Top areas of focus for the C-suite
Note: All data cited is from our PwC Pulse Survey, published in November 2022, unless otherwise noted. Between October 12 and October 18, 2022, PwC surveyed 657 US executives, including 91 CFOs and finance leaders, 94 CHROs and human capital leaders, 73 CMOs and marketing leaders, 89 tax leaders, 72 risk management leaders, including CROs, CAEs and CISOs, 82 COOs and operations leaders, 87 CIOs, CTOs and technology leaders and 69 corporate board directors.
From employees and customers to investors and regulators, stakeholders want proof that your business’ words and actions align. Top areas of focus include data protection, cybersecurity, employee treatment, ethical business practices and admitting mistakes. How you perform and communicate across all these areas — before and after something goes awry — can influence how well you recover.
Trust is an integral part of your organization’s DNA, but there’s a significant gap in trust between businesses and their customers and employees. PwC’s Consumer Intelligence Series on Trust revealed that while 87% of executives think customers highly trust their companies, only about 30% of customers say they do. Diverse stakeholder perspectives can make it harder to cultivate that confidence. The responsibility for nurturing trust is the responsibility of all senior executives, though many look to two executives to lead: CEOs and CFOs. If these two take the initiative to align senior leadership around customers’ and employees' priorities, they can help focus the entire organization on the most important trust initiatives.
Build trust and transparency
Executives ranked digital transformation among their top priorities at the start of 2022, and recessionary risks haven’t derailed them. Technology is still seen as the most effective and reliable way to drive growth, improve efficiency and enhance ESG initiatives, and a vast majority of CIOs are investing to digitally transform operations.
Despite the initial outlay, digitizing and modernizing outdated processes and equipment is one way to trim expenses. These initiatives have enterprise-wide influence. CIOs are steering the direction, but there’s a shared responsibility across finance, operations, HR, tax and risk. Proactively engaging finance and risk leaders, for instance, can help your organization reap the biggest potential benefits. Tax leaders can also help identify how research and development tax credits against US federal and state taxes can offset digital investments.
Accelerate transformation
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues influence the entire enterprise, from net zero and data security to board oversight and stakeholder trust. Internal and external stakeholders are demanding faster and measurable progress, even in areas where you may not have all the answers. Executives can work in concert to prioritize initiatives that will position the organization to lead.
Among CMOs and marketing leaders, 89% are refining how their companies tell their ESG story. With the SEC's proposed new rules for climate change disclosures, technology leaders will play a key role in implementing cloud-based solutions to manage sustainability data and advance on net zero and other commitments. CFOs are focused on consistent reporting metrics, and COOs are considering whether to update their operating models to include a view into potential ESG impacts. Perhaps the biggest opportunities are within the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Tax leaders can drive value by providing guidance on how to tap into the nearly $370 billion in climate and clean energy provisions as the IRS issues guidance.
Create value through ESG
Since the pandemic, workforce expectations have shifted dramatically for employers and employees alike. Business leaders face dueling challenges: headcount reductions and hiring in specific areas to drive growth. Employees want support in battling burnout and are demanding more flexibility, a healthier workplace culture and different ways of working — including remote work.
How do you make sure you have the right people with the right skills in the right positions? Many executives are struggling to create an inclusive environment for all employees, whether they work onsite or remotely. Thirty percent strongly agree that management favors onsite over remote workers for advancement and compensation. By centering the talent strategy around flexibility and personalization and making inclusive leadership a core capability, executives can proactively defuse tension and foster trust with their teams.
Navigate workforce disruption
A multicrisis world requires senior executives to take a wider view of risks. That means transforming how crisis management, risk management and resilience work together. Risk leaders will want to remain in sync with senior executives to unlock opportunities as challenges unfold.
It’s difficult to anticipate every possible scenario, and resilience testing strategies, recovery testing plans and scenario libraries are critical. Next to macroeconomic concerns, business leaders (52%) are on alert for more frequent or broader cyber attacks, for example. Taking a crisis-agnostic view and testing against multiple events and scenarios enables stakeholders to come to a shared, working knowledge of the company’s recovery capabilities.
