Almost half of business leaders polled in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) 28th Annual Global CEO Survey expect GenAI to increase their company’s profitability over the next 12 months.

Based on the findings of the survey, 49 per cent of the 4,701 senior executives are bullish that AI will boost their company’s performance, representative of a three percentage point uptick over last year’s survey.

However, when the 2025 poll asked respondents to gauge their personal trust in embedding AI into key business processes, a less optimistic picture emerged: nearly a third of CEOs reported low trust in the deployment of the technology, with another third reporting only moderate trust.

In this regard, PwC encourages CEOs and senior executives to take a more optimistic outlook on investing in and implementing AI components in their operations.

“In a future where productivity gains will be mere table stakes in the race to leverage AI, trust in the tech will be essential to maximising its potential — and avoiding obsolescence,” the audit, assurance and consultancy firm stated.

Citing the findings of the survey, PwC noted that CEOs who said they have a high level of trust in AI not only reported higher gains in efficiency, revenue and profitability; they also reported more progress in the integration of GenAI into tech platforms, business processes, and workflows. 

The challenge ahead for many CEOs is, therefore, switching from an emotional response to the technology and embracing a “cautious and informed optimism” founded on three main principles.

First, PwC recommends “centralised leadership on responsible AI. The task of building trust in AI starts with owning the risks and responsibilities.

“CEOs should consider establishing a leadership role that’s fully accountable for ensuring fairness, accuracy, privacy and security, and for transparent reporting on how threats like bias and copyright infringement are being mitigated. This leader should oversee a multidisciplinary team that has eyes on all aspects of AI integration across the business, and across all phases of the AI life cycle, from use case testing to output validation,” PwC further outlined.

Moreover, PwC encourages businesses to develop an empowered workforce. Only a third of CEOs in the 2025 survey said they’re planning to integrate AI into their company’s workforce and skills strategy.

“This suggests that corporate leadership may not be sufficiently focused on making sure employees—more than half of whom say GenAI will increase bias and provide incorrect or misleading information, according to PwC’s 2024 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey—know when to use AI tools in their work, and how to use them safely. Closing that worker trust gap is a key mandate of responsible AI leadership, and should be a CEO priority.

Finally, the audit firm calls for “a systematic approach to AI-enabled value creation. 

“There’s nothing wrong with productivity gains. The challenge for CEOs, once they’ve laid a foundation of trust in AI, is to parlay those gains into a broader transformation. That requires a series of coordinated actions: assessing the overall value-creation potential of AI in your company, identifying priority use cases, mapping those use cases to common GenAI use patterns (such as humanlike speech generation or reformatting code), visualising the tools needed for deployment, assessing implementation costs (both financial and societal), and testing the new applications of AI in a controlled environment before expanding deployment to other areas of the business,” PwC explained.

By taking action grounded in trust, AI can foster a virtuous cycle of value creation that can fundamentally transform a company’s operations in an increasingly AI-powered business environment.