PwC Global CEO Survey: CEO confidence at a five-year low

This article is available for reading in Trade magazin 2026/02-03

PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey was conducted between 30 September and 10 November 2025, with 4,454 CEOs in 95 countries.

Spotlight is on the speed of implementation: CEOs say the pace of technological adaptation has become one of the key determinants of competitiveness – even as most AI investments have yet to show clear, tangible returns

AI: where is the return on investment?

According to the survey, CEOs are currently most concerned about whether they can transform their operations quickly enough to keep up with technological changes, including AI. While AI experiments are widespread, 56% of respondents reported neither revenue growth nor cost cutting in the past 12 months as a result of AI applications. The Hungarian summary adds an important layer: company executives who believe their organisation has a strong AI foundation are three times more likely to report meaningful financial returns. Businesses that widely use AI in their products, services and customer experiences achieve profit margins nearly 4 percentage points higher than those that haven’t yet done so.

Tariffs and cyber risks

This year’s survey narrative has seen a dramatic surge in the importance of external factors that not only put pressure on costs, but also reduce predictability. There is a mixed picture when it comes to tariffs: 20% of CEOs say their company is highly or very highly exposed to significant financial losses due to tariffs over the next 12 months, with exposure varying by region (e.g., 6% in the Middle East, 35% in Mexico and 22% in the US). Cyber risk has become even more prominent among the threats: according to the Hungarian summary, 31% of CEOs cite it as the main threat (up from 24% last year and 21% two years ago). It is no coincidence that 84% indicated that they would improve their company-level cybersecurity practices in response to geopolitical risks. 42% of executives said their companies had started competing in new sectors in the past five years – meaning that in many cases renewal has already translated into actual market steps.

Five‑year trough: in 2026, only 30 per cent of CEOs say they are “very” or “extremely” confident about revenue growth over the next 12 months; their three‑year outlook has also become more restrained

Consumer markets: double exposure

The CEO Survey also shows that for firms closely linked to consumer goods and retail, geopolitical uncertainty quickly translates into margin, procurement and supply security issues. On the consumer markets sector 23% of CEOs said their companies would be highly exposed to tariffs over the next 12 months. Alongside tariffs, the preparedness of supply chains is also uneven: 33% of consumer markets executives indicated that they have defined processes in place to manage climate-related risks and opportunities in their supply chains. Taken together, these two figures show why dual adaptation will become a key issue in 2026: it will be necessary to respond to trade policy shocks in the short term and make procurement and logistics systems more stable in the medium term. PwC claims that in today’s environment, one of the keys to leadership agility is how quickly a CEO can switch between issues, opportunities and time frames.