Pillay UK
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Pillay UK presents the IBM IBV 2026 CEO Study • 2,000 CEOs • 33 geographies • 21 industries

Rewiring the C-Suite

The fast track to 2030 — concise briefing deck

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What this study is

Study design and why it matters

Sample
2,000
CEOs and equivalent senior leaders surveyed
Coverage
33 / 21
Geographies / industries represented
Fieldwork
2026
Survey conducted February to April; interviews from Oct 2025 to Apr 2026
Typical scale
$5.8B
Median annual revenue or budget; mean was $12B

Core premise

  • AI is reshaping how decisions are made, how authority is distributed, and how fast enterprises can execute.
  • The report argues the winner’s advantage comes from operating AI-first, not from bolting AI onto existing structures.
  • Best-performing CEOs combine leadership redesign, workflow redesign, governance, and deliberate reinvestment.
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Executive summary

The five plays and the payoff

1

Rethink the C-suite

AI-first leadership redesign scaled 10 more AI initiatives enterprise-wide.

2

Create an AI-agent flywheel

Future-focused CEOs scaled 23 more AI initiatives.

3

Customize your AI mix

Tailored AI strategies point to 13% more 2030 revenue from new offerings.

4

Orchestrate human + AI

Cross-functional redesign more than doubles odds of delivering business objectives.

5

Expect unpredictable futures

AI-first CEOs are already using ecosystems to prepare for quantum disruption.

Cross-study headline
AI-first organizations reported a 17% revenue growth premium over the past three years.
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What changed on the CEO agenda

2026 top priorities

  1. Productivity or profitability.
  2. AI and technology modernization.
  3. Customer experience.
  4. Product and service innovation.
  5. Forecast accuracy.
  6. Speed of execution entered the list as a new 2026 priority.
AI is already altering the core
69%
CEOs say AI is already changing core aspects of the business.
Technology convergence
77%
CEOs say talent and technology leadership roles are converging.
Domain expertise shift
85%
Say all functional leaders must become technology experts in their domain.
Implication
Speed becomes a design variable
The report treats execution speed as a structural leadership issue, not a motivational one.
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Play 1 — rethink the C-suite

What the best CEOs are doing
  • Reassign decision rights so leaders closest to the issue can act without waiting for consensus.
  • Elevate a Chief AI Officer with authority over priorities, standards, and funding gates.
  • Push COOs and business leaders to own transformation, not just their function.
  • Tie at least 30% of C-suite compensation to shared enterprise outcomes.
AI scaling payoff
+10
More AI initiatives scaled enterprise-wide by CEOs remaking the C-suite.
CAIO adoption
76%
Organizations with a CAIO in 2026, up from 26% in 2025.
CAIO influence
100%
Of CEOs with a CAIO expect that role’s influence to rise by 2030.
Decision design
79%
CEOs are decentralizing decision-making.
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Play 2 — build an AI-agent flywheel

Flywheel logic

1. Capture productivity

Use AI to reduce friction in repeatable, high-volume decisions and free up capital and talent.

Flywheel logic

2. Reinvest deliberately

Commit 60% to 80% of productivity gains to experimentation, innovation, and scale-up.

Flywheel logic

3. Expand autonomy

Increase AI decision authority only where guardrails, auditability, and named accountability are in place.

Scaled initiatives
+23
Future-focused CEOs versus the least committed cohort.
Operational decisions by AI today
25%
Expected by 2030
48%
Comfort with AI input
64%
CEOs comfortable making major strategic decisions from AI-generated input.
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Decision autonomy is rising fast

CEO expectation for AI-made operational decisions
202625%
203048%
Demand forecasting autonomy65%
Inventory optimization autonomy61%

Interpretation

  • The report does not argue for removing humans from decisions; it argues for humans moving to exception handling, guardrail design, and audit.
  • Good first targets are repeatable, codifiable decisions such as pricing updates, inventory allocation, routing, and incident remediation.
  • Sensitive legal, regulatory, and disclosure decisions remain human-led no-go zones.
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Play 3 — customize the AI mix

