September 25, 2026
The CEO’s 2027 Planning Brief: 5 Business Trends Leadership Teams Should Prepare for Now
Most leadership teams are already thinking about 2027.
Revenue targets.
Hiring plans.
Budgets.
Expansion.
Margins.
New customers.
But some of the decisions that could have the biggest impact on next year's performance may not appear as separate lines in the strategic plan.
Artificial intelligence is changing how employees work.
Businesses are under pressure to improve productivity without simply adding headcount.
Fraud is becoming more convincing.
Companies are increasingly dependent on technology, cloud platforms and outside providers to operate.
And technology spending continues to spread across nearly every department.
For CEOs, CFOs and other executives, these aren't simply technology issues.
They're business planning issues.
As you build your 2027 plan, here are five conversations worth putting on the leadership agenda.
1. AI Needs to Move From Experimentation to Accountability
For many companies, the first phase of artificial intelligence adoption happened informally.
Employees discovered tools that could help them:
- draft emails
- summarize documents
- research prospects
- analyze information
- prepare presentations
- create marketing content
- automate repetitive tasks
The next phase requires more structure.
Leadership needs to move beyond asking:
"Should we use AI?"
The better questions for 2027 are:
Where should we use it?
What measurable business result should it produce?
What information should employees be allowed to share with AI platforms?
Who is responsible for reviewing the output?
Which AI tools should the company actually pay for?
Without direction, companies can end up with employees independently adopting different tools, departments buying overlapping platforms and sensitive business information being shared without clear guidelines.
But being overly restrictive can create another problem: missing legitimate opportunities to improve productivity.
The goal should be neither uncontrolled adoption nor an outright ban.
It should be intentional adoption.
What CEOs should do before 2027
Create a simple company-wide AI strategy covering three areas:
Approved tools: Which AI platforms can employees use for company work?
Information: What company, customer or financial information can and cannot be entered?
Business value: Which processes could AI realistically make faster, cheaper or better?
Then identify two or three measurable AI use cases rather than launching dozens of experiments.
For example:
Reduce the time required to prepare a weekly report.
Speed up the creation of sales proposals.
Automate the first stage of document review.
Summarize customer meetings and create follow-up tasks.
The executive conversation around AI should increasingly focus on return on investment, productivity and risk rather than novelty.
2. Productivity Growth May Matter More Than Headcount Growth
When demand increases, the traditional answer has often been:
Hire more people.
In 2027 planning, leadership teams should consider another question first:
Can we create more capacity with the people we already have?
Look at the typical workday inside almost any organization.
Employees search for information.
They copy information between applications.
They manually build recurring reports.
They chase approvals.
They enter the same data more than once.
They respond to repetitive requests.
They wait for slow processes or systems.
Individually, these activities may consume only a few minutes.
Across an entire organization, they can consume hundreds or thousands of employee hours.
Consider a company with 100 employees.
If each person loses just 15 minutes per workday to avoidable friction, that's 25 hours of lost productivity every day.
Across approximately 250 working days, that's roughly 6,250 hours per year.
The question isn't whether employees are working hard.
It's whether the company's processes allow their time to be used effectively.
What CEOs should do before 2027
Ask every department leader one question:
"What does your team repeatedly spend time doing that you believe shouldn't require this much human effort?"
Look for:
- repetitive data entry
- manual reporting
- duplicate processes
- approval bottlenecks
- unnecessary meetings
- disconnected applications
- recurring administrative work
- information employees struggle to find
Then rank those problems by employee hours consumed.
This changes the automation conversation.
Instead of asking:
"Where can we use AI?"
You start asking:
"Where are we wasting the most human time?"
Technology, automation and AI can then be applied to a clearly defined business problem.
3. Fraud Is Becoming a Leadership and Financial-Control Issue
When executives hear "cybersecurity," they often think about ransomware, hackers and stolen information.
But one of the most important risks to discuss with Finance may look much more ordinary.
An email.
A payment request.
A vendor changing banking information.
A message that appears to come from an executive.
A request to urgently transfer funds.
The danger is that fraudulent communications don't always look suspicious.
Artificial intelligence can help criminals produce more convincing messages, imitate normal business language and create communications that appear increasingly legitimate.
That means the traditional advice to "look for bad spelling and strange emails" is no longer enough.
Businesses need processes designed around the possibility that an employee will eventually receive an extremely convincing fraudulent request.
What CEOs and CFOs should do before 2027
Review how your company handles:
- changes to vendor banking information
- large wire transfers
- unusual payment requests
- executive requests involving money
- new vendor setup
- password and account recovery requests
Then ask:
Could one convincing email cause money to leave the company?
Consider requiring independent verification of banking changes.
Use known contact information rather than phone numbers supplied in the request.
Require secondary approval for significant transfers.
Establish clear procedures for unusual executive payment requests.
And make sure employees know that urgency is never a reason to bypass financial controls.
Fraud prevention isn't solely a cybersecurity responsibility.
It's an internal-control responsibility.
That makes it a CEO and CFO conversation.
4. Business Resilience Needs a Dollar Amount
Most companies know they should have backups.
That's no longer the most useful executive question.
A better question is:
What happens to the business while we're recovering?
Imagine your most important systems become unavailable Monday morning.
Can employees work?
Can sales process orders?
Can customer service access customer information?
Can Finance send invoices?
Can operations continue?
Can payroll be processed?
Can customers still do business with you?
Now attach a financial number to that disruption.
