What UK business leaders actually prioritise in 2026 – And why no single issue wins

Ask ten business leaders what’s keeping them up at night in 2026 and you’ll get ten different answers. That’s not a failure of strategy. Based on what we're seeing in our own data, it might be the most honest signal in business today.

We put the question directly to 246 senior leaders who downloaded OneAdvanced’s 10th Annual Business Trends Report, spanning manufacturing, education, legal, government and healthcare organisations across the UK. The question was simple: what’s your top business priority for the next 12 months? The answers, spread almost evenly across ten distinct priorities, tell a more interesting story than any single trend ever could.

The ten priorities, ranked

Here's what struck us first: nothing runs away with it. Improving customer experience narrowly leads the field, but AI adoption and integration and operational efficiency are close behind, and the gap between first and tenth place is a matter of a few percentage points, not a landslide.

Priority	Responses	Share
Improving customer experience	29	11.8%
AI adoption and integration	28	11.4%
Operational efficiency	28	11.4%
Enhancing data and analytics capabilities	26	10.6%
Talent retention and employee experience	25	10.2%
Sustainability	23	9.3%
Reducing costs	23	9.3%
Cyber resilience	22	8.9%
Modernising legacy systems	22	8.9%
Regulation and compliance	20	8.1%

If you're looking for the one thing every UK business leader agrees on this year, the data suggests: there isn't single headline priority. Leaders are balancing a range of pressures, from improving performance and adopting AI to managing costs, talent, cyber resilience and compliance, and all demanding attention at the same time.

Why no single priority is winning

This pattern isn’t unique to our survey, and that’s what makes it worth paying attention to. If you look across the wider UK business landscape in 2026, a similar picture emerges: businesses are dealing with several pressures at once, rather than responding to one defining challenge.

Lloyds Bank’s 2026 Business Barometer, for example, found productivity at the top of the national agenda. But investment in upskilling and technology adoption was close behind, with more than a third of businesses identifying each as a priority. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s UK Business Data Survey also shows that AI adoption is becoming established across UK businesses, but its use and understanding still vary significantly.

Meanwhile, the CBI’s 2026 policy agenda focuses on three areas rather than one: lowering the cost of doing business, accelerating delivery, and keeping the UK competitive on the global stage, reflecting the pressures organisations are facing around costs, productivity and competitiveness all at once. Research from Make UK and PwC tells a similar story, with manufacturers balancing rising employment and energy costs with continued investment in digital technology and skills.

The message is clear: there is no single issue defining UK business in 2026. Leaders have to balance growth with cost control, digital transformation with cyber resilience, and investment in technology with the need to develop and retain talent. These priorities are closely connected, and progress in one area can often depend on getting another right. That’s why the challenge for leaders isn’t simply choosing which priority comes first. It’s understanding how these pressures fit together and finding ways to make progress across them without creating new problems elsewhere.

How priorities shift by sector

The averages tell only part of the story. Break the results down by sector and each one reveals a distinct personality, shaped by the specific pressures of that sector.

Sector	#1 priority
Manufacturing	Data & analytics (16%)
Education	Talent retention (14%)
Legal	Cyber resilience / AI adoption (16% each)
Government	Data & analytics (20%)
Care & Healthcare	Regulation & compliance / efficiency (24% each)

Manufacturing

Data & analytics leads at 16%, followed by operational efficiency (14%) and AI adoption (13%). The results suggest that manufacturing leaders are focused on getting greater value from their data while improving efficiency, with AI adoption forming part of that wider agenda.

Education

Talent retention and employee experience is the sector’s top priority at 14%, ahead of technology and cost-related priorities. Reducing costs also features among the top three (12%), highlighting the pressure education leaders face to retain people while managing tight budgets.

Legal

Cyber resilience and AI adoption share the top spot at 16% each. The result reflects two important priorities for legal organisations: managing the risks associated with technology while exploring its potential to improve how work is delivered.

Government

Data & analytics is the clear leading priority at 20%, followed by customer experience (17%) and sustainability (13%). The results point to a strong focus on using data to support better decisions and services.

Healthcare

Regulation & compliance and operational efficiency are tied at 24%, followed by sustainability at 18%. While the sample is small, the findings reflect the need to balance regulatory demands with pressure to improve efficiency and deliver sustainable services.

The hidden divide: What finance, HR and IT want

The most useful cut of the data isn't by sector alone. It's by function. And here the picture gets sharper, and more uncomfortable, because these functions frequently sit inside the very same organisations across each sector.

Function	Top three priorities
HR	Reducing costs, modernising legacy systems, sustainability
Finance	Data & analytics, cyber resilience, customer experience
IT	Customer experience, operational efficiency, modernising legacy systems

HR leaders are focused on cost control and clearing out legacy technology debt. Finance leaders want better data and stronger defences against cyber risk. IT leaders are chasing customer experience and operational efficiency. Three functions, three different lenses on the same business, and only partial overlap between any two of them.

So, how can businesses bring these priorities together?

Connecting priorities across the business

When ten priorities are competing for attention, the answer isn't to pick one and ignore the rest. Our data suggests that the real challenge for leaders in 2026 isn't choosing the right priority out of ten. It's building the underlying capability to make progress on several of them at once, without each function pulling in a different direction.

That starts with a more connected approach: bringing together the systems, data and processes teams rely on every day. This is exactly the thinking behind OneAdvanced IQ: a platform built around the idea that finance, HR and IT perform best when they're working from the same connected, trusted, intelligent foundation, rather than three separate ones. When these functions have a more joined-up foundation, organisations can work towards priorities such as AI adoption, cost control, efficiency and customer experience without treating each as a separate challenge.

Explore OneAdvanced IQ and see how a shared, connected, and intelligent foundation can help each function work better together.

Get the full picture Discover the priorities shaping UK businesses in 2026, with sector and function insights from OneAdvanced’s 10th Annual Business Trends Report. Download the 10th Annual Business Trends Report