Our annual review of marketing trends and spending benchmarks reveals a stunning subplot; the confluence of technologies including AI has already reshaped the field of modern marketing.

In a world that’s increasingly volatile, it has been a particularly chaotic couple of weeks.

Businesspeople are in a frenzy to implement AI solutions, but many want to have their cake and eat it too. Managers expect rapid deployment of AI tools because they view them as a path to competitive advantage. To harness the transformative power of AI will require that we reimagine how we do business.

In my travels as a strategy consultant, there is one constant among new clients: a lack of definition around target markets. Clients tell us they have clarity, but when we pull back the kimono, we often find confusion about who their ideal clients are.

As we head into the final stretch of the presidential election, no topic will frame the outcome more than the momentum of our economy. Recent data suggests the economy is at an inflection point in terms of inflation, wages, and productivity.

As we’ve often pointed out, one of mankind’s most fundamental problems is that economies need population growth to sustain prosperity, at a time when governments struggle to provide infrastructure while sustaining the planet.

In a January Vistage Trends webinar, Vistage Chief Research Officer Joe Galvin asked Optimize President Marc Emmer what he considered the number-one geopolitical threat in the world today. Marc answered, “our enemies ganging up on us.”

Strategic planning has always been a core responsibility of the CEO. Given the rate of change, strategic planning needs to be done more often, and with more rigor.

ChatGPT-5 is expected to feature multimodal capabilities and potential agent-like autonomy, which could revolutionize AI interactions.