The AI advantage starts with alignment

In PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey, we asked more than 4,000 chief executive officers to pick the questions that concern them most. There was a clear winner: are we transforming our business fast enough to keep up with technology, including AI? In second place: is my company’s innovation capability adequate for our uncertain future? AI-powered transformation and innovation are opportunities to reignite growth and secure competitive advantage at a time when CEOs’ confidence in their company’s near-term prospects is waning.

But companies can only unlock the transformative potential of AI when they use it to tackle hard problems in the front office and workflows that cut across multiple functions and business units. As our Global CEO Survey results confirmed, companies deploying AI extensively across many different areas of the business are furthest ahead in getting concrete financial returns from their investment in the technology. This is a much more complex endeavour than implementing isolated AI pilots and requires strong alignment across the top team.

PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025 (which surveyed everyone from senior management to the front line) showed that executives were more curious and excited about AI than other employees and were more likely to be using it daily. They were also more aligned with the organisation’s overall strategic direction than the teams they lead. Even so, it’s striking that only about four in ten executives strongly agreed that they understood and believed in their organisation’s long-term goals and objectives. Strategic alignment in the senior ranks can’t be taken for granted.

Your next move: Build trust among senior leaders. Top team alignment starts with interpersonal trust among senior leaders. Yet in our workforce research, about a third of executives lacked confidence that they could share opinions and ideas, that it was safe to try new approaches, or that their team treated failures as opportunities to learn and improve. This points to a lack of psychological safety—a key driver of trust—at senior levels in many companies. CEOs and board members should explore honestly and openly whether top team dynamics could be improved and whether senior colleagues are truly aligned with the company’s AI vision, AI-related targets for their business or function, and tactical plans for technology-driven transformation.

Investors, like CEOs, see AI as a golden opportunity to reinvent a company’s business and operating models. Expectations are high. In PwC’s Global Investor Survey 2025, more than nine in ten respondents (92%) said the companies they invest in or cover should increase investment in technology transformation. More than three-quarters (78%) said they would at least moderately increase investment in companies pursuing enterprise-wide AI transformation. 

Yet there are signs of a disconnect between CEOs and investors over the timing of financial returns from AI. Two-thirds of investors (66%) said the companies they invest in or cover had seen revenue gains tied to AI adoption during the previous year. In contrast, only 30% of business leaders who participated in our Global CEO Survey reported revenue gains from AI during this period, a figure that rose to 39% among CEOs of publicly listed companies.

While these surveys were in the field at slightly different times—and with some differences in how questions were asked—the data highlights the potential for misalignment between business leaders and providers of capital. Investors themselves are aware of the issue. A large majority are dissatisfied with company disclosures on AI strategies and policies, governance, performance, and impact on headcount.  

Your next move: Strengthen your investor narrative. While financial statements remain the anchor of investor decision-making, alignment, when it comes to AI, depends on credible forward-looking narratives. CEOs and chief financial officers need to be fluent in AI and should have high-quality data at their disposal, including assurance of non-financial metrics where feasible. Publishing key performance indicators that tie AI implementation to productivity, margins, and revenue allows investors to understand the trajectory. Disclosing AI governance, model validation, as well as privacy and security controls ensures that value protection is part of the overall narrative. Since investors don’t like surprises, CEOs who are open and transparent about AI challenges as well as opportunities will deliver a smoother path towards value. 

Disclosure also helps bridge trust gaps around AI safety, data privacy, and transparency—areas where 66% of respondents to our Global CEO Survey said their company had experienced trust concerns to at least a moderate extent in the previous year. These trust dynamics have striking financial implications: companies experiencing the fewest trust concerns delivered total shareholder returns over a 12-month period that were, on average, nine percentage points higher than those dealing with the most trust concerns.

The AI-led transformation that CEOs want, and investors expect, won’t happen unless workers feel prepared, motivated, and ready to embrace it. The good news is that employee optimism about AI outweighs anxiety. The 50,000 workers who participated in PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025 were twice as likely to be curious or excited about AI’s impact on their work as they were to be worried or confused. The question facing leaders is how to harness positive emotions even as they reshape their workforce to support tomorrow’s business and operating models. 

Our survey showed that employee motivation is strongest when people see a future for themselves in the organisation and have access to learning; believe in management and its priorities; experience meaning and psychological safety at work; and feel financially rewarded. While these aren’t new priorities, leaders need to carefully consider each driver of motivation in the context of AI.

For example, AI’s advance makes the need for upskilling even more urgent for employees and companies alike. Yet employers’ current efforts are falling short. Barely half (51%) of non-managers felt they had the resources they need for learning and development. Equally, only 51% of survey respondents moderately or strongly agreed that they trust their organisation’s top management, falling to 42% among those working for companies with more than 10,000 employees. When employees doubt their leaders, energy and focus drain away.

Your next move: Reinforce clear messages with actions. Management transparency can go a long way towards reducing fear and building trust. We recommend laying out the company’s AI story in the context of long-term corporate goals and how they’ll create a better future for the company and its employees. At the same time, leaders should be clear and transparent about why AI is being used, how work is going to be redefined, and the scale of the technological forces at play. Openness won’t create security, but it can pave the way for shared understanding and solutions.

Employers should pay special attention to entry-level workers, nearly a third of whom said they were worried to a large or very large extent about AI’s impact on their future. This underscores the need for visible, equitable upskilling pathways, supported by clear messages from leaders about which skills will matter most in the future. PwC research on AI integration and upskilling also shows how important it is to provide resources for experimentation and learning by employees.