Notwithstanding the geopolitical uncertainty, Italian CEO’s carry on aiming for efficiency and growth, by investing in new technologies.
The Annual Global CEO Survey, (“Upskilling, Intelligenza Artificiale e Data Analytics al centro dell’Agenda dei CEO italiani”), published by PWC, points out some interesting trends about those strategies worldwide CEO’s are willing to resort on in 2019 (Italian CEO’s take part in this report, as well). Operations efficiency, integrated growth and new products launch appear as the most promising strategies.
This survey reports lower expectations among Italian and worldwide CEOs.
In particular, Italian CEOs turn out to be more pessimistic than their peer in the World: the percentage of those Italian CEOs who foresee company growth in the next 12 months reaches 70%, (it was 90% one year ago); while, the percentage of Italian CEO’s that expect company growth in the next three years is equal to 84% (it was 94% one year ago).
As far as concerned with growth strategies, Italian CEO’s put operational efficiency first (70%, 77% among foreign CEOs); integrated growth follows (54% in Italy in 2019, while it was equal to 78% in 2018; World decreased from 79% to 72%). Product development and new products launch is placed third (Italy: 46%; World: 62%). Ranking includes also: entry in a new market, merges and acquisitions, strategic alliances, partnerships with other companies and start-ups.
Digital infrastructure is going to have greater impact in firms’ results; it has to guarantee reliable and complete data, in order to monitor business health on a daily basis. The most relevant data companies need are: customer needs and preferences (88%), brand and company reputation (85%), financial perspectives and projections (82%), competitors’ performance (81%).
Italian CEOs deem that reporting systems do not usually provide accurate and adequate data. In particular, reporting data have difficulty in extracting and presenting significant data, as well as in analyzing huge amount of data. Indeed, while proliferation of informative systems as well as IoT technologies has empowered companies to generate massive data, companies have not developed the adequate capabilities to cope with mass data analysis too. In conclusion, companies generate so much data from their own processes and operations that they are not able to analyze, ultimately.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to be the prominent technology in the future; it is supposed to overturn a large heterogeneity of businesses: 73% of Italian CEOs (this percentage increases up to 84% in case of foreign CEOs) thinks that a large variety of businesses will be significantly impacted in the next five years by AI. Worldwide, 62% of CEOs expects that AI will have a greater impact than Internet. Nevertheless, the implementation ratio is still low: 77% of Italian companies has not implemented any Artificial Intelligence technology yet.
Lastly, competencies represent a key topic: 55% of Italian CEOs states that they watch out for “availability of key-competencies”, 65% struggles in finding talents, 58% resorts on internal training.