Model strategy shift

Pre-trained foundation models, 202639%
Pre-trained foundation models, 203013%
Hybrid strategy by 203050%
AI sovereignty is essential83%
Innovation upside
+13%
More 2030 revenue expected from new products and services when proprietary data and IP are used systematically.
Productivity delta
+24%
Greater productivity gains expected from smaller tailored or mixed-model approaches versus mostly large pre-trained models.
Margin delta
+55%
Higher operating profit margin improvement expectation.
Cycle-time effect
2x
Reduction in process cycle times by 2030 versus organizations relying mainly on large pre-trained models.
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Play 4 — orchestrate human and artificial intelligence

Business-case delivery
2x+

CEOs redesigning cross-functional collaboration are more than twice as likely to realize planned business-case benefits.

Comprehensive redesign
4x

Organizations redesigning technology, finance, HR, operations, and cross-functional collaboration are 4x more likely to deliver on business objectives.

Workflow redesign momentum
87%

CEOs are actively embedding AI across workflows.

Workforce reality

  • 19% of the workforce was reskilled for a different role in the past year; 41% for the current role.
  • From 2026 to 2028, CEOs expect 29% to need reskilling for a different role and 53% for the current role.

The operational gap

  • Only 25% of the workforce uses AI regularly as part of the job.
  • Yet 86% of CEOs say employees have the skills to collaborate with AI.
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Employee adoption is more bottleneck than capability

Employees have AI collaboration skills86%
Workforce using AI regularly25%
Employees saying AI makes work less mundane61%
Comfortable being managed by an AI agent48%

Management implication

  • The report treats low AI usage as an operating model failure, not primarily a training problem.
  • Redesign workflows before redesigning jobs; otherwise reskilling spend is absorbed by old ways of working.
  • Measure AI availability, actual usage, and where work snaps back to manual defaults.
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Play 5 — expect unpredictable futures

Quantum readiness today

Have a quantum use-case team
46%
AI-first CEOs using quantum ecosystems
82%
All CEOs using quantum ecosystems
50%
Core message
Optionality beats certainty

Where CEOs expect quantum value

Advancing AI and machine learning48%
Accelerating complex simulations45%
Exploring new business models or services39%
Enhancing cybersecurity or encryption32%
Improving research and product development timelines30%
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Evidence from the case studies

Dahl / Saint-Gobain
  • Launched warehouse automation targeting 85% to 90% automation per order line.
  • Consolidated monitoring from 10 solutions to 4.
  • Response times fell from 5 seconds to under 2 milliseconds.
  • New incident remediation capabilities accelerated e-commerce launch by 4 months and delivered 100% ROI within weeks.
Unipol
  • NAMI analyzed more than 800 system events in two months and escalated only 538.
  • Since June 2025, NAMI has taken over more than 100 processes.
  • Event response time dropped from 20 minutes to 90 seconds.
  • Incident handling time fell by 90%, while accounting and claims processing time dropped from 21 to 18 hours.
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The no-vagueness management agenda

1

Redesign decision rights now

Name owners for the few enterprise decisions that slow everything down: AI deployment, pricing moves, capital shifts, and partner selection.

2

Set reinvestment rates explicitly

Before budget lock, pre-commit 60% to 80% of AI productivity gains to innovation and scaling.

3

Choose model portfolios deliberately

Separate commodity AI from competitive AI and assign business ownership to every differentiated investment.

4

Track AI as an operating metric

Measure availability, actual usage, exception rates, and where workflows revert to manual behavior.

5

Reskill for orchestration

Focus on systems thinking, exception handling, and challenging AI outputs rather than replacement narratives.

6

Build quantum optionality

Use a small cross-functional team and ecosystem partnerships to learn fast without locking into one future.

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One-line reading

AI-first leadership is an operating model

The study’s through-line is blunt: faster growth comes from rewiring authority, workflows, model strategy, and ecosystem choices together — not from isolated AI pilots.

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