The Confidence Paradox
A new global survey of 700 senior business leaders, published by Clyde & Co on 25 June 2026, paints a picture that should worry any organisation paying attention.¹
Technology risk saw the sharpest rise of any category tracked. The share of leaders rating it high impact jumped to 86%, up from 46% just a year earlier.¹ ² AI adoption is outpacing the frameworks meant to govern it: 76% of organisations say AI, data privacy, and cybersecurity requirements are evolving faster than they can keep up with, yet only 68% say they have a mature AI governance framework in place.² ³
Operational strain is following the same curve. 86% of leaders now rate day-to-day operational challenges as high impact, up from 61% the year before, with technology implementation and systems integration cited as the leading pressure point.⁴ Compliance burden shows a similar jump, from 54% to 85% year on year.³ Geopolitical volatility is affecting performance for 72% of organisations, up from 49% the year before.⁴
So the picture, on its face, is straightforward: risk is rising sharply across every category tracked, and the governance meant to manage the biggest driver of that risk is admittedly behind.
And yet, in the same survey, 95% of organisations say they are confident in management's ability to identify and mitigate material risks.³ That's not a small majority. That's close to unanimous, sitting right next to a set of numbers that would suggest otherwise.
Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, because Clyde & Co isn't the only 2026 survey asking a version of this question, and once you line the others up, "confidence" stops looking like one stable thing and starts looking like something that swings wildly depending on exactly what's being asked.
Grant Thornton's 2026 AI Impact Survey asked a more specific version of the same underlying question. Not "are you confident in management generally," but could your organisation pass an independent AI governance audit within 90 days. Seventy eight percent of executives said they lacked strong confidence that they could.⁵ Same year, same broad topic, a completely different number, because the question stopped being abstract and started being something a specific team would either pass or fail.
Then there is a third data point that complicates things even further. PwC's 29th Global CEO Survey, based on 4,454 chief executives across 95 countries surveyed between September and November 2025, found that only 30% of CEOs said they were confident about their company's revenue growth over the next 12 months, down from 38% in 2025 and 56% in 2022, the lowest reading in five years.⁶ ⁷ That's the same population, roughly the same period, asked about the same underlying pressures (AI returns, cyber risk, geopolitical exposure), and it produced a confidence number nearly a third the size of Clyde & Co's.
Three surveys, three numbers, one year: 95% confident in general risk management, 30% confident in revenue growth, 22% confident (the inverse of Grant Thornton's 78%) in passing a specific governance audit. These are three different populations surveyed with three different methodologies, Clyde & Co's 700 senior decision-makers, PwC's 4,454 CEOs, Grant Thornton's roughly 950 C-suite and senior leaders, so the numbers aren't directly comparable in a statistical sense, and no single one of them proves the other wrong. What they do share is a direction worth noticing: across all three, confidence tracks closer to how vague or concrete the question is than to any single shared fact about the state of risk. That's a pattern worth watching, not a controlled experiment.
The pattern holds up elsewhere too. AlixPartners' 2026 U.S. Risk Survey, based on 500 senior executives in legal, compliance, and risk roles, found the same pattern on a specific measure: 73% of leaders said enhancing data encryption was important, but only 50% were actually doing it or had plans to.⁸ The same survey found that close to half of organisations still lack basic elements of AI governance, such as a formal AI governing body.⁹ McKinsey's 2026 State of AI Trust research described the governance and risk-management gap as consistent across every region it studied, even in the sectors it considers furthest ahead on responsible AI maturity.¹⁰ And the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026, drawing on more than 1,300 experts alongside a separate Executive Opinion Survey of over 11,000 business leaders across 116 economies, ranked geoeconomic confrontation as the single most severe near-term global risk, a sharp jump in ranking from the year before, meaning the geopolitical pressure Clyde & Co's respondents report shows up independently in a survey with a completely different methodology and respondent base.¹¹ ¹² ¹³
Put all of this together and a pattern emerges that no single report states outright: published confidence numbers are not a stable read on institutional readiness. They are a read on how the question was framed. Ask leaders to evaluate themselves against a vague, comforting standard, "can management handle risk," and you get near unanimous agreement. Ask them about something concrete and time-bound, an audit, a revenue target, a governance structure that either exists or doesn't, and confidence collapses by 40, 50, sometimes 65 percentage points. That is not a contradiction between dishonest surveys. It is a demonstration of how easily self-assessment inflates the further it gets from anything that could actually be checked.
Worth being honest about what the sources themselves recommend as the fix, because it isn't "get an outside audit." Grant Thornton points organisations toward building internal governance, testing incident response plans, and getting the C-suite aligned on ownership.⁵ AlixPartners points toward the same kind of internal work, forming a formal AI governing body, closing the gap between stated priorities and funded action.⁹ That's the real, necessary work, and no external report replaces it.
