Getting it right on Transformation: Ireland CEO Outlook 2026

For Irish CEOs, transformation is no longer a programme with a fixed beginning and end. It is the continuous work of keeping their business relevant as technology, customer expectations and competitive boundaries change. Increasingly, an organisation’s ability to adapt is becoming a key determinant of its long-term success.

That makes transformation a leadership issue before it is a technology issue. CEOs must remain connected to the market, understand how their audiences are changing and distinguish durable shifts from short-lived noise. It is also crucial that they ensure the processes built to manage a large organisation efficiently do not become barriers to speed, experimentation or ambition.

Irish CEOs are investing with intent. AI remains a top investment priority for 83 percent of leaders in the Republic of Ireland and 73 percent in Northern Ireland. Yet 38 percent in the Republic and 35 percent in Northern Ireland identify AI integration as a leading threat to growth.

The tension is clear: leaders can see the opportunity, but many are still building the organisational capacity required to capture it.

Transformation depends on more than the scale of investment. It requires leaders to make sharper choices about where change will create value, redesign how work gets done and create the conditions for people to adopt new ways of working.

Above all, it requires organisations to convert ambition into measurable outcomes.

1. Staying connected to your market

Transformation should begin with an accurate view of the market. CEOs need to understand not only where demand is today, but how customer needs, routes to market and expectations are changing. That calls for direct engagement with customers and frontline teams, supported by timely data, and a willingness to test established assumptions.

In a fast-moving environment, the volume of information available to leaders can make judgement harder rather than easier. New technologies, competitor announcements and changing consumer behaviours can all appear urgent. The challenge for leaders is to filter out the noise and focus on the changes that will have a lasting impact on their business.

Aligning AI investment with business needs

This is particularly important as organisations consider AI. The rapid pace of technological advancement is expected to affect the prosperity of almost three-quarters of CEOs across Ireland, 74 percent, over the next three years. But a clear view of the technology is not the same as a clear view of the market need. Transformation creates value when it begins with a business or customer problem, rather than with a solution looking for somewhere to land.

For CEOs, this means asking whether insight is reaching the leadership team quickly enough. Are changes in customer behaviour visible across the organisation? Are emerging needs reflected in product, service and investment decisions? And are leaders close enough to the market to challenge internal assumptions before performance data makes the case unavoidable?

Staying agile through growth

The qualities that build a successful business are not always enough to sustain its next phase of growth. As organisations scale, leaders need to preserve entrepreneurial instinct, closeness to customers and speed, while developing the capabilities, structures and ways of working needed for what comes next.

As Niall Savage, Head of Private Enterprise at KPMG in Ireland, points out, maintaining the ambition and curiosity that drove success in the first place remains critical to identifying new opportunities for growth.

“Many of Ireland’s most successful businesses were built by leaders who saw opportunities where others saw constraints. That mindset remains essential. The businesses most likely to thrive will be those that continue to challenge themselves, pursue opportunities, and stay focused on the value they create for customers.”

M&A opens new routes to growth

For many CEOs, pursuing growth means looking beyond organic expansion alone. Deal activity is also firmly on the agenda. Almost all CEOs in the Republic of Ireland (91 percent) are planning acquisitions in the next three years, with 88 percent reporting the same in Northern Ireland.

These figures point to sustained optimism despite continued global uncertainty and are broadly consistent with KPMG’s M&A Outlook report published earlier this year.

According to David O’Kelly, Partner and Head of M&A at KPMG in Ireland: “The strong appetite for acquisitions among Irish CEOs reflects a clear determination to pursue growth. As 2026 draws to a close, leaders are looking to M&A not simply to increase scale, but to access new capabilities, technology, markets, and talent. With healthy activity across sectors including healthcare, industrial markets, energy and infrastructure, dealmaking is set to remain an important part of the CEO growth agenda into 2027.”

2. Redesigning your organisation for change

Large organisations rely on process. Clear governance and defined ways of working are essential to manage risk, quality and efficiency at scale. Yet those same structures can slow decisions, dilute accountability and prevent new ideas from gaining traction.

A strategy may be bold at board level but quickly lose momentum as it moves through approval layers, legacy systems and organisational silos. The result is that transformation often becomes a collection of initiatives rather than a genuine shift in performance.

As organisations grow, they can also become increasingly inward-looking. Governance, systems and internal processes are necessary, but can become ends in themselves. Leaders need to keep returning to fundamental questions: What business are we really in? What problem are we solving for customers? Are we organised around what matters to them?

Closing the gap between AI ambition and readiness

AI makes the execution challenge especially visible. Agentic AI is already having a significant or transformational impact for more than half of CEOs on the island (63 percent in the Republic of Ireland and 60 percent in Northern Ireland), while 80 percent and 83 percent respectively say their leadership has a clear view of how AI will disrupt existing business models and create new opportunities.

