns share a common trait—they've embedded AI deeply across products, services, and decision-making rather than running isolated pilots. Gartner predicts that by 2027, enterprises without a people-centric AI strategy will lose their top AI talent to those who treat workforce enablement as central to the effort, not an afterthought (Gartner, 2026).
The workforce tension nobody wants to say out loud
Investment in people and culture has been quietly declining. Gartner's 2025 CEO research found that 18% of CEOs are actively cutting investment in people and culture development, with 31% reducing hiring, even as AI transformation demands more from the workforce, not less (Gartner, 2025). Meanwhile, 75% of CEOs in the SHRM survey expect further workforce reductions, even as organizations struggle to find AI talent (SHRM, 2025).
Gartner has named the result: a “give more, expect less” employment deal; more output expected from employees, with less flexibility, security, or support in return (Gartner, 2026). That's a cultural stress fracture. It tends to show up quietly at first, then all at once in the form of attrition, disengagement, and lost institutional knowledge.
give more, expect less
more output expected from employees, with less flexibility, security, or support in return
The short-term problem
PwC surfaced a finding that should give any senior leader pause: CEOs currently spend 47% of their time on issues with a horizon of less than one year, compared with just 16% on decisions looking more than five years ahead (PwC, 2026). The pressures driving that imbalance are real and understandable. But organizations that spend most of their leadership bandwidth on the immediate tend to underinvest in the capabilities that determine where they'll be in a decade.
EY's research reinforces this: geopolitics, once treated as background noise, now functions as a multiplier of every other risk a business faces (EY, 2026). Leaders who haven't built that fluency are increasingly making strategic decisions with an incomplete map.
The gender blind spot
There's a dimension to this leadership conversation that rarely gets addressed directly: what does this environment mean for women, and are women leaders showing the same patterns?
On the first question, the current trends hit women harder than men; as employees and as aspiring leaders. The “give more, expect less” employment deal disproportionately affects women, who already carry a greater share of caregiving responsibilities outside work. McKinsey's Women in the Workplace 2025 report found that women in leadership are experiencing high levels of burnout and job insecurity, and that commitment to gender diversity is declining: two in ten companies have already reduced or eliminated bias training (McKinsey & Lean In, 2025). The pipeline is thinning at the top: women hold just 11% of Fortune 500 CEO roles, and new female board appointments fell to their lowest recorded level in Q3 2025 (CNBC, 2026).
The timing is particularly striking: this is happening precisely when the environment needs the leadership attributes research consistently associates with women. McKinsey's research on women CEOs finds they tend to score higher on relational competencies, systems thinking, learning mindsets, and purpose-driven vision (McKinsey, 2025).
On the second question, whether women CEOs show the same short-term bias and reduced people investment, the honest answer is that we don't have gender-disaggregated data from the major CEO surveys. The sample of women CEOs is still too small for statistically meaningful comparisons. What research does consistently show is that companies led by women, or with gender-diverse leadership teams, outperform peers on profitability, employee outcomes, and long-term value creation. The problem isn't women leaders. The problem is that there aren't enough of them, and the current environment is making that worse, not better.
Four capabilities that matter right now
The data points to a handful of leadership capabilities that separate effective executives from struggling ones in this environment:
- Dual-horizon thinking: the discipline to manage near-term pressure without sacrificing long-term investment.
- AI judgment: not just adoption, but knowing where to deploy it, how to measure it, and when to pause.
- Workforce stewardship: managing transformation in a way that doesn't hollow out the culture or talent base that makes transformation sustainable.
- Geopolitical fluency: treating global risk as an embedded part of strategy, not a separate briefing.
None of these are new concepts. But the environment of 2026 is putting them under pressure in ways that expose whether leaders actually have them, or just think they do.
References
Aykens, P. (2026, February 2). 9 trends shaping work in 2026 and beyond. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/02/9-trends-shaping-work-in-2026-and-beyond
CNBC. (2026, February 25). 2026 CNBC Changemakers: Women leaders who defied the odds to reach the highest levels of success. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/25/changemakers-women-ceos-founders-success-leadership.html
EY. (2026). CEO priorities 2026: Growth, resilience, and AI ROI. EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook Survey. https://www.ey.com/en_gl/ceo/ceo-outlook-global-report
Gartner. (2025, August 6). How CEOs are navigating 2025's perfect storm of uncertainty. https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/2025-ceo-challenges
Gartner. (2026, January 12). Gartner identifies the top future of work trends for CHROs in 2026 [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-01-12-gartner-identifies-the-top-future-of-work-trends-for-chros-in-2026
Gartner. (2026, May 13). Gartner predicts by 2027, 50% of enterprises without a people-centric AI strategy will lose their top AI talent [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-13-gartner-predicts-by-2027-50-percent-of-enterprises-without-a-people-centric-ai-strategy-will-lose-their-top-ai-talent
Grant Thornton. (2026, March 3). Women in business 2026: The value of visibility. https://www.grantthornton.com/insights/articles/insights/2026/women-in-business
McKinsey & Company & Lean In. (2025). Women in the workplace 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/women-in-the-workplace
McKinsey & Company. (2025, May 21). Women CEOs: Leading the journey to excellence. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-inner-game-of-women-ceos
PwC. (2026, January 20). CEO confidence in revenue outlook hits five-year low—as AI becomes a defining divide between leaders and laggards: PwC 2026 Global CEO Survey [Press release]. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/pwc-2026-global-ceo-survey.html
Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). (2025, December 4). 2026 CEO priorities and perspectives report. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/research/ceo-priorities-perspectives-report
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