Ask CEOs how confident they are in their strategy, and most will say very. Ask whether their board is aligned, their leadership team committed, their ambition clear: same answer.

The vision is there. But it requires companies to simultaneously take their current core business to full potential and build new growth engines.

That’s difficult enough in placid times. In the face of today’s turbulence, fewer than half of the CEOs we surveyed believe that their organizations are agile enough to adapt and execute. Middle layers remain bureaucratic. Decision processes slow rather than accelerate. AI, often treated as the solution, is deployed narrowly. And more than 80% of CEOs aren’t satisfied with what it’s delivering.

This is what our 2026 CEO Agenda Survey reveals: not a crisis of leadership at the top but a gap between where strategy is set and how it is delivered.

The threats are clear; the organizations aren’t ready

For most of the past century, strategy was a deliberate craft. The business landscape shifted slowly enough that leaders had time to see it coming, deliberate, and respond. Today, every decision a company makes is effectively a prediction, a bet on the future. Making better predictions about business shifts has become the first step in successfully navigating them.

Conviction turns those predictions into competitive advantage. When leaders have it, they can move faster and commit more fully. When they don't, they must spread their bets, keep options open, and watch industry signals more carefully.

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Industrial CEOs: Is AI the Least of Their Worries?

AI barely cracks the list of external threats for CEOs in heavy industries. Instead, 86% are betting on it to reduce costs and lift productivity.

Our 2026 CEO Agenda Survey puts hard numbers on this new reality. CEOs cite macroeconomic uncertainty, regulatory and geopolitical volatility, and technology disruption as their top threats. These pressures are raising the cost of hesitation and putting a premium on adaptability and resilience.

Yet fewer than half of the CEOs we surveyed feel confident that their organizations can do any of this well. They are least confident in the very capabilities that turbulence demands: course correcting quickly, investing in resilience, and building the market-sensing mechanisms needed to make future bets with conviction.

The leadership challenge is not to forecast the future perfectly; it is to build an organization that can respond faster and with more conviction than competitors.

Questions for CEOs

• What are the few external shifts that could most materially change our competitive position?
• Do we have the routines to make fast, fact-based decisions when volatility rises?

One organization, two agendas: The best CEOs run both  

Every CEO is managing two distinct time frames simultaneously. The first is immediate: delivering against plan, hitting operational targets, meeting stakeholder commitments. The second is longer: building the capabilities, growth engines, and business models that will  determine competitive position three to five years out.

In a turbulent environment, these two agendas can feel like they compete for the same resources, leadership bandwidth, and organizational energy. But our survey shows that the strongest companies are not choosing between the core and the future when it comes to value creation; they are running both. And the gap between them and everyone else is widening.

The companies that are gaining share are more likely to be taking their core business to full potential while simultaneously building new growth engines. That combination is what separates them, and it requires a different kind of strategic discipline. Delivery decisions, such as operational efficiency, performance against plan, and stakeholder commitments, need to be made on a short time cycle, with clear accountability and visible progress. Development decisions, such as innovation, new capabilities, and growth options, require longer time horizons, more tolerance for uncertainty, and different success metrics. Only about half of the CEOs we surveyed, 52%, agree that they have the right routines for running and changing the business simultaneously.

Delivery and development are equal priorities for leadership teams

Share gainers both strengthen the core and build new engines

Running two agendas simultaneously requires deliberate choices about where to invest and where to cut. Cost transformation is most powerful when it funds the future. No CEO leads a company with the ambition of becoming permanently smaller. The goal is to shrink where it doesn't matter in order to grow where it does.

Questions for CEOs

• Where is the core still underearning its full potential?
• Which growth engines deserve disproportionate investment now?
• Are cost programs explicitly linked to reinvestment and growth?

Execution is the bottleneck

CEOs are clear about where the gap lies: translating strategic intent into measurable outcomes across complex, fast-moving markets. It shows up in four places.

1. Routines: Most organizations lack the frontline routines that make strategy real, the repeatable behaviors that tell the front line what the strategy actually means for them day to day.
2. Capabilities: Fewer than half of the CEOs we surveyed are confident that they have the right people in the right roles or a credible plan to close the gap. The shortfalls are specific: technical and data skills, AI expertise, and the programs to identify who has what and develop them fast enough to keep current.
3. Behaviors: Ownership, curiosity, and risk taking are in short supply. CEOs want less command and control and more of the entrepreneurial energy that characterized their companies at their best.
4. Governance: Decision making is too slow and too centralized. Only half of the CEOs we surveyed say that their governance processes are simple enough to support speed and agility. The deeper problem: Decision processes are unclear, accountability is diffuse, and the structures in place were built for a different time.

Execution is a system, not a slogan. It requires routines that make progress visible, decision processes redesigned for today's pace, and proof points that show the organization what the new behaviors actually look like in practice. For CEOs, this means getting out of headquarters, connecting directly with the front line, and celebrating the people getting it right.

