Insights

AI agents and large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing marketing by transforming how consumers search for and discover products and increasingly by enabling autonomous decision-making on their behalf. Since 2022, AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT have enhanced marketplace information access, allowing consumers to compare brands, features, and prices more efficiently. Emerging AI personal agents now co-create buying decisions with users by handling complex customer journey steps. This shift necessitates firms to rethink consumer relationships as algorithms mediate interactions, requiring marketers to adapt strategies to leverage AI agents as key tools in customer engagement and decision support.
How AI Agents Are Transforming Modern Marketing Strategy
Cybersecurity faces increasing challenges as AI expands the attack surface and adds complexity, exposing the limitations of traditional security methods. Effective protection now requires rethinking security frameworks with AI integrated at their core rather than applied as an afterthought. Tarique Mustafa, CEO and CTO of GC Cybersecurity, highlights the need for autonomous, AI-driven solutions in data leak prevention and security compliance. His advanced AI-powered platforms exemplify how next-generation cybersecurity must evolve to address ultra-high-scale, complex threats in the AI era.
Education
Cyber-Insecurity in the AI Era
Healthy life expectancy in the UK has declined, placing it near the bottom among 21 countries. This decline is driven by factors such as obesity and poverty, but housing plays a central role. High housing costs limit living options, force trade-offs on essentials like heating and food, and push people into poor-quality, unsafe, or overcrowded homes, which directly harm physical and mental health. Cold, damp, and insecure housing increase risks of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and accelerate biological aging. The shrinking social housing stock and rise in private renting heighten insecurity, with eviction fears contributing to stress and ill health. Temporary accommodation, rising sharply, poses severe risks, especially for children, increasing vulnerability and mortality rates. Inequalities in housing quality and affordability significantly contribute to disparities in healthy life expectancy across England.
Health
How Britain’s housing crisis contributes to its declining healthy life expectancy
Global trade is shifting due to rising US-China tensions and a trend toward self-reliance. The US is reducing imports from China, particularly in complex goods like electronics and machinery, leading to two strategies: reshoring production domestically or friendshoring—sourcing from allied or closer countries. Reshoring risks harming developing countries through lost investment and jobs, while friendshoring creates opportunities, particularly for middle-income countries with manufacturing capabilities. Southeast Asia, Latin America, and South Asia are gaining from friendshoring, attracting investments and expanding exports. Friendshoring may stabilize consumer prices and support global value chains better than reshoring or tariffs.
Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Viet Nam | Financial services
Amid rising tensions, ‘friendshoring’ might keep global trade alive
Humanity has experienced unprecedented progress in health and prosperity over the past two centuries, but this advancement came at the significant expense of the natural world. Since 1950, rapid economic growth and consumption have caused major environmental damage, including dramatic declines in wildlife populations, deforestation, climate change, and ecosystem destabilization. Despite this, nature remains fundamental to human survival. The concept of "becoming nature positive" envisions reversing biodiversity loss by 2030 through a systemic shift toward sustainable, equitable interaction with the environment. This shift requires collective action, especially from businesses and investors, to transition toward a future where humans and nature coexist prosperously.
Health
“Becoming Nature Positive” is a documentary about the great choice of our time
AlphaFold2, an AI model unveiled by Google DeepMind in 2020, revolutionized biology by accurately predicting protein structures, a task previously slow and costly using lab experiments. It predicted over 200 million protein structures, vastly surpassing decades of experimental results. Despite initial concerns, AlphaFold2 did not replace structural biologists but enhanced their work, enabling faster and more precise discoveries through human–AI collaboration. Scientists combined AI predictions with experimental methods for improved accuracy, expanding research into previously unstudied proteins. This case illustrates how AI can transform specialized fields by augmenting rather than displacing expertise.
What Happens When AI Transforms a Specialized Field Overnight?
Population aging significantly slows the adoption of new technologies, as demonstrated by research on mobile-payment uptake in India. Younger individuals under 30 used mobile payment for over half their transactions, while those over 60 used it for about a quarter, with age explaining nearly 40% of adoption variation—much more than wealth or occupation. Businesses in areas with more young people adopted mobile-payment systems faster, driven by customer demand. This trend implies that aging societies may experience delayed technology diffusion, which affects economic productivity and policy effectiveness.
