2026 trends for business

Is 2026 going to be any more straightforward than 2025? Of course not, complexity is the new normal. So what can business leaders expect to see unfolding over the next year? We asked six LBS faculty to shine a flashlight into the murky months ahead, providing some much-needed illumination – and LBS Dean Sergei Guriev shares three focus areas for the year ahead. 

Digital will continue to evolve as AI matures

Anja Lambrecht, Professor of Marketing

As Generative AI matures, 2026 will mark an important stage in consumer adoption and use of large language models (LLMs), with implications for online behaviour and content ecosystems. LLMs will evolve from optional tools to built-in interfaces within browsers, search engines, and productivity software. Users’ readiness to adopt LLMs will change how they locate and consume information – but traditional search will not be obsolete.

For businesses and publishers, this transformation will start redefining digital monetisation. It will become increasingly important to build businesses around high-quality or tailored content that attracts users directly to the site. “AI-native advertising” is expected to become a distinct marketing channel, capitalising on the ability to more subtly integrate and personalise branded messages.

In education, Generative AI already provides credible alternatives for summarising, explaining, and tutoring. As AI assistants become more reliable and multimodal – integrating text, voice, and simulation – many learning platforms will pivot toward hybrid models that blend proprietary content with AI personalisation.

2026 is likely to see an increase in AI-generated social media content, personas, automated participation in online communities, which may shift the way users interact online. But AI’s capability to replace human connections – even online – is still limited. Authenticity, creativity, and social validation continue to differentiate human interaction.

Ongoing uncertainty will demand leaders skilled in conflict resolution

Randall S Peterson, Professor of Organisational Behaviour

Uncertain times produce turbulent politics as voters want stability and growth, and when these are not happening they become more open to new ways of thinking. Business needs to project confidence and stability, or face increasing volatility and polarisation between the current winners and losers in the economy.

The UK is dealing with the bite of Brexit as the economy goes sideways. Will this be a “lost decade” or a temporary adjustment to new trading relationships? Should leaders plan for a short or long-term situation? The bets they take could set their organisations up for success, or not.

The epic battle for the future of the US will likely result in the decline of soft power. As the focus becomes internal, business will need to deal with strong differences between co-workers that can make it hard for people to collaborate and work together, even in organisations that are determined to steer clear of politics. All businesses will be dealing with these arguments invading the workplace, and need policies, processes, and leaders who are able to deal with conflict.

In the MENA region, where many countries were relatively late to economic development, leaders are also dealing with the pace of change and new technologies. As well as the ubiquitous changes around AI, cybersecurity and climate, people are now living their daily lives and working differently, for example in working hours and remote vs in-person. The catch-up is moving change at a rate never experienced in the USA and UK. The challenge here is avoiding obsolescence. Big organisations can be slow to change, and that is not an option.

Human judgement will be crucial as we figure out what AI can and can’t do

Andrew Likierman, Professor of Management Practice in Accounting

The issue at the forefront of everyone’s mind is the impact of AI on their own field and organisation. There is a broad divide between optimists and pessimists – the former focussing on the possibilities for wealth creation, the latter gloomy about the prospects for employment. Both are highly speculative and in considering how much weight to give them, it is essential to consider who is making such predictions, the basis of the forecasts and the viewpoint from which they are made.

In my own work on human judgment, I have been considering the impact of AI and how far machines can exercise it. Having consulted many authorities and end-users, I can summarise where we are now in three propositions:

1. AI cannot exercise judgment – it is one of the things that humans have and machines don’t.

2. AI can do certain things involving judgment better than humans. In these areas, some jobs will be lost, though others will be created. (For example, they can make accurate medical diagnoses having trained on huge data samples.)

3. AI can help human beings do things better – they will need to use that help to remain in, and enhance, their job. If they don’t, others will have a huge competitive advantage.

The implication is clear. All of us need to be able to understand what impact AI will have on our jobs and react accordingly. And all of us (I declare an interest here) should be working to improve our own judgement, as one of the main things we humans have to offer in an age of AI.

Growth becomes realigned to climate policy

Ioannis Ioannou, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Amid weak productivity growth and persistent economic uncertainty, the UK government will have to strike a delicate balance between fiscal discipline and the long-term need for green investment. With constrained public finances, climate and energy initiatives will be framed as levers for industrial renewal, regional competitiveness and energy resilience rather than as broad national transformation goals. For businesses, 2026 demands a recalibration of strategy. Firms will need to align transition plans with this more disciplined policy environment, linking sustainability directly to the industrial upgrading, energy resilience and productivity improvements that government priorities will increasingly reward.