Questions for CEOs

• Which routines most directly connect strategy to measurable progress?
• Where do decision rights slow down the business?
• How are we using the customer and frontline voice to sharpen execution?
• Which leadership behaviors are we unintentionally rewarding?

AI is everywhere, so why isn't it working?

AI is high on the agenda, but most companies are still seeing too little value from it. More than 80% of the CEOs we surveyed are using AI for cost reduction and productivity improvements. That is a logical starting point, but it is not the full prize. And most aren’t satisfied with the results so far.

The bigger opportunity is to use AI to accelerate both delivery and development: improving productivity, reshaping customer experiences, building new capabilities, speeding innovation, and, in some cases, reinventing the business model.

The barriers are specific: Companies don’t have enough people who know how to make AI work, their data and platforms aren’t ready, and most efforts remain trapped in local pilots. One in five of the CEOs we surveyed also ranks AI among their top external threats, making the gap between AI ambition and AI results all the more consequential.

AI won't scale through technology alone. The evidence suggests that 20% to 30% of the value comes from the tools themselves; the rest comes from reimagining how work actually gets done. That takes more than a portfolio of pilots; it requires the CEO to treat AI as a core business agenda item, set clear priorities, and build the cross-functional teams that can redesign work, not just deploy tools.

Questions for CEOs

• Where can AI create measurable value over the next 12 months?
• Which AI use cases can reshape growth, customer experience, or the operating model?
• What is preventing successful pilots from scaling?
• Do we have the talent, data, and governance to industrialize AI?

CEOs are trapped by their own calendars

CEOs want to spend more time outside the company with customers, peers, advisers, and thought leaders. Inside the company, they want more time with the board and leadership team on strategy and transformation.

But too often, their calendars tell a different story: Routine operations, recurring meetings, and low-value work crowd out the agenda only the CEO can own. Only 41% of those we surveyed say that their calendar protects time for deep work, and only 41% maintain an evergreen stop list to prune low-value initiatives. Without both, the CEO becomes the bottleneck.

CEOs want to reallocate time toward customers, learning, strategy, and transformation

A CEO’s time is one of their company’s scarcest resources. They must actively design their own agenda, not passively inherit it, which means ruthlessly protecting time for the strategic execution work that only they can do: staying close to customers, making the few critical choices, shaping the leadership team, and building the organizational resilience that won't happen if the CEO is buried in operations. It also means building a leadership team capable of carrying the rest so that the CEO isn't the last line of defense on decisions that should never reach their desk.

Questions for CEOs

• What work can only you do, and are you actually doing it?
• What is on your agenda today that should never have reached your desk?
• Where are you being pulled into decisions because the organization below you lacks confidence or clarity?

From strategy to legacy

The CEO agenda is becoming broader and more human, not narrower and more technical.

Our survey makes that pattern clear: CEOs are most confident in ambition and alignment, the parts of the job that point outward and forward. Confidence fades on execution, operating model, speed, and personal sustainability, the parts that determine whether the organization can actually deliver.

But strategy is about making things happen. It is about action. A problem with execution is ultimately a strategy failure.

CEOs still must set a bold ambition and lead with a full-potential mindset. But our survey suggests that they also need to build high-performing teams, simplify ways of working, model the behaviors that they want to scale, and, critically, sustain their own energy over time.

That last point is underrated. Only 54% of the CEOs we surveyed agree that they have routines in place to sustain their own performance over time. The best CEOs think carefully about their own pace, their circle of advisers, and the moments that will define their tenure. They know that how they lead, with purpose, energy, and frontline focus, matters as much as what they decide.

CEOs are bullish on growth and leadership alignment, but confidence fades on execution

The CEO role is not only about setting the agenda; it is about creating the conditions for the organization to deliver it and sustaining the personal energy to see it through. That means building the right team, designing the operating model around the unit of value creation, and reconnecting with the front line. The hardest part might be the most personal: managing your own energy as deliberately as you manage the business.

Questions for CEOs

• What is the unit of value creation in our business, and is the organization designed around it?
• Does the leadership team amplify or dilute the customer and frontline voice?
• What defining moments will shape your leadership legacy?
• Are you surrounded by energy givers or energy vampires?

The path forward

The 2026 CEO agenda is not short on ambition; it is short on capacity, speed, and focus. The companies pulling ahead are solving for all three simultaneously, and the CEOs leading them are making it happen.

They are simplifying the agenda to a few big moves that connect strategy, execution, and their own time. They are linking cost transformation explicitly to growth and reinvestment. They are treating execution as a repeatable system, not a management aspiration. They are moving AI from a portfolio of pilots to a scaled business agenda. And they are bringing the human side of the CEO role into the room, recognizing that personal sustainability and energy management are not soft issues; they are the foundation on which everything else rests.

What CEOs need is not a longer list but a sharper one.