CEO priorities: how entrepreneurs turn discipline into scale

The implication is clear: Entrepreneurs are still pursuing growth, but they are doing so with less room for error. In this market, resilience matters as much as growth. Founders who can continue to execute under pressure will outperform.

A delayed funding round, a missed key hire, a supplier disruption or a sudden cost shock can affect the whole business, making capital discipline, operational agility and execution resilience central to how entrepreneurs navigate their next phase of growth. Entrepreneurs are responding to uncertainty through capability acceleration, while larger enterprises are responding through balance-sheet protection.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) research reinforces the point. Its 2026 small and medium enterprises (SME) financing scorecard² finds that borrowing costs remain historically high, with SME interest rates above pre-pandemic levels in 34 of 39 countries, while bank-lending terms have tightened in many markets. The result is a financing environment where working capital, investment capital and growth capital all require sharper prioritization.

Yet entrepreneurs are not responding by trimming their ambitions. Only 4% say they are cancelling or pausing major investments. Entrepreneurs are not retreating from uncertainty. They are operationalizing around it.

“The end of cheap capital has made entrepreneurship more honest, says Rafał Brzoska, Founder and CEO of InPost. “Raising money is different from building a company. Real leadership means treating cash flow as oxygen, making hard choices early and proving that growth can stand on its own economics.”

That entrepreneurs and CEOs are moving at the same headline pace is significant. AI adoption is no longer the differentiator. The question is whether entrepreneurs can turn AI activity into measurable business value faster than larger competitors can.

Their AI spending priorities show a pragmatic balance. Entrepreneurs are allocating AI capital almost evenly across reshaping the cost base, incremental cost-out, quality uplift and commercial reinvention. This is not a narrow automation agenda. It suggests founders and scale-up leaders alike see AI as a multi-purpose lever. It will enable them to expand capacity, improve quality, support new revenue models and offset some disadvantages of scale.

The path to AI-driven growth and productivity gains is not yet obvious to the majority of companies, both established and smaller entrepreneurial ones. The OECD’s 2026 D4SME Survey³ makes a similar point at the broader SME level. AI adoption is rising rapidly, but strategic and secure integration into business operations remains uneven, with time constraints, maintenance costs and skills gaps limiting impact.

However, the signs of an early impact are already visible. Entrepreneurs report measurable AI value across core operations and production, supply chain and procurement, product or service innovation, strategy and decision-making, customer experience, sales and marketing, finance and risk, and HR. But the spread of impact also raises a harder question. If AI is everywhere, where is it truly creating enterprise value?

The real AI maturity gap is not between entrepreneurs and enterprises. It is between AI activity and measurable enterprise value. As investor scrutiny increases, founders are under greater pressure to prove that AI investment is translating into measurable business outcomes, whether through revenue growth, productivity gains or margin improvement.

Only 9% of entrepreneurs link AI impact to financial reporting and regular senior-management review. Many are still measuring through inconsistent KPIs or case-by-case assessments. That is understandable in fast-moving companies, where experimentation often precedes governance. But it also creates risk. If AI investment is rising while capital remains constrained, entrepreneurs will need a tighter bridge between use cases, productivity, revenue, margin and cash flow.

The next phase of AI competition will not revolve around who has adopted the tools. It will revolve around who can measure, scale, and govern these emerging capabilities best. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2025/2026 Global Report also finds an AI readiness gap between entrepreneurs with access to AI capability and those without⁴.

As David Hyman, Founder and CEO of mono ai says:

“AI transformation isn’t really about choosing the right model or tool. It’s about fundamentally rethinking the business model and, from there, the operating model. Technology, tools and AI models come downstream of those decisions. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is treating AI as a technology initiative rather than a business transformation. The second mistake is misunderstanding what happens when the cost of building software approaches zero. Because software can now be built in days or weeks instead of months or years, many organizations are investing effort in building AI infrastructure they don’t need. If you’re in law, mortgages or ETFs, your focus should be creating the best customer and product experience, not reinventing the AI stack. Companies are spending time and strategic energy at layers of the stack where they shouldn’t be.”

Leadership capability, training infrastructure and the need to preserve entrepreneurial culture during AI-driven change also matter. Unlike larger organizations, entrepreneurs may face less legacy inertia, but they often have thinner benches. They must build capability while continuing to run at growth-company speed.

That makes the workforce agenda more urgent and more practical. Entrepreneurs are looking to reskill and upskill existing employees; hire AI, data and digital talent; redesign roles; and use external or contingent talent. This is not simply a people strategy. It is an operating model strategy. AI value depends on whether founders can redesign roles fast enough for technology to become embedded in decisions, customer interactions, product cycles and core operations.

