At a glance
- The global economy is volatile, with nervous consumers and uneven growth.
- Artificial intelligence is a top business priority, but its productivity impact is uncertain.
- Rising power prices are a growing concern for businesses in advanced nations.
- Private equity investment is reshaping the structure of the accounting industry.
Where is the business world at the start of 2026?
Below we list the most distinctive features of the world economy as we enter the second half of the 2020s. All of these are helping to reshape the economies and businesses of advanced nations. And they point to how the world economy could evolve over the next decade and beyond.
Two issues stand out. The first is political and regulatory volatility. The second is the emergence of AI in everyday business.
So what should businesses do? They should experiment with promising AI uses. They should also do what they can to protect against high volatility scenarios, like shifts in trade policy – but that is easier said than done.
2026’s nervous world
Over the past decade (2016–2025), global consumer and business confidence has followed a volatile trajectory. The 10-year period has been marked by three notable shocks – an off-again-on-again US-China trade war, a global pandemic, and a post-pandemic inflation surge.
This same period has also seen governments’ debts rising – indeed, in many cases reaching post-WW2 highs as a share of GDP.
All this has created a widespread perception that the environment for global trade and industry is less stable than at any time in the past 40 years.
The most obvious exceptions to this rule have been three of the world’s largest economies:
- China, which according to its government is still growing at a real (inflation-adjusted) around 5% a year;
- the US, where real growth of between 2% and 3% remains better than in most other advanced nations, thanks in part to high spending on AI hardware and software creation; and
- India, which continues to grow at rates of between 6 and 10 per cent, and is overtaking Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy.
(One caution: many experts are unsure about the quality of Chinese economic figures.)
But growth rates remain low through most of the high-GDP-per-person nations outside the US, from Canada to Sweden to Japan to New Zealand. The UK economy has grown at little more than 1% a year through 2024 and 2025.
Consumers grow cautious
The global nervousness shows through most clearly in the Nielsen audience measurement agency’s global consumer outlook for 2026. This document argues that consumer caution is the new normal. In advanced economies, it says, consumers have adapted to those economic shocks that we described above. Wariness is now a habit, price rises drive customers elsewhere, and “every purchase has to earn its place” – often by saving time or money. According to Nielsen data quoted in the report, “33% of global consumers feel that the last few years have made them realize that ‘less is more’ – and that they don’t need as much as they thought to be happy.”
Yet economies still muddle through
The oddest thing about the world economy may be how steady it has been since 2022. 2025’s actual overall economic performance was steadier than many economic projections from the start or even the middle of that year.
M. Ayhan Kose, the World Bank’s deputy chief economist, wrote in July that the bank expected tariffs and policy uncertainty to slow global trade “markedly” by the end of the year. Although Kose didn’t say it, he presumably feared the effects of US tariff rises and other policy changes.
But as 2025 went on, the world economy showed itself to be, at least in the short term, far less affected by those changes than many economists had predicted.
Indeed, that has been the pattern since the COVID pandemic. Through 2022, 2023 and 2024, actual global growth has exceeded consensus expectations by roughly 0.3 percentage points each year. This is just enough to keep people’s views of their economies stable, even though consumers remain relatively glum.
Greater AI usage
In 2026, AI agents are expected to manage more complex, multi-step tasks. Indeed, many employees expect their roles to change significantly as AI grows more powerful.
An October 2025 membership survey by ISACA, a body for IT professionals, reported that among IT professionals, “artificial intelligence, including machine learning and generative AI, are the top technology priorities for 2026”. It named predictive analytics, automation and content/code generation as AI’s key applications.
Among the biggest open questions is when and how much AI’s output will begin to show up clearly in numbers such as national and global productivity. So far, we’ve had rising AI use – but also near-stagnant productivity numbers in most of the countries making greatest use of it.
Also still unclear is how AI companies will expand these tools’ abilities in accounting and finance. Until now, IA has shown itself unable to deliver must-be-right numbers for purposes such as monthly profit calculations. Some experts think that could start to change in 2026, perhaps by having LLMs make more use of outside tools for calculation.
Higher power costs
National commitments to net zero are causing governments to turn off coal plants. At the same time, electricity demand is rising, partly driven by artificial intelligence needs. As an example, Bloomberg New Energy Finance reckons, for instance, that US data centres could take close to 9% of that country’s electricity by 2035. But reshaping the global power supply system around renewable energy is taking longer than many people expected.
Many politicians understand that if power demand outstrips supply, voters will react harshly. So they’re looking for new solutions. These include radically better battery technologies, as well as nuclear power, particularly through a new generation of small modular reactors.
These new technologies are now in a race to reverse the rise in world electricity prices. But even new battery tech is probably a decade away from substantially affecting electricity prices; new nuclear reactor capacity is even further off. So 2026 is likely to see further rises in advanced nations’ electricity prices.
Accounting’s private equity rebound
Private equity firms have aggressively acquired stakes in mid-tier and large accounting networks since 2023. This has moved parts of accounting from the traditional partner-owned model toward capital-funded corporate structures.
An Accountancy Europe report counted 192 private equity deals for accounting firms in Europe alone in 2024, up from just 10 in 2020. The US has seen broadly similar growth. The UK has been at the epicentre of the boom, with at least 19 platform investments by high-profile mid-market private equity houses. Azets, Moore Kingston Smith and Xeinadin have been among the largest players.
The question now is whether accounting’s private equity deals will continue in 2026 at the high level they reached in 2024 and 2025, or fall back down.
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