With AI pilots everywhere, the harder question is how to turn pockets of impact into enterprise-wide value. This report identifies five realities shaping how AI delivers enterprise value from backloaded financial timelines and operational readiness barriers to the imperatives of strong data foundations, talent reinvention and future-ready operating models. Drawn from roughly 6,000 AI engagements and research, it charts a clear three-phase journey from Siloed AI to Structural AI and Systemic AI that create the base for an enterprise where intelligence is embedded at the core and value compounds continuously. The companies that sequence the foundations and move now will own the next decade.

As cyber attacks become more frequent and harder to stop, cyber resilience should be central to every company’s strategy. But leaders are split on what resilience actually is and who owns it. To survive constant disruption, organizations must align: shifting from protection-only thinking to prioritizing how they recover.

Data alone does not make an enterprise intelligent. Intelligence emerges when data, knowledge, and decisions work as one across the enterprise. With humans in the lead, intelligent systems help organizations continuously learn, improve decisions, and drive reinvention.

The Sovereign AI: Own Your AI Future report argues that artificial intelligence has become a strategic asset—and a strategic risk—because data, compute and models are increasingly concentrated in a few global players. Sovereign AI enables nations and enterprises to retain control over critical AI assets while still leveraging global innovation through hybrid ecosystems. Our research shows sovereignty is no longer just about compliance or risk mitigation; it is a driver of growth, resilience and competitiveness. Leading companies treat sovereign AI as a CEO-level priority, apply it selectively across high-value workloads, build ecosystems that blend local trust with global scale, and redesign architectures for multi-cloud, multi-model and agentic AI.

Accenture’s Top Banking Trends 2026 report positions banking at an inflection point, as long-standing constraints on growth, cost, technology and capacity begin to dissolve. Drawing on multiple executive and consumer surveys, economic modeling and global client work, the report identifies forces reshaping the industry across six areas: money, experience, work and talent, technology, risk and regulation, and competition. It highlights how digital currencies, tokenization and agentic payments could shift up to $13 trillion in transaction value by 2030, placing $13 billion in payment fees at risk. It shows how agentic AI can decouple growth from headcount, enabling “10× banks” with sharply higher productivity. The report also warns that rising tech debt, fragmented risk oversight and intensifying competition threaten profitability, with more than $200 trillion in global deposits and loans exposed to disruption. Together, the trends provide a practical roadmap for banks to modernize, manage risk holistically and compete in an AI-first future.

The consumer has spoken. Your move. The era of assumed value is over. Agents will judge brands on what they can verify: product quality, price transparency, delivery reliability and experience consistency. But when agents absorb the hassle, the space opens up to build outcomes that genuinely improve people's lives. The consumer who delegates to an AI agent has not lowered their standards. They have raised them—and found a more powerful way to act on them. The brands that earn it, deliberately, operationally and humanly, will be the ones consumers choose to keep.

In a world reeling from relentless change, people are being thrust into transformation journeys they never chose—emotionally, technologically, and culturally. Nearly 46% of global consumers say their desire for stability has grown stronger, while 54% use AI weekly to manage life’s complexity. Businesses must now evolve beyond customer centricity to life centricity.

This year’s five defining trends reflect that shift: a stability premium as people seek clarity in chaos; human journeys shaped by AI in daily and profound moments; finding Neo, where employees reimagine AI from the ground up; good vibrations as play and presence reclaim value; and coming of age, where older generations emerge as powerful cultural and economic forces.

Digital commerce has not lived up to its promise. Consumers feel overwhelmed by choices and often struggle to find the products and services that best meet their needs. Brands absorb the cost in lost sales, returns and restocking expenses, and endless spending to reacquire the same customers. The system is accepted, not loved.

AI agents are upending that model, and the impact will be felt in every industry and every stage of the purchase journey. Agents can now compare features, read the fine print, choose a winner, complete a purchase and manage delivery and returns—all autonomously, on a customer's behalf. The long-held understanding of who makes buying decisions, and when, and how, is changing fast.