The question worth sitting with is not whether your organisation is generally confident. It is whether that confidence would survive being asked something specific.
About Counara
Counara is an independent research and strategy practice founded by Iliyana Hristova. Counara works on complex, non-standard questions across competitive intelligence, strategic research, and EAA/WCAG web accessibility auditing. The focus is on turning fragmented information and self-reported confidence into clear, specific findings that hold up under scrutiny.
If the AI governance question raised above sounds familiar, that is the kind of exposure a competitive intelligence teardown is built to surface. If the "would our positioning hold up" question sounds more relevant, that is the terrain of a strategic research brief. If it is your own site's readiness in question, that is exactly what an EAA/WCAG accessibility audit is designed to test. Explore the services pages to see which fits.
Disclaimer and Scope of Analysis
This article takes a cross-survey view of how business leaders self-report confidence in risk management, drawing on six separately conducted 2026 studies: Clyde & Co's Corporate Risk Radar, Grant Thornton's AI Impact Survey, PwC's Global CEO Survey, AlixPartners' U.S. Risk Survey, McKinsey's State of AI Trust research, and the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report. It does not cover every risk or confidence survey published in 2026, nor does it claim to represent a single, unified industry consensus.
The three headline figures compared in this article (95% confidence in general risk management from Clyde & Co, 30% confidence in revenue growth from PwC, and 22% confidence in passing a specific AI governance audit, the inverse of Grant Thornton's reported 78% lacking confidence) come from three different respondent populations surveyed with three different methodologies: 700 senior decision-makers, 4,454 CEOs, and roughly 950 C-suite and senior leaders, respectively. The comparison between them is the author's own analysis and is not a joint or cross-referenced finding published by any of the cited organisations. It should be read as an observed pattern across independent data points, not a statistically controlled result.
The AlixPartners figure cited (73% of leaders calling data encryption important against 50% acting on it) refers specifically to that measure and should not be generalised to AlixPartners' findings on financial crime, cybersecurity, or AI governance more broadly, which the same survey reports separately.
This article does not constitute risk management, compliance, legal, or investment advice. It does not account for sector-specific regulatory obligations, company size, or regional variation in risk exposure, all of which affect how these findings apply to any individual organisation. Readers should consult the original reports directly and seek qualified advice before making decisions based on the figures cited here.
The article draws on publicly available sources only and does not incorporate proprietary risk data, non-public survey results, or confidential client information. All interpretation and framing are the author's own at the time of writing.
References
Clyde & Co, Corporate Risk Radar 2026: Navigating Risk Without Respite - https://www.clydeco.com/en/reports/2026/06/corporate-risk-radar-2026-navigating-risk-without
Clyde & Co, Businesses face permanent high-risk environment as AI, geopolitics and regulation converge - https://www.clydeco.com/en/news/2026/06/businesses-face-permanent-high-risk-environment-as
Insurance Business UK, Businesses operating in 'permanent high-risk environment' as AI, geopolitics and regulation converge - https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/uk/news/cyber/businesses-operating-in-permanent-highrisk-environment-as-ai-geopolitics-and-regulation-converge-580380.aspx
Insurance Edge, Clyde & Co Survey Reveals Volatile Environment For Business Sector - https://insurance-edge.net/2026/06/29/clyde-co-survey-reveals-volatile-environment-for-business-sector/
Grant Thornton, 2026 AI Impact Survey Report - https://www.grantthornton.com/services/advisory-services/artificial-intelligence/2026-ai-impact-survey
PwC, PwC 2026 Global CEO Survey (Press Release) - https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/pwc-2026-global-ceo-survey.html
PwC, Leading Through Uncertainty in the Age of AI: PwC's 29th Global CEO Survey (full report, PDF) - https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/ceo-survey/2026/pwc-ceo-survey-2026.pdf
AlixPartners, Press Release: 2026 U.S. Risk Survey - https://www.alixpartners.com/newsroom/press-release-2026-us-risk-survey/
AlixPartners, 2026 U.S. Risk Survey: AI, Cybersecurity & Corporate Litigation Trends - https://www.alixpartners.com/insights/2026-us-risk-survey/
McKinsey & Company, State of AI Trust in 2026: Shifting to the Agentic Era - https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/tech-forward/state-of-ai-trust-in-2026-shifting-to-the-agentic-era
World Economic Forum, The Global Risks Report 2026 - https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/
World Economic Forum, Overview of Methodology, Global Risks Report 2026 - https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/in-full/global-risks-report-2026-overview-of-methodology/
World Economic Forum, The Global Risks Report 2026 (full PDF) - https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2026.pdf