Financial services
Swipe or Tap? How Age Shapes the Adoption of New Technologies
Political polarization and national-populist election victories significantly impact marketing effectiveness, especially regarding domestic versus foreign brand perceptions. Research shows domestic brands gain from increased advertising and price promotion effectiveness after such elections, while foreign brands experience declines. Brands relying on country-of-origin prestige, like German cars or French wines, face challenges as nationalism shifts consumer preference to local products. To adapt, foreign brands should emphasize local contributions such as manufacturing and job creation to mitigate negative sentiment. Marketers must tailor strategies regionally, balancing patriotic messaging where national-populism is strong and traditional approaches elsewhere, choosing brand positioning with long-term political risks in mind.
How political polarization is rewriting the marketing plan
Sports transcends entertainment by fostering leadership, discipline, perseverance, and unity across diverse cultures. The growing professionalization of sports raises challenges in governance, sustainability, and value creation. IESE Business School's new Sports Management Center, supported by leaders like Kristen and Alan Pace, aims to advance leadership and professionalism in sports. Insights from sports figures highlight essential leadership qualities: intrinsic motivation amid setbacks, maintaining vision despite skepticism, and adapting identity post-career. These lessons emphasize balancing ambition with reality and managing short- and long-term goals, offering valuable strategies applicable beyond sports.
Leadership and sports, playing the long game
Yukio Kani, CEO of JERA Global, led a transformative energy shift in Japan following the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Facing the loss of nuclear power and financial crisis at TEPCO, Kani envisioned creating a new joint venture with Chubu Electric Power to expand gas-fired power and secure LNG supplies. Despite initial resistance, the plan gained government-backed leadership support, culminating in JERA's 2015 formation. Kani emphasizes that transformational change requires a clear, socially beneficial vision, trusted partnerships, and dedicated people. JERA also deliberately established a new organizational culture, rejecting traditional seniority and male-dominant practices to foster innovation and inclusivity within the global energy sector.
Financial services, Education
Purpose, partnerships and people: the keys to transformational change
Social media platforms, once seen as tools for democratic engagement and open dialogue, have become polarized spaces driven by algorithms that prioritize sensational and extreme content to maximize engagement. This shift has undermined quality discourse and turned many platforms into arenas of misinformation, hate speech, and political fragmentation. Unlike smaller platforms, major ones like Facebook, Twitter (X), and TikTok hold massive power, using business models that commoditize social interactions and promote outrage. Their actions, including political bias and poor content moderation, threaten democratic norms and the integrity of elections. Addressing these issues demands recognizing social media as political actors and implementing business and policy reforms to foster healthier democratic discourse.
Education, ICT
Social media are dividing us. Here’s how we can fight back
Agro-processing firms in The Gambia face significant structural challenges largely due to high dependence on imported machinery, inputs, and packaging materials. Competition from imported processed goods benefiting from economies of scale, advanced technology, and branding further constrains domestic firms' growth and competitiveness. Despite adopting strategies like vertical integration, decentralized sourcing, export orientation, and supply chain coordination, these measures are insufficient to overcome systemic barriers such as weak infrastructure, limited finance access, regulatory inefficiencies, and consumer preference for imports. Structural and policy-related issues beyond firms’ control substantially hinder the sector's potential for economic growth and diversification.
Africa
The Impact of Food Import Dependency on the Performance and Growth of Agro-Processing Firms in the Gambia
The circular economy emphasizes product longevity, repair, reuse, and systemic innovation over fast consumption. Patagonia exemplifies this with its strategy focused on durable products, repair services, and resale, creating sustained competitive advantage despite fewer new sales. The 9 R’s framework—Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Refurbish, Remanufacture, Repurpose, and Recycle—guides businesses to embed circularity beyond recycling, which is a last resort. Achieving circularity demands rethinking design, production, transportation, usage, and disposal, often requiring new business models like product-as-a-service. Companies must prioritize long-term sustainability and loyalty over short-term gains to align with emerging regulations such as the EU Circular Economy Act by 2026.
Spain
The circular economy: Are you ready?