Most manufacturers concentrate AI efforts on operations and maintenance, where data is richest and ROI is easiest to prove. That focus misses the bigger opportunity. Manufacturing value accrues across the full plant lifecycle, from design through construction, commissioning, ramp-up and decades of operation. An AI program targeting only the operating phase is likely to stall. Fragmented data, unclear ownership and workforces not yet designed for AI are not late-stage problems; they run through the entire lifecycle.

The last few years have revealed AI’s enormous potential and a simple truth: Real value shows up when people and technology advance together. As AI adoption accelerates, returns are uneven. Many organizations are investing heavily in AI, but have not updated their talent strategy accordingly.

Our latest research uncovers new opportunities to deliver innovation with talent. We surveyed 1,320 C-suite executives and 4,560 employees across 20 industries and 12 countries between August and September 2025 and found an elite group—just 18% of organizations—that are taking a different approach to talent and delivering real value. We call them Talent Reinventors.

AI has progressed from a novelty to a driver of performance faster than any technology before it. Use of AI has shifted from simple augmentation, where AI supports a task, to co-intelligence, where AI can interpret intent, reason through options, coordinate steps, and execute bounded work across functions at machine speed. While benchmarks indicate AI may surpass people in specific domains, only humans bring the full view, including context, values, legitimacy, and accountability. That is why humans are not merely “in the loop.” Humans must stay in the lead by setting direction, defining guardrails, challenging analysis, making trade-offs, and owning outcomes.

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This shift raises a new leadership mandate: redeploy expanded capacity into measurable value and sustained growth. As AI compresses analysis, decision cycles, and delivery, it expands both human and digital capacity, and that capacity can be redirected toward reinvention. That includes faster product iteration, new offerings, sharper customer response, and smarter capital allocation. Leaders need human-led operating systems where people orchestrate human and AI collaboration and AI executes within clear constraints, so speed and scale increase while responsibility remains firmly human. 

Despite progress, corporate decarbonization is lagging—only
16% of the world’s largest companies are on track to reach net
zero in operations by 2050, while 45% are still increasing
emissions. The challenge isn’t commitment—65% have set
operational net zero targets—but execution, particularly in
tackling Scope 3 emissions and scaling next-generation
solutions. Companies must move beyond incrementalism,
embedding decarbonization levers into core operations and
leveraging AI to accelerate impact. Early adopters of AI-driven
sustainability strategies, like predictive energy optimization
and real-time emissions monitoring, are already cutting costs
and emissions simultaneously. With regulators tightening
disclosure requirements and investors prioritizing sustainability,
the imperative is clear: Those who fail to act decisively risk
falling behind both competitively and environmentally

Sixty-six percent of companies plan to advance their supply
chain autonomy by 2035, aiming to cut order lead times by
27%, boost productivity by 25% and reduce emissions by 16%.
Yet only 25% of leaders are making autonomy a top investment
priority. To unlock this potential, companies must act
decisively by building a secure, integrated digital core,
investing in AI-enabling technologies and redesigning how
people and technology collaborate. Those who delay these
actions risk being outpaced by more agile competitors
leveraging AI to transform supply chain resilience, enhance
responsiveness and create enterprise-wide value.

This report revisits and reaffirms five imperatives identified in
2024 as key areas for organizations to prioritize as they seek to
harness gen AI and create material impact. Many organizations
still struggle to scale gen AI solutions. Only 36% of surveyed
executives report having scaled gen AI solutions, and just 13%
have created significant enterprise-level value. Key challenges
include data readiness, process redesign and a lack of C-level
sponsorship. The biggest barrier is talent: Organizations spend
3x more on technology than on people. The report suggests
focusing on leading with value, reinventing talent and ways of
working, building a secure digital core, ensuring responsible
AI and driving continuous reinvention. By following these
recommendations, organizations are 2.5x more likely to
achieve significant enterprise-level value.

