Why GCC CEOs Must Now Balance Growth, AI and Resilience All at Once

The Gulf CEO Role Has Become More Compressed, and More Complex

A new global survey of 415 chief executives, representing roughly ten per cent of world market capitalisation, has put hard numbers on a shift Gulf business leaders have been living through for several years: growth, resilience, AI deployment, workforce transformation and capital allocation can no longer be tackled one at a time. According to Pedro Oliveira, managing partner for India, the Middle East and Africa at Oliver Wyman, that shift marks a new leadership mandate, one where competitive advantage depends less on setting ambitious strategy and more on executing several of these priorities simultaneously, often with incomplete information and under closer scrutiny from boards and shareholders.

The research, The CEO Agenda 2026, is a joint project of the Oliver Wyman Forum and the New York Stock Exchange. It found that almost two thirds of chief executives now see market volatility as an opportunity to outmanoeuvre competitors rather than simply a risk to be managed, a mindset Oliveira says the Gulf adopted earlier and more intensely than most other regions.

Why the Region Feels This Shift More Than Most

Oliveira points to the UAE's positioning as a global hub economy, Saudi Arabia's scale of domestic economic transformation, and Qatar's pivot from World Cup driven infrastructure spending toward energy, financial services and the knowledge economy as evidence that GCC growth models were already built around speed and early commitment. What has changed, he argues, is the delivery challenge: CEOs must now make several high stakes decisions in parallel, a pattern consistent with how Gulf enterprises are racing to scale AI adoption while simultaneously managing cost, resilience and talent questions that used to be addressed in sequence.

Growth Now Has to Pay for Itself

The survey found that two thirds of CEOs rank a growth lever as their primary objective, while 58 per cent cite cost management among their top three priorities, a combination Oliveira describes as growth funding itself rather than companies turning defensive. For Gulf businesses, the practical implication is that capital must be deployed with more precision even as growth ambitions stay high, directing efficiency savings into the technology and transformation programmes that improve long term competitiveness rather than treating cost control as an end in itself.

Mergers and acquisitions reflect the same logic at a larger scale. Ninety four per cent of CEOs surveyed plan deals over the next one to two years, with Oliveira noting that Gulf businesses in financial services, healthcare, industrials and energy are increasingly using acquisitions and partnerships to access specialist capabilities faster than they could build them internally, echoing the same buy rather than build calculus behind recent enterprise AI partnerships across the region.

AI Ambition Is Outrunning AI Execution

The report's most pointed finding for Gulf leadership concerns AI itself. About two thirds of CEOs globally are still primarily planning or piloting AI deployment, and 53 per cent say it remains too early to assess return on investment. Oliveira is careful to frame this as an execution problem rather than a hype problem: moving from experimentation to commercial value requires changes to workflows, operating models, data and governance, not just more pilots. Crucially, AI deployment leaders are around three times more likely than laggards to report returns meeting or exceeding expectations, meaning the gap between AI ambition and AI value is widening rather than closing, a dynamic that mirrors broader findings that AI adoption is intensifying rather than simplifying work for many organisations still in the early stages of deployment.

For GCC boardrooms, Oliveira's advice is disciplined prioritisation over broad experimentation: identifying specifically where AI should drive growth, where it should lift efficiency, and where the risk remains too high, then redesigning work around those choices rather than running isolated pilots across every function.

The Workforce Question Boards Cannot Defer

The survey also found that 43 per cent of CEOs plan to reduce junior roles while 45 per cent expect to keep overall headcount broadly flat, a structural redesign of how work gets done rather than a simple cost cutting exercise. Oliveira flags a specific caution for high growth Gulf markets: cutting junior roles for short term efficiency risks weakening the pipeline of future managers and leaders precisely as regional economies pursue ambitious, long term transformation agendas. Boards weighing workforce restructuring alongside AI rollouts, he suggests, need to treat leadership pipeline continuity as a first order strategic question, not an afterthought to be resolved once the technology decisions are made.