What the research
actually says.

New research among sales leaders and representatives finds that a human-to-human call is still the most effective way to reach a new prospect, second only to a warm referral. Yet around four in ten sellers say they are afraid to pick up the phone, and nearly half give up too early. The researchers are blunt about the cause: the problem is not the channel, it is the skill and the confidence that have been allowed to erode.

AI changes the work around the call, not the call itself. It drafts, researches and prepares, but the buyer still wants a person on the other end to weigh what the machine produced and to help them dare to decide. The teams pulling ahead use AI for the preparation and put a confident human on the line for the conversation that actually moves the deal.

IBM's annual study among roughly two thousand CEOs, run with Oxford Economics, tracks a remarkable shift: the share of organisations reporting a Chief AI Officer roughly tripled within a year, from about a quarter to about three quarters. Every surveyed CEO who has one expects the role's influence to keep growing towards 2030.

Just as telling is what surrounds the role. A large majority of CEOs say AI success depends more on people adopting it than on the technology itself, most see talent leadership and technology leadership converging, and many expect the influence of the CHRO to rise alongside it. AI-first is an operating model, not a software layer.

PwC's research into sustained growth finds that only around one in nine companies manages to increase revenue year after year over a multi-year period. The ones that do are not simply better at finding the next revenue bump; they build what PwC calls a growth system, an integrated set of capabilities and assets that keeps producing.

The market notices the difference: these growth champions were valued at roughly 4.2 times revenue against 2.8 times for less systematic growers. The research also urges leaders to regularly review which assets no longer fit, and to part with what the future no longer needs.

EY-Parthenon's global CEO Outlook finds that over half of CEOs are in the middle of an enterprise-wide transformation and most of the rest plan to start one in 2026. Top priorities are productivity and operations, followed by customer engagement, while AI moves from broad experimentation to targeted scaling where it demonstrably pays.

Underneath sits a confidence gap: leaders remain confident in their own ability to deliver growth while their confidence in the external environment softens. The study frames 2026 as a year of sharper choices, balancing short-term cost pressure against long-term competitiveness.

Boston Consulting Group's guide for CEOs emerging from a turbulent year argues that growth in 2026 is not reignited by ambition alone. The leaders who pull ahead pair bold moves with disciplined execution, put AI to work at scale rather than in pilots, and build the kind of resilience that turns disruption into advantage.

The underlying message is a leadership one: in a volatile environment, the calm, structured operator beats the loudest visionary, because disciplined execution is what converts opportunity into results.

The seventh edition of this joint study, drawing on close to two thousand decision-makers, shows how much weight a leader's published thinking now carries. When a company's thought leadership is strong, a majority of decision-makers say brand recognition matters less, which levels the field for challengers.

The newest edition zooms in on hidden buyers, the stakeholders in finance, operations and legal who quietly shape a large share of stalled deals. They consume serious content just as hungrily as the visible decision-makers, and strong ideas are one of the few ways to reach them.