Calculate the cost of downtime
Leadership should estimate:
Lost revenue
How much revenue could be delayed or permanently lost?
Lost productivity
How many employees would be unable to work normally, and what does that labor cost?
Recovery expenses
Would you need outside specialists, emergency equipment, overtime or temporary systems?
Customer impact
Could customers cancel orders, move to competitors or request compensation?
Reputational impact
Would the disruption affect customer confidence or future sales?
The exact number doesn't need to be perfect.
The objective is to understand whether an hour, a day or a week of downtime represents an inconvenience—or a serious financial event.
What CEOs should do before 2027
Identify the five systems your company cannot operate without.
For each one, determine:
How long can we operate without it?
How quickly can we realistically restore it?
Those numbers may not be the same.
Having backups does not automatically mean the business can recover quickly.
The executive objective should be business recovery, not simply data recovery.
5. Technology Spending Should Be Tied to the Business Plan
Technology spending has become decentralized.
IT may manage core infrastructure.
But Sales purchases applications.
Marketing subscribes to platforms.
Finance has specialized systems.
HR has its own software.
Operations adds tools.
Individual employees may even purchase subscriptions on company credit cards.
Over time, technology expenses can become difficult to see as a whole.
That creates two risks.
The first is obvious:
The company may be paying for things it doesn't need.
The second is more important:
The company may be underinvesting in technology it will need to achieve its growth plan.
That's why technology budgeting shouldn't begin with last year's technology budget.
It should begin with the company's 2027 business plan.
What CEOs and CFOs should do before 2027
Take your major strategic objectives and ask what each one requires.
If the goal is to grow revenue 25%, can your current systems support the additional volume?
If you're adding 50 employees, can they be onboarded efficiently?
If you're opening another location, can it operate using the same systems and processes?
If you're acquiring another company, how will the two organizations integrate?
If you're increasing automation, is your current information organized well enough to support it?
If you're trying to improve margins, where is technology currently creating unnecessary costs?
Every major technology investment should connect to a business objective.
And every significant technology expense should be able to answer a simple question:
What business outcome are we paying for?
5 Questions to Put on Your 2027 Leadership Agenda
You don't need a technical background to lead these conversations.
Start with five questions.
1. Where should AI create measurable value for us in 2027?
Move the conversation from experimentation to business outcomes.
2. Where are we paying employees to perform work that could be simplified or automated?
Look for wasted time before adding headcount.
3. Could a convincing fraudulent request bypass our financial controls?
Assume the fraudulent message will look legitimate.
4. What would one day without our critical systems cost the business?
Put a financial number on operational resilience.
5. Does our technology budget support our actual 2027 business plan?
Connect spending to growth, efficiency and risk.
If your leadership team can confidently answer all five, you're in a stronger position heading into 2027.
If you can't, you've identified where the next conversation needs to happen.
Don't Build a Technology Strategy. Build a Business Strategy.
There's a common mistake in annual planning.
The business creates its strategy.
Then someone asks IT what technology needs to be purchased.
That sequence is backwards.
Technology now influences nearly every major business objective:
Growth.
Productivity.
Customer experience.
Hiring.
Automation.
Financial controls.
Business continuity.
Expansion.
The technology conversation should happen inside the business-planning conversation, not after it.
The question isn't:
"What technology should we buy in 2027?"
It's:
"What are we trying to accomplish in 2027, and what needs to be true for technology to help us get there?"
That distinction matters.
Because the best technology strategy isn't necessarily the one with the most sophisticated tools.
It's the one that helps the company execute its business strategy more effectively.
Your 2027 Executive Planning Checklist
Before finalizing your 2027 plan, make sure leadership can answer:
AI
- Which AI tools are employees allowed to use?
- What information should never be entered into them?
- Where do we expect measurable productivity gains?
Productivity
- Which processes consume unnecessary employee time?
- What repetitive work could be eliminated or automated?
- Where are disconnected systems creating additional work?
Fraud
- How do we verify banking changes?
- Who can authorize significant payments?
- Could an urgent executive email bypass normal controls?
Business resilience
- Which systems are essential to operations?
- How long could we operate without them?
- How long would recovery actually take?
Technology spending
- What are we paying for today?
- What aren't we using?
- Where are we duplicating capabilities?
- What investments will our growth strategy require?
You don't need to solve every issue before January.
But leadership should know which ones matter.
2027 Planning Should Start With Business Outcomes
The companies that get the most value from technology aren't necessarily the companies that spend the most.
They're the companies that know what they're trying to accomplish.
For 2027, that may mean increasing employee capacity without significantly increasing headcount.
It may mean using AI responsibly.
It may mean reducing unnecessary expenses.
It may mean protecting the company from increasingly sophisticated fraud.
Or it may mean ensuring the business can continue operating when something goes wrong.
The priorities will differ from company to company.
But the principle remains the same:
Technology decisions should support business outcomes.
Before finalizing your 2027 budget and strategic plan, make sure these conversations have a seat at the leadership table.
Is Your Business Ready for 2027?
Our Executive Technology Review helps leadership teams evaluate technology from a business perspective.
We focus on five areas:
AI. Productivity. Financial Risk. Resilience. Growth.
We'll help you identify where technology may be creating unnecessary costs, where opportunities for improvement exist and whether your current environment is prepared to support your 2027 business objectives.
No unnecessary technical deep dive.
Just a strategic conversation about where your business is going—and whether your technology is ready to help you get there.