Strengthen business resilience
Cost cutting has been a recurring theme for executives, but hunkering down as the economy contracts and scaling back spending could turn recessionary fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Executives are cautiously optimistic that targeted growth is still possible. It's important to identify savings that can be reallocated and combined with smart investments that will enable the company to emerge from a potential recession in a healthier position.
While there’s greater pressure to demonstrate return on investment (ROI), the vast majority of executives are confident they can achieve their short-term growth goals. For example, 74% of CFOs are changing capital spending strategies in response to the current economic environment, our latest Pulse Survey found. Collaboration across the C-suite will be key in right-sizing those decisions to navigate the downturn.
Enable growth through collaboration
Today’s executives face an unprecedented level of economic and geopolitical volatility. Despite concerns about the impact of these macroeconomic conditions on their businesses, many remain confident they can achieve their growth goals. It will take an agile, collaborative approach to do so, based not on traditional three-year plans, but as financial circumstances evolve over the next 12 to 18 months.
No matter where you sit in the C-suite, the unpredictability elevates the complexity. But the challenges of the past few years — from a global pandemic to geopolitical unrest — have helped prepare you for the future. Click through the growth drivers on the left for insights on what lies ahead and how executives can work together to take their company forward.
What’s important to the C-suite
Build trust and transparency
Accelerate transformation
Create value through ESG
Navigate workforce disruption
Strengthen business resilience
Enable growth through collaboration
Transform through generative AI
Build trust and transparency
Accelerate transformation
Create value through ESG
Navigate workforce disruption
Strengthen business resilience
Enable growth through collaboration
Transform through generative AI
Note: All data cited is from our PwC Pulse Survey, published in November 2022, unless otherwise noted. Between October 12 and October 18, 2022, PwC surveyed 657 US executives, including 91 CFOs and finance leaders, 94 CHROs and human capital leaders, 73 CMOs and marketing leaders, 89 tax leaders, 72 risk management leaders, including CROs, CAEs and CISOs, 82 COOs and operations leaders, 87 CIOs, CTOs and technology leaders and 69 corporate board directors.
Top areas of focus for the C-suite
Previous
From employees and customers to investors and regulators, stakeholders want proof that your business’ words and actions align. Top areas of focus include data protection, cybersecurity, employee treatment, ethical business practices and admitting mistakes. How you perform and communicate across all these areas — before and after something goes awry — can influence how well you recover.
Trust is an integral part of your organization’s DNA, but there’s a significant gap in trust between businesses and their customers and employees. PwC’s Consumer Intelligence Series on Trust revealed that while 87% of executives think customers highly trust their companies, only about 30% of customers say they do. Diverse stakeholder perspectives can make it harder to cultivate that confidence. The responsibility for nurturing trust is the responsibility of all senior executives, though many look to two executives to lead: CEOs and CFOs. If these two take the initiative to align senior leadership around customers’ and employees' priorities, they can help focus the entire organization on the most important trust initiatives.
Build trust and transparency
Next
Previous
Executives ranked digital transformation among their top priorities at the start of 2022, and recessionary risks haven’t derailed them. Technology is still seen as the most effective and reliable way to drive growth, improve efficiency and enhance ESG initiatives, and a vast majority of CIOs are investing to digitally transform operations.
Despite the initial outlay, digitizing and modernizing outdated processes and equipment is one way to trim expenses. These initiatives have enterprise-wide influence. CIOs are steering the direction, but there’s a shared responsibility across finance, operations, HR, tax and risk. Proactively engaging finance and risk leaders, for instance, can help your organization reap the biggest potential benefits. Tax leaders can also help identify how research and development tax credits against US federal and state taxes can offset digital investments.
Accelerate transformation
Next
Previous
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues influence the entire enterprise, from net zero and data security to board oversight and stakeholder trust. Internal and external stakeholders are demanding faster and measurable progress, even in areas where you may not have all the answers. Executives can work in concert to prioritize initiatives that will position the organization to lead.
Among CMOs and marketing leaders, 89% are refining how their companies tell their ESG story. With the SEC's proposed new rules for climate change disclosures, technology leaders will play a key role in implementing cloud-based solutions to manage sustainability data and advance on net zero and other commitments. CFOs are focused on consistent reporting metrics, and COOs are considering whether to update their operating models to include a view into potential ESG impacts. Perhaps the biggest opportunities are within the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Tax leaders can drive value by providing guidance on how to tap into the nearly $370 billion in climate and clean energy provisions as the IRS issues guidance.