Accenture’s Technology vision 2025 report focuses on the
growing impacts of gen AI on business and technology. The
main theme explores the unifying thread between to trends
like how AI is becoming generalized, the autonomy it brings
to the things it touches and how it will be used to develop
“cognitive digital brains” for every enterprise. It also raises
how trust—both emotional and cognitive—will be paramount
to any AI-driven enterprise reinvention. The trends explore
these concepts through the dimensions of software and the
technology ecosystem, brand and customer experience, the
future of robotics and the intersection of AI and the workforce.

Life trends 2025 explores five forces reshaping people’s
expectations—and the pressure they’re putting on brands to
respond with relevance and care: 1. Cost of hesitations
explores how scams, slop and AI confusion are making people
pause before they click. 2. The parent trap highlights a wave
of concern about kids and technology that is sparking action
from families and governments. 3. Impatience economy reveals
how people are bypassing traditional systems to hack their
way to health, wealth and happiness. 4. The dignity of work
looks at a workforce running on empty, demanding meaning
and respect. 5. Social rewilding shows people are reclaiming
joy offline. People are changing faster than businesses and
trust is wearing thin. The report offers bold, human-centered
solutions to help brands keep pace.

As gen AI scales, its environmental toll is growing fast. By
2030, AI data centers could consume 612 TWh of electricity
annually and emit 3.4% of global carbon emissions. To shift
focus from raw power to return on resource investments,
Accenture introduces the Sustainable AI Quotient (SAIQ), a
metric that tracks dollars, energy, water and emissions per
unit of AI output. To improve SAIQ, the report outlines four
strategic imperatives: deploy smarter silicon, decarbonize data
centers, use AI more thoughtfully and embed sustainability
into governance. Together, these offer a pragmatic path to
balancing AI innovation with planetary limits.

Resilience might be a top priority for many companies, but a
deeper analysis reveals significant cracks below the surface.
Accenture’s Resilience Index, which quantifies the resilience of
over 1,600 companies across six dimensions, highlights
vulnerabilities in people and operational resilience, despite
increased investment in technology. Adaptive resilience makes
a difference: 60% of top quartile performers on the Resilience
Index achieved profit gains after a severe shock, compared to
just 21% in the bottom quartile. To achieve adaptive resilience,
companies need to reframe volatility as a strategic advantage,
build flexible operating models that can stay ahead of crises
and invest in people, not just platforms. Accenture experts
have augmented this report with a series of blogs and articles
on different pillars of resilience, such as people, technology,
commercial and operational resilience.

A small minority of companies are achieving considerable
success at reinventing their enterprises with gen AI. They all
get one very important thing right: They combine lower-value
“table stakes” investments in gen AI with “strategic bets”—
investments that aim to maximize the potential of gen AI to
drive exceptional productivity, innovation and revenue growth.
Compared to competitors that have not done so, companies
that have scaled at least one strategic bet are nearly 3x more
likely to have their ROI from gen AI surpass their forecasts.
Drawing on a survey of 2,000 organizations, this report
describes the essential capabilities and practices that all
companies need to deploy and scale strategic bets.

AI is outpacing cybersecurity. Accenture finds that while 86% of
leaders plan to expand AI investments, only 20% feel confident
in securing their AI models. Meanwhile, 90% of organizations
lack the maturity to defend against AI-driven threats. To close
this gap, the report introduces the Reinvention-Ready Zone—
a benchmark for resilient security strategy and capability.
Companies that reach it are 69% less likely to suffer advanced
cyberattacks. Four actions can accelerate this shift: embed
AI-secure governance, build resilient AI systems, maintain
continuous threat readiness and reinvent cybersecurity using
gen AI to boost speed, scale and defensive strength.

AI is outpacing cybersecurity. Accenture finds that while 86% of
leaders plan to expand AI investments, only 20% feel confident
in securing their AI models. Meanwhile, 90% of organizations
lack the maturity to defend against AI-driven threats. To close
this gap, the report introduces the Reinvention-Ready Zone—
a benchmark for resilient security strategy and capability.
Companies that reach it are 69% less likely to suffer advanced
cyberattacks. Four actions can accelerate this shift: embed
AI-secure governance, build resilient AI systems, maintain
continuous threat readiness and reinvent cybersecurity using
gen AI to boost speed, scale and defensive strength.