“The talent market is changing, especially for entry-level and graduate roles,” says Rosaleen Blair, Founder and Chair of AMS. “Entrepreneurial companies have a golden opportunity to attract high-caliber candidates that larger firms may be overlooking if they are over-reliant on automated talent screening or have a more prescribed/traditional profile in mind. One thing that AI use by job applicants is doing is creating a more homogenized candidate profile. Keeping the process human-centric is crucial in today’s market.”

Entrepreneurs are more likely to use transactions to create optionality. Divestments, carve-outs, sponsor sales and selective alliances can simplify the business, release capital, reduce management complexity or create a new route to scale. The comparison with CEOs is useful here. Large-company CEOs are much more likely to pursue M&A, alliances and JVs, while entrepreneurs show greater emphasis on divestment-related options and capital flexibility.

This does not mean entrepreneurs are less strategic. It means their transaction logic is more capital-sensitive. When they evaluate acquisitions or divestments, exposure to geopolitical or regulatory risk, margin quality, technology and AI capability, synergies, capital intensity, and valuation all rank closely. The pattern points to disciplined portfolio thinking, even among younger companies. Entrepreneurs are asking not only how to grow but what kind of growth is fundable, resilient and manageable.

But it is the gap in joint ventures and strategic alliances that is most concerning. CEOs of mature companies are far more likely to pursue strategic alliances, at 57% versus 32% for entrepreneurs, and JVs, at 45% versus 26%. Yet entrepreneurial companies may be exactly the businesses that larger firms are looking to partner with.

For entrepreneurs, the case for partnering is not only about market access. A well-structured alliance with a larger corporate can help close the capability gaps that often become more visible as a company scales. These include regulatory experience, procurement discipline, sales, manufacturing resilience, cyber maturity, finance and reporting infrastructure, international distribution, risk management, and AI governance. For a growth company, those capabilities can be expensive and slow to build alone. A partnership can provide access to them without the loss of control that may come with a sale or the capital intensity that may come with acquisition.

There is also a cultural and operating-model benefit. Entrepreneurs bring speed, customer proximity, product focus and a willingness to experiment. Larger corporates bring process, governance, compliance discipline, balance sheet capacity and experience in scaling across markets. The effective partnerships do not try to dilute either side. They create a structure in which entrepreneurial speed is protected, while corporate discipline is selectively imported. That can be particularly valuable in areas such as AI, where many entrepreneurs are investing heavily but still have inconsistent measurement of enterprise value. A corporate partner can help convert pilots into governed, measurable and scalable use cases.

The policy environment is also moving in this direction, especially in Europe. Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness⁵ argues that Europe does not lack entrepreneurial potential. As the report puts it, “The problem is not that Europe lacks ideas or ambition.” The issue is the next stage, where innovation must be commercialized, financed and scaled. The Letta report⁶ reaches a similar conclusion from the perspective of the Single Market. It argues that Europe’s model “thrives on the vital link between large and small enterprises,” and that the Single Market must better support the scale-up and growth of European companies.

This creates an important question for entrepreneurs. If governments, large corporates and investors are all looking for ways to accelerate scale-up ecosystems, why are entrepreneurs not leaning harder into alliances and JVs? One answer may be control. Founders may worry that corporate partnerships will slow decision-making, absorb management attention or create dependency on a much larger counterparty. Those risks are real. Poorly designed alliances can become complex, unequal and distracting.

This cautious approach toward partnerships reflects the pressure many founders face to move quickly, preserve agility and maintain control while operating with leaner teams and limited management bandwidth.

But the risks can be managed. Entrepreneurs should approach alliances with the same discipline they apply to capital. A partnership should have a defined value thesis and a small number of metrics that show whether it is increasing revenue, reducing cost, accelerating time to market, improving resilience, or strengthening the company’s strategic position.

Entrepreneurs are already using transactions to create flexibility. The next step is to use partnerships more deliberately to create scale. For many growth companies, the right strategic alliance may be less a fallback option than a missing part of the operating model.

Strengthening the wider entrepreneurial network

The broader entrepreneurial context reinforces that point. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2025/2026 Global Report⁷ finds record startup activity across many regions but also warns of a widening survival gap as too few startups become established firms. That is the larger challenge behind the EY-Parthenon entrepreneur findings. The world does not lack entrepreneurial activity. It lacks enough companies that can convert early growth into durable, profitable scale.

The entrepreneurs in this survey appear alert to that challenge: 91% say their local entrepreneurial ecosystem provides strong support for companies looking to scale. But ecosystem support alone is not enough. In a more capital-constrained environment, founders need to translate support into execution, credible unit economics, repeatable revenue growth, measurable AI returns, resilient supply chains, cyber maturity and a talent model that can scale with the business.

Summary

Standout leaders will pair ambition with discipline, invest through uncertainty with clear returns, tie AI to performance, grow profitably and use deals to focus, fund, and strengthen the business.