For the past two and a half decades, the mandate for global business leaders has been relatively simple: expand the existing business, allocate capital efficiently, and implement technology to drive productivity. But Mohamed Kande, global president of PwC, in conversation with Fortune in Davos, Switzerland, stage of the World Economic Forum, stated that this era is over.
According to Kande, the CEO role has changed more in the last year than at any other time he has seen over the last quarter century.
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“This is one of the most challenging times for leaders,” Kande told Fortune’s Diane Brady, describing a new “trimodal” mandate that requires executives to simultaneously drive the current business, transform it in real time, and build entirely new business models for the future. “I haven’t seen this in 25 years,” he said.
Despite this pressure, Kande’s message to the global business community is anchored in historic optimism. “Don’t be afraid of the future. It’s unsettling. That’s true. Every day something changes, but don’t be afraid,” he said, noting that all the uncertainty that stresses executives today has happened before, from tariffs, about 100 years ago, to the industrial revolution, even further back.
“In the end, something good will happen.” Kande acknowledged that he is optimistic by nature, but insisted that top leaders can adjust to this business environment.
The AI Execution Gap
Of course, one of the main drivers of this unsettling change is the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, as revealed in PwC’s 29th global CEO survey, Leading Through Uncertainty in the Age of AI, released at the start of the annual meeting in Davos.
Based on responses from 4,454 CEOs from 95 countries and territories, the survey exposes a strong gap between ambition and reality. Kande said the business community has come a long way from 2024 to 2025, moving from asking whether it could or should adopt AI to a point where “no one is asking that question anymore. Everyone is moving toward it.”
PwC research shows, however, that only 10% to 12% of companies report seeing revenue or cost benefits, while a staggering 56% say they are not getting anything positive out of AI. This echoes the MIT study that rattled markets in August, finding that 95% of generative AI pilots were failing in the corporate sector.
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Kande attributed this tension not to the technology itself, but to a lack of rigor in the fundamentals. “Somehow, AI is moving so fast… that people have forgotten that to adopt technology, you have to go back to basics,” he explained, citing the need for clean data, solid business processes and governance.
PwC has noted that companies that are reaping the benefits of AI are “putting the foundations in place.” It’s about execution, not technology, he argued, and that depends on good management and leadership.
The paradox of trust and US dominance
The uncertain environment has also created a paradox in business sentiment, Kande told Fortune. While CEOs view the global economy positively, only 30% are confident they can grow their own businesses.
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Kande questioned whether this hesitancy stems from geopolitics, tariffs, technology or a lack of agility in leadership. The last 15 years, he noted, have been one of solid growth and stable business models, which makes the current moment a real test for top management.
“This is one of the most challenging times for leaders,” he said, because it requires the ability to change quickly and adapt quickly without getting bogged down in day-to-day tactical combat.
In PwC’s 29th survey, just three in ten CEOs were confident of revenue growth over the next 12 months, down from 38% in 2025 and 56% in 2022, marking the lowest level in five years of CEO confidence in their own revenue outlook.
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This comes even as many leaders continue to pursue long-term opportunities to reinvent their businesses through AI, innovation and cross-industry expansion.
The transformation of the CEO role is sweeping across the workforce, requiring a reimagining of career trajectories. Kande warned that the traditional “learning model” — in which early-career employees learn by performing basic tasks — is being disrupted by AI.
This classic career ladder, which started at the bottom, taught a lot of knowledge through practice, but will need to be redesigned going forward to teach “systems thinking” rather than task execution as AI increasingly takes over the latter.
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Finally, Kande encourages executives to look at the last 50 to 100 years, not just the last five, to understand the current moment. Citing the infrastructure booms of the railroad era and the dawn of the internet, he said he believes the current wave of investment will give rise to the next era of innovation.
The way the CEO survey characterizes the arrival of a “decade of innovation and industrial reconfiguration” supports this long-term view, highlighting that companies that generate more revenue from new sectors tend to have higher profit margins and greater CEO confidence in future growth.
“I’m an optimist,” he said. Instead of being afraid of all the changes happening now, he asked leaders to remember that people fear what they don’t understand, and that the best remedy for that is to seek understanding.
“That’s why I spend so much time learning now and traveling a lot, just to understand what’s going on and think about what can be done differently. That’s why I’m not afraid of AI. I’ve seen changes. You have to embrace them,” Kande said.
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