That confidence is important, but it is not the same as readiness. Six in ten CEOs in Northern Ireland (60 percent) and 58 percent of those in the Republic are confident in their data quality and readiness, while 58 percent and 63 percent respectively believe their organisations have the robust governance frameworks required to deploy AI responsibly.

This challenge is echoed in research published this year by Trinity College Dublin, in association with Microsoft Ireland, which found that employees are adopting AI faster than organisations are redesigning workflows, processes and decision-making structures to capture its full value.

Managing risk through transformation

Transformation and resilience must also remain connected. New technologies and more interconnected operating models can introduce new dependencies and vulnerabilities. Security, data protection and operational continuity therefore need to be designed into transformation from the outset, rather than added after deployment.

That requires business, technology, finance, risk and people leaders to work towards the same outcomes. Decisions about systems, controls, skills and investment need to be made together, with clear accountability for the overall result. Otherwise, individual functions can meet their own objectives without delivering the change the business needs.

According to Colm O’Neill, Head of Consulting and Global Head of Power and Utilities, KPMG in Ireland: “AI and other emerging technologies are creating significant opportunities for Irish business, but lasting value comes from redesigning processes, decisions and ways of working. Leaders do not need perfect certainty before they act. They do need the confidence to make decisions, clear ownership of outcomes, and an organisation that helps good ideas move quickly from concept to execution.”

3. Turning investment into measurable value

Ultimately, transformation is a test of leadership discipline. Most businesses know where they want to go; the harder task is deciding what to prioritise and where to focus resources. Not every initiative can be a priority. Spreading investment too widely can create the appearance of momentum without delivering meaningful progress.

For established businesses, transformation also carries an unavoidable economic challenge. Leaders may recognise the need for change while remaining responsible for protecting the revenues and margins generated by the existing business.

This is particularly challenging in a mature organisation or market, where established products and services continue to perform well. Changing them introduces cost, uncertainty and execution risk, while the returns from new investments may take time to emerge.

This can create a gap between what leaders say and what the organisation experiences. Transformation may be presented as a strategic priority, but its true importance is revealed through decisions about capital, talent and management attention.

If protecting established revenue streams consistently takes precedence over building new capabilities, and no meaningful activity is stopped or reshaped, transformation risks becoming something added around the edges of the business rather than a change to the business itself.

Measuring the value of transformation

Making progress therefore requires a small number of transformation priorities linked to clear ownership, measurable value and a realistic sequence of change. Investment should be connected to a defined commercial or operational outcome, whether that is faster cycle times, lower costs, improved quality, stronger customer retention or quicker product development.

This focus on outcomes is reflected in the priorities of CEOs in our research. Efficiency, productivity and better decision-making rank among the three most important benefits of AI for 55 percent of CEOs in the Republic of Ireland and 65 percent in Northern Ireland.

Realising those benefits depends on how effectively organisations translate investment into action. As Rory Timlin, Technology, Data & AI Leader at KPMG in Ireland, notes, “moving from experimentation to creating actual business value requires organisations to make deliberate choices about where technology can have the greatest impact and how it is embedded across the business. Success depends not only on investment, but on the strength of the technology, data, governance, skills and process ownership that support it.”

Balancing investment, cost, and return

Leaders need to understand the full cost of transformation, not just the initial investment. Old and new ways of working may need to run side by side, while ongoing costs can include technology infrastructure, data management, security, training and regulatory compliance.

Leaders also need to distinguish between results achieved through exceptional effort in a pilot and improvements the organisation can sustain in everyday operations. They should also be clear about where value will come from, whether through revenue growth, greater capacity or reduced risk, and when those benefits are likely to be realised.

This is particularly important because investment can move quickly, while changes to data, processes, accountability and skills often take longer.

Knowing when to scale, adapt or stop

Every experiment should begin with a defined problem, an accountable owner, a measure of value and a clear decision point: scale, adapt or stop.

Distinguishing signal from noise does not mean waiting for certainty. It means agreeing the indicators that matter and being prepared to redirect resources as evidence emerges.

The challenge is to keep works while creating the capacity to build what comes next. Leaders need to distinguish between the parts of the business that should be strengthened, those that need to evolve and those that may have to be disrupted before competitors or changing customer expectations make that decision for them. The risk of changing course can be immediate and visible; the risk of standing still may become apparent only over time.

For Irish CEOs, the opportunity is significant. Investment appetite remains strong, technology is opening new routes to productivity and growth, and leaders are actively exploring acquisitions and new capabilities.

The organisations that create the greatest value will be those that stay close to their markets, redesign rather than simply digitise, and ensure that the structures built for efficiency do not come at the expense of agility and ambition.

Ireland’s CEOs are ready.
Are you?

Chat with our leadership team about how the trends uncovered in CEO Outlook 2026 apply to your business and sector - connect with us to turn insight into action.

Ryan McCarthy

Managing Partner

KPMG in Ireland

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Irish CEOs are prioritising AI investment at a higher rate than their global peers

Read CEO Outlook 2026

Getting it right on Transformation

1. Staying connected to your market