Create value through ESG
Next
Previous
Since the pandemic, workforce expectations have shifted dramatically for employers and employees alike. Business leaders face dueling challenges: headcount reductions and hiring in specific areas to drive growth. Employees want support in battling burnout and are demanding more flexibility, a healthier workplace culture and different ways of working — including remote work.
How do you make sure you have the right people with the right skills in the right positions? Many executives are struggling to create an inclusive environment for all employees, whether they work onsite or remotely. Thirty percent strongly agree that management favors onsite over remote workers for advancement and compensation. By centering the talent strategy around flexibility and personalization and making inclusive leadership a core capability, executives can proactively defuse tension and foster trust with their teams.
Navigate workforce disruption
Next
Previous
A multicrisis world requires senior executives to take a wider view of risks. That means transforming how crisis management, risk management and resilience work together. Risk leaders will want to remain in sync with senior executives to unlock opportunities as challenges unfold.
It’s difficult to anticipate every possible scenario, and resilience testing strategies, recovery testing plans and scenario libraries are critical. Next to macroeconomic concerns, business leaders (52%) are on alert for more frequent or broader cyber attacks, for example. Taking a crisis-agnostic view and testing against multiple events and scenarios enables stakeholders to come to a shared, working knowledge of the company’s recovery capabilities.
Strengthen business resilience
Next
Previous
Cost cutting has been a recurring theme for executives, but hunkering down as the economy contracts and scaling back spending could turn recessionary fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Executives are cautiously optimistic that targeted growth is still possible. It's important to identify savings that can be reallocated and combined with smart investments that will enable the company to emerge from a potential recession in a healthier position.
While there’s greater pressure to demonstrate return on investment (ROI), the vast majority of executives are confident they can achieve their short-term growth goals. For example, 74% of CFOs are changing capital spending strategies in response to the current economic environment, our latest Pulse Survey found. Collaboration across the C-suite will be key in right-sizing those decisions to navigate the downturn.
Enable growth through collaboration
Next
Today’s executives face an unprecedented level of economic and geopolitical volatility. Despite concerns about the impact of these macroeconomic conditions on their businesses, many remain confident they can achieve their growth goals. It will take an agile, collaborative approach to do so, based not on traditional three-year plans, but as financial circumstances evolve over the next 12 to 18 months.
No matter where you sit in the C-suite, the unpredictability elevates the complexity. But the challenges of the past few years — from a global pandemic to geopolitical unrest — have helped prepare you for the future. Click through the growth drivers on the left for insights on what lies ahead and how executives can work together to take their company forward.
What’s important to the C-suite
Build trust and transparency
Accelerate transformation
Create value through ESG
Navigate workforce disruption
Strengthen business resilience
Enable growth through collaboration
What's important to the C-suite
COO
CISO
CIO
CFO
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Transform through generative AI
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If you’re a senior executive, here are three facts about generative AI that you can count on.
1. It has caused AI to reach a tipping point. Generative AI (GenAI) is so powerful, so scalable and soon to be so pervasive, it’s poised to change how work gets done and how industries operate.
2. You’ll only find success with GenAI if it’s built on trusted foundations and generates trust.
3. It’s more important than ever to work across the C-suite to truly realize value from GenAI.
At PwC, we’re reinventing our business and workforce with the help of generative AI — and we’re instilling trust-by-design into our operations and those of our clients with our responsible AI framework. Based on our leadership in AI and our experience helping companies across all industries transform their businesses, here’s what every senior leader needs to consider. The goal is to use GenAI for greater productivity today and new business models tomorrow.
Transform through generative AI
CFO
CIO
CISO
CMO
COO
Transformation Leader
Previous
Your top generative AI job as a CIO is to take advantage of how this technology can scale far more quickly — and deliver faster ROI — than conventional AI. You can achieve this most effectively with an AI factory, an operating model tailored for generative AI. That often may require identifying and closing technology gaps, whether in data sets and integration, APIs, cloud engineering skills or responsible AI practices to manage cyber and other risks.