The US landscape is now multi-speed and regionally driven, combining rollback at the federal level with experimentation and innovation in progressive states. California, Massachusetts and New York are advancing ambitious clean-energy agendas while red states continue to champion oil and gas. For companies, this creates an increasingly complex strategic environment that demands coherence across divergent jurisdictions and stakeholder expectations. The political polarisation of the climate debate heightens the importance of trust, transparency, and long-term orientation. In 2026, firms that sustain clarity of purpose and align with forward-looking states and global norms will set the pace.

Across the Middle East, 2026 will mark a shift from vision to institutionalisation in corporate sustainability. Sovereign wealth funds are emerging as the principal engines of the region’s transition, directing investment toward hydrogen, clean manufacturing, and circular-economy infrastructure. At the same time, stock exchanges in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt are aligning with global ESG frameworks and pushing for auditable, decision-useful data. The region is building a model of transition that relies less on market decentralisation and more on coordinated state capacity. For companies, this will create both opportunity and scrutiny. Firms will need transition strategies that align with sovereign priorities, demonstrate local-content value, and withstand investor examination.

Individuals take control of their own healthcare

Helen Edwards, Adjunct Associate Professor of Marketing

What turns a trickle into a trend? Usually, multiple external factors – societal, technological, economic – combine to give a marginal behavioural choice runaway impetus. The consumer move to self-diagnosis and self-medication is at that point right now. People are ditching their passive deference towards the medical profession and taking health matters into their own hands. And they have good reason to.

With populations ageing and demand for healthcare surging, health systems are failing to keep up. Simply getting in touch with a doctor in many societies has become a maze of impossibility. In Italy, it can take three weeks to get a GP call back. In the UK, the NHS presides over a waiting list of 7.4 million. In the US, cost is the problem: the most expensive healthcare in the world delivers only mid-table outcomes. Where systems have failed citizens, AI has stepped in. In a recent Times feature, one woman claimed AI diagnosed her condition and gave advice within minutes, where it had taken a relay of medical professionals months to get nowhere. “With a better bedside manner”, she quipped.

Increasingly, the trend to “Dr Me” – my body, my health, my responsibility – is about avoiding the need for medical intervention in the first place, about achieving a better state of physical and mental wellbeing at every stage of life. This is a development of what I described in my 2023 book, From Marginal to Mainstream, as “the quantified self” – using body-worn technology to monitor and advise on everything from heartrate and sleep through to alertness and mood. Once the province of a dedicated few, it is on track to become the norm for the many. No matter what category you work in – but especially in healthcare, tech and food & drink – this is a trend to monitor.

Generative AI will develop relevant local knowledge and understanding

Nicos Savva, Professor of Management Science and Operations; Academic Director, Data Science and AI Initiative

Generative AI is remarkably capable, but it fails as often as it succeeds. Not because it isn’t smart, but because it lacks context. Models like ChatGPT have “read the internet,” but that only makes them clever generalists. To become a true specialist – to act as a competent professional – AI needs access to a firm's internal knowledge, rules, and proprietary data.

Addressing this need, a new discipline is emerging: context engineering. This is the deliberate design of the information, structure, and governance that allow AI systems to perform reliably in a specific organisational setting. Just as business process outsourcing required firms to map their processes, context engineering requires them to map their internal knowledge: what the AI should know, what it must not know (protecting IP and trade secrets), and how it learns from human review.

In 2026, the battle from Silicon Valley to Wall Street won't be about who has the brightest AI model, but who has the richest, most defensible context. A new industry of "context-as-a-service" firms will rise, helping clients curate, govern, and audit the information environments that create comprehensive, proprietary intelligence. This is a massive opportunity for the professional services and legal-tech sectors. The first great outsourcing wave was about process. The next one will be about context.

AI will need to understand local knowledge, finance principles, and unique market dynamics around the globe. For regions undergoing rapid transformation, this offers a historic leapfrogging opportunity. Instead of replicating legacy systems, rapidly developing economies can build advanced, context-aware AI from the ground up. A new local industry of context providers will emerge, helping enterprises build AI that is not just powerful, but regulatorily fluent.