What will 2026 mean for business?

From Warwick Business School’s London base on the 17th floor of The Shard, the capital unfolds as study in perpetual motion. To the west, the glass towers of the City signal London’s enduring role as a global financial hub; to the north, the energy of Spitalfields and Shoreditch reflects a thriving ecosystem of digital innovation and entrepreneurial ambition. Eastwards, the railway lines stretching out from London Bridge hint at futures still taking shape.  

It is a striking view that mirrors, and contributes to, the conversations unfolding within Warwick Business School (WBS) itself. Both WBS in London and our Warwick campus are hubs where students, academics, alumni and business partners have come together to exchange ideas, challenge orthodoxies and interrogate the forces shaping modern business.

Both WBS London and our Warwick campus provide forums for navigating the next wave of business disruption – from climate equity and digital transformation to the shifting leadership demands and strategic challenges brought on by geopolitical uncertainty.  

So what might 2026 bring? In the second and final part of our New Year forecast series, we asked our academics to look ahead.

Will we manage to control AI slop? 

2026 will be the year when ‘AI slop’ is challenged as humans work out how to tackle low-quality content generated by machine intelligence, writes Pietro Micheli, Professor of Business Performance and Innovation.

While generative AI has enormous potential and algorithms are constantly improving, in 2025 we have witnessed the rise of AI slop: low-quality content generated by the likes of ChatGPT and Co-Pilot. Imagine a bland text that is not incorrect, but does not really convey much new, or a song that is not so bad, but demonstrates no originality whatsoever.

In 2026, we will find better ways to tackle AI slop, and this will be a good test of the so-called ‘augmentation’ side of the AI argument – AI helping humans improve their performance, rather than replacing them.

I am sure that we will find better ways to guide humans’ interactions with AI, addressing issues such as over trust and cognitive offloading (thinking that AI’s outputs are perfect) in both our work and personal lives.

This will require a much better understanding of what AI can and cannot do, what roles humans can and should play, and when and how AI should be used or not.

Take your team back to the drawing board

2026 will be the year when design thinking becomes more crucial than ever for businesses, writes Bo Kelestyn, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Analytics.

As organisations navigate an increasingly volatile landscape shaped by geopolitical uncertainty, rapid technological change and fragile public trust, traditional efficiency-driven, product-centric approaches to innovation will show their limits.

This is because digital innovation is never neutral. It actively shapes behaviour, identity, wellbeing, and even security.

In this context, design thinking, with its human-centred approach can offer a powerful and pragmatic lens. By adopting the mindset of designers sitting in front of their drawing boards, design thinking starts with empathy for the end-user, trying to understand the problem they are trying to solve. And it starts with collaboration, working with diverse groups of users, framing and reframing the problem and surfacing hidden assumptions and biases right from the beginning. 

Through ongoing co-creation between designers and intended users, with the help of feedback, reflection and product testing in an iterative process, design thinking succeeds in balancing commercial or political interests with real human voices and their needs. In doing so, it can help organisations anticipate not only intended outcomes, but also the unintended consequences of innovation.

This matters on two counts. The first is artificial intelligence.  As AI becomes more conversational and embedded in everyday life, the risk of disinformation amplified through ‘LLM grooming’ grows, and with it the power to shape beliefs, behaviours and public opinion in subtle but powerful ways.

In response, businesses will need to prioritise human-centred AI and encourage users to treat machine-generated outputs with critical scrutiny. Design thinking should help them do this.

The second is digital identity. Properly designed, digital ID systems can strengthen a sense of inclusion and civic trust, particularly in moments of crisis or rapid transformation. The emergence of government technology to improve access to public services is a case in point.

But poorly designed, these new systems risk entrenching citizen surveillance and a sense of exclusion. 

To sum up, design thinking is going to be critical in ensuring digital innovation is inclusive, transparent and trustworthy, designed with users rather than for them. In 2026, responsible business leaders will treat design thinking as a strategic capability – one that enables quick yet ethical judgement and genuine value creation.

More than counting click rates

2026 will be the year when smart businesses measure marketing value, not just marketing activity, writes Laura Chamberlain, Professor of Marketing. 

Marketing teams are drowning in data but starving for insight. We've become obsessed with measuring everything we can (click, impressions, engagement rates) whilst struggling to demonstrate what actually matters; the value marketing creates for the business. We are measuring activity brilliantly whilst losing sight of outcomes. 

Part of the problem is external pressure for false precision, particularly from finance teams demanding quarterly Return on Ad Spend guarantees on brand-building investments. But part of it is our own doing: we've chased vanity metrics and oversold certainty we can't deliver.

But there's a shift coming. Finance leaders are recognising that quarter-by-quarter performance marketing destroys brand equity. Marketing teams are finding frameworks to articulate value beyond immediate conversion. Most importantly, sophisticated businesses are realising that rigorous marketing measurement requires critical thinking about context, not just algorithmic attribution.

In 2026, the businesses that pull ahead will be those who measure what marketing achieves – brand health alongside conversions, customer lifetime value alongside acquisition costs, and effectiveness alongside efficiency – rather than just counting what marketing does.

A more joined-up approach to policy delivery

2026 could be the year when we start to see the benefits of UK devolution touch peoples’ lives, writes Nigel Driffield, Professor of International Business and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor for Regional Engagement.

Several of the mayoral combined authorities (MCAs) led by the directly elected ‘metro mayors’ are quite mature now, with increasing levels of engagement both with business and society. I hope that the partnerships formed will start to show real benefits in the form of innovation and productivity growth at the level of the region, with policy delivery being more joined up.

To take just one example, if one wants to make the case for investment in a region this requires the coordination of interventions on skills, business support, innovation and investment promotion. The Government’s Industrial Strategy published last summer offers a framework by which local plans can be developed, targeting priority sectors and supply chains, with local interventions on planning unlocking growth.

Such policies cannot be simply delivered nationally, so localities need to show confidence in themselves to make the case for devolution.

A region’s Higher Education sector will play a big part in this. As the Government’s Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper published last October illustrates, higher education is the glue that joins innovation and skills.

In 2026, more coordinated activity at a regional level can help to boost productivity and therefore earnings across the whole UK economy. 

Pietro Micheli is Professor of Business Performance and Innovation and teaches Managing Organisational Performance on the Executive MBA, Executive MBA (London), Global Online MBA and Accelerator MBA (London) programmes.  

Bo Kelestyn is Associate Professor of Information Systems and Analytics and teaches the Design Thinking for Digital Innovation module on the BSc Management and BSc International Management programmes. 

Laura Chamberlain is Professor of Marketing and teaches Marketing on the Executive MBA, Executive MBA (London) and the Accelerator MBA (London). 

Nigel Driffield is Professor of International Business and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor for Regional Engagement. 

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