Generative AI is quickly changing how software is developed, which will have major implications for both the applications you buy and develop in-house. Automation offered by GenAI can also help your team do more with existing resources. It can, for example, create test scripts and synthetic data to expedite deployment of technology tools and apps. Consider, too, how to provide the business with GenAI-generated analytics, to help support faster, more data-driven decisions.
CIO
Learn more
As CFO, you have two big tasks with generative AI: to help maximize your organization’s return on investment (ROI) and to transform your own function. To support the organization, provide a plan that’s complete with mechanisms to track spend and ROI and that shows how and when generative AI investments can help deliver top-notch returns by transforming business processes and functions. ROI can often come quickly, thanks to generative AI’s remarkable ability to scale — a single “pattern” of deployment can often deliver value in multiple functions and lines of business.
Inside tax and finance, generative AI can automate many rote accounting, controls and compliance tasks and help your team make enhanced, faster decisions. It can, for instance, automate some financial reports and flag anomalies in others, summarize regulatory notices and competitor intelligence and provide financial insights at speed.
CFO
Learn more
For the CISO, GenAI can be both a new arm in your defensive arsenal — and a new source of threats. To support your work, it can generate and analyze potential attack patterns, helping you identify vulnerabilities and respond more quickly to threats through Q&A guidance. It can also automate routine security processes, leaving your team more time to concentrate on novel or critical threats.
But threat actors can use GenAI as well, generating more compelling and sophisticated phishing and deepfakes. Malicious actors could potentially breach and manipulate your GenAI systems. Protecting against these threats will likely require both upskilling in GenAI-specific cyber hygiene and cyber defenses customized for your GenAI models, data and content.
CISO
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Generative AI can help CMOs do more with existing resources. It can, for example, rapidly develop first drafts of art and copy, automatically document internal processes and automate content classification and distribution — providing your team with more time for strategic marketing. Generative AI can also make it easier to query analytic data sources, which means faster access to actionable insights.
As CMO, you’re a steward of your organization’s brand. Work with other senior leaders to make sure that your company’s generative AI use follows responsible AI principles — including effective compliance, privacy and actions to minimize misinformation and bias.
CMO
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GenAI can (and likely will) change everything about operations — improving customer and employee experiences, boosting productivity, managing costs and risks and transforming the nature of work. It can help generate or evaluate documents throughout your organization (such as contracts), draft or troubleshoot software code and product designs, and help deliver faster, easier access to data and analytics.
To operationalize GenAI at scale, the place to start is governance and security. You’ll need to evaluate internal capabilities, including your unstructured data landscape. Work closely with your CIO to assess solutions — and determine how to take advantage of the GenAI functionality that’s being built into existing business applications and how to create your own AI factory for broader transformation. Consider too trust-by-design, making your GenAI responsible AI from day one.
COO
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CEOs, chief strategy officers and chief transformation officers have two big questions to answer. The first is, How can GenAI transform how we work? GenAI can turbocharge productivity by automating some tasks and providing insights through an “AI copilot” to augment others. The second question is, How can GenAI transform our business model? With GenAI’s help you might, for example, be able to offer every customer the hyper-personalized products and services that today only your highest-value customers receive. To navigate this fast-paced change, the place to start is usually a focus on the outcomes you’re after.
Transformation Leader
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CHRO
As CHRO, you’ll need to lead a workforce transformation. Generative AI will automate many lower-value tasks and augment higher-value ones with faster access to data and expertise — meaning nearly everyone in your organization can benefit from the knowledge of your highest-performing employees. But this surge in productivity will require upskilling and new assignments of roles and responsibilities. You’ll likely also need to recruit or upskill for new and vital GenAI-specific roles, such as prompt engineer and model mechanic.
GenAI can transform your function, helping you provide a better employee experience and attract top talent. Look to GenAI to help create personalized content for interviews, offers, onboarding, performance reviews and career development plans. Its data collection and analysis capabilities may help you pinpoint success drivers for recruiting, retention and advancement.
CHRO
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Transform through generative AI
What's important to the C-suite
What's important to the C-suite
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What's important to the C-suite
What's important to the C-suite
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Transform through generative AI
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