Sustainability reporting faces polarization but can achieve trust and credibility through stakeholder cooperation. ESG disclosures differ from financial reporting by being forward-looking and involving complex scientific data and subjective judgments. Trust depends on confidence in the reporting company and its governance ecosystem, while credibility relates to the accuracy and reliability of the information. Key stakeholders influencing ESG reporting include regulators, boards, investors, auditors, and broader groups like employees and suppliers. Their impact varies by proximity to data, scope of influence, maturity of governance mechanisms, and motivation to monitor disclosures. Unlike financial reporting’s clear roles, ESG requires collaborative efforts across diverse actors to ensure reliable and credible sustainability reporting.
Financial services
Using trust and credibility to bridge sustainability reporting divisions
Effective leadership during labor disputes requires practical wisdom, prudent action, and a thorough diagnosis of underlying issues rather than quick fixes. At Ceramics of Andalucia, worker strikes stemmed not just from wages but from unrealistic production targets, stress, and declining product quality, highlighting the need to view problems systemically. Leaders must consider interconnected operational, financial, HR, and reputational factors, avoiding knee-jerk reactions. Prudence involves understanding root causes, engaging cross-functional perspectives, and balancing competing interests to resolve conflicts sustainably and maintain organizational trust and performance.
When a strike looms, these are the leadership qualities that matter most
The playbook developed by the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Azerbaijan and the World Economic Forum offers a practical blueprint for scaling AI-driven improvements in building energy efficiency. Based on a national pilot using the net-positive AI-energy framework, it adapts global solutions to Azerbaijan’s infrastructure, policy, and market conditions. The paper identifies barriers, enabling policies, and a roadmap for adoption, emphasizing coordinated efforts across government, industry, and technology sectors. AI optimization can cut HVAC energy use by up to 25% and reduce emissions by 20-40%, addressing the significant energy and emissions footprint of Azerbaijani buildings and supporting climate goals.
Piloting Buildings of the Future: Azerbaijan’s AI-Energy Playbook
Russia is a hybrid empire shaped by both European and Asian influences, emerging from the Eurasian steppe as a militarized, multiethnic society. It combines traditions from Rus, the Turko-Mongol world, and Western Europe, blending universal and national monarchy concepts. The modern concept of Eurasianism, revived by Putin, highlights Russia’s dual identity and geopolitical ambitions as a Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power, uniting diverse peoples and cultures. Unlike other steppe empires, Russia retained its native ruling dynasty post-Mongol era, developing as both the most European empire in Asia and the most Asian empire in Europe, reflecting its unresolved national identity between two continents.
The hybrid empire – why Russia is a product of both Asia and Europe
Businesses in Britain, France, and Germany are rapidly adopting AI but fail to effectively measure its impact on employees. A Catalyst and Coqual study reveals 95% of leaders do not track AI’s effects, focusing mainly on business metrics like innovation, risk management, and improved decision-making rather than employee outcomes such as engagement, retention, or career progression. This creates a critical blind spot as AI reshapes work. British firms lead in measurement maturity, yet even they struggle to capture AI’s influence on employees' daily experiences. Organizations need to integrate people-focused metrics alongside financial KPIs to fully understand AI’s value and consequences.
Education
European businesses cannot quantify the impact of AI on their staff because they are not tracking it
Smart motorways in the UK, designed to convert hard shoulders into live traffic lanes and managed through digital monitoring, have raised significant safety concerns due to incidents involving stranded vehicles in live lanes. Despite the government's 2023 halt on new smart motorway projects over safety and cost issues, existing systems remain operational with ongoing upgrades. Research shows public ambivalence: while many welcome traffic improvements, they express unease about data use, surveillance, and transparency. The rollout has involved substantial financial investment and challenges in maintaining public trust, highlighting the need for clearer governance, accountability, and communication to balance innovation with safety and social acceptance.
Financial services, Education, ICT
Smart motorways were halted over safety concerns – what’s the future for digital roads?
Geopolitical fragmentation, economic volatility, and accelerating AI adoption are transforming global labor markets and workforce strategies. While 50% of leaders foresee improved talent availability, 30% expect declines, with skills mismatches emerging as a key challenge. Insights from over 140 global people leaders identify three priorities: redesigning organizational structures and roles, expanding upskilling and reskilling, and scaling responsible AI and automation. The shift from AI experimentation to implementation, combined with geopolitical pressures, calls for agile talent models, internal mobility, and cross-sector collaboration to build resilient, future-ready workforces.
Africa | Health, Education
Chief People Officers’ Outlook – May 2026

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