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This brief presents Longview’s outlook for the global business leader agenda in 2026.  In addition to covering key geographies and AI, it outlines six topline trends:

1.  Business leaders will have to continue reading through noisy and misleading headlines. Expect more disconnects between conventional wisdoms, business and consumer surveys, and actual performance.
2.  Trump administration policy is both transformative and being written in pencil. Midterm electioneering will force policy shifts as the Trump administration reacts to declining poll numbers.
3.  Tariffs are a 2025 story. Expect more deals (with India, for example) and carve-outs (food and pharmaceuticals), given the White House’s newfound focus on affordability.
4.  For global enterprises, there is still no alternative to America. For better or worse, the US will continue to dominate the global business narrative and policy tempo, and operating in the US market will remain more advantageous than being outside it.
5.  AI is generating distraction risks. AI exuberance is masking economic fragilities in the US. AI developments have the potential to be the biggest risk to the economic outlook in 2026.
6.  Risk awareness is the new normal. Executives are increasingly treating policy, geopolitical, and economic uncertainty as permanent and baseline features of the operating environment

Fast-paced and consequential events will make a shorter time horizon and a wider range of scenarios more useful for business planning this year. Timing business and investment decisions right will be important given the potential for big market shifts.

To that point, this outlook focuses on the first half of the year, and it concentrates on geographies instead of global trends. The second half of 2025 (let alone 2026) will look much different and is impossible to predict at this time.