Technology is reshaping how UK businesses drive performance, resilience and growth.
Our C-suite Barometer 2026 research shows that 51% of UK C-suite leaders identify transforming company IT and technology as a top strategic priority, while 85% have a dedicated technology transformation strategy.
At the centre of this shift is artificial intelligence, now the top external trend impacting UK businesses (48%). As AI evolves towards more advanced capabilities, including agentic systems that can plan, act and coordinate tasks across multiple systems, organisations have significant opportunities to improve productivity and innovation, alongside growing challenges around governance, oversight and accountability.
Organisations are prioritising technology investment, particularly in AI, with 60% identifying it as a key investment focus within their transformation strategies. 58% of UK executives also expect the highest ROI to come from AI.
Ambition remains strong but turning that ambition into consistent, real world outcomes will depend on how effectively organisations can execute, adapt and operate in a more dynamic and interconnected environment.
It’s no longer a case of standalone upgrades or system replacements. Increasingly, digital capabilities are converging into complex, interdependent systems – ones that behave in unexpected ways, and that cut across traditional organisational boundaries.
This is why, despite strong intentions and greater budgets, many efforts involving digital transformation technologies still fall short in practice. The challenge isn’t just setting direction – its ensuring execution delivers under real-world complexity.
Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is accelerating rapidly, driving investment, transforming business operations and facing increasing regulatory scrutiny across industries and global markets.
A C-suite guide to capturing value without losing control.
Across the UK and globally, organisations delivering meaningful AI impact are not just experimenting, they are operating differently.
Crucially, governance is not treated as a compliance layer but operationalised through clear ownership, accountability, and control of AI outputs. In our experience, long-term success is consistently underpinned by three integrated, well governed capabilities: people, process and technology working together to enable scale, manage risk and sustain value.
To help businesses close the gap between strategy and delivery, we have curated a set of insights exploring several areas central to effective transformation.
The recent reports about an OpenAI autonomous agent escaping a test environment and orchestrating a cyber-attack on a start-up made for striking headlines. “AI goes rogue” is the sort of phrase that travels quickly – as one commentator breathlessly suggested, it sounds like the stuff of Hollywood movies.
The hardest question your board will ask about AI in 2026 is “What decisions and actions are we allowing agentic AI to take on our behalf and how do we know it’s under control?” That is a very different question to those we’ve been hearing from boards recently on AI and requires a different kind of governance.
Agentic AI has moved quickly from emerging concept to business priority, and the question for senior leaders is no longer just about return on investment, but how to capture its value without losing control and confidence.
Agentic AI offers organisations significant opportunities to improve speed, productivity and decision-making but it also introduces a greater governance challenge.
The fiscal environment of 2026 has brought AI hype to its peak, bringing with it far higher expectations for value-driven delivery. What was once difficult to quantify is now starting to take shape. As organisations have prioritised use cases and learned from early integration efforts, the first credible wave of ROI reports has now emerged, making it impossible for leaders to justify ongoing investment...
We often hear that artificial intelligence is going to rewrite the rules of business. The jury may be out in some quarters as to how or when that future becomes reality. In the meantime, it’s clear that it’s already rewritten investment priorities.
Technology, media and telecommunications companies are prepared for change and committed to artificial intelligence (AI) investment. They are also among the first to confront the strategic question of how to strike the right balance between humans and AI in the workplace.
C-suite executives in the UK could be forgiven for going into 2026 in a downbeat mood. It is, after all, a turbulent world out there. We barely need to highlight the uncertainty caused by geopolitical see-sawing, spiralling costs from taxation, employment and supply chains, and the growing threats from cyber criminals – recreational, professional and state-sponsored.
Our AI solutions: Prepare with purpose. Govern with confidence.
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Speak with our experts about igital transformation and AI
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