I coach CEOs who wake up to numbers nobody planned for. Kriti Sharma, CEO of IFS Nexus Black, told me about a German manufacturer that woke up to a 15% tariff increase overnight while 12% of global trade sat stuck behind one blocked shipping corridor. That is the environment you run a company in now. AI is the tool that decides who survives it.
Quick Answer
CEOs lead through economic and geopolitical uncertainty in 2026 by cutting their dependence on external capital, shrinking teams while raising the bar for who stays on them, and deploying AI inside their own operations before the market forces prices down. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, works with CEOs facing exactly this squeeze: shrinking price ceilings on one side and AI-driven margin gains on the other. The CEOs who win this stretch are not the ones waiting for stability to return. They are the ones restructuring their cost base now, before their competitors do.
The Growth-At-Any-Cost Era Is Over
Capital used to be cheap. It funded years of losses while companies chased market share. That model is gone. Theodore Krantz, CEO of interios.ai, told me the CEOs who last now are the ones who get their EBIT in order early and stop “chasing new rounds” to cover losses. He said the goal is becoming “a self-sustaining business” that does not need a big burn to survive the next twelve months.
Eric Martell, Founder of Pear Commerce, runs his company against a Rule of 40 target. Capital is harder to come by than it was five years ago, he told me, so his team treats every win differently: “These wins are won with capital efficiency, not by throwing money at the problem.” A dollar of growth funded by discipline is worth more to your business than a dollar of growth funded by your next raise, because only one of those dollars survives a downturn.
I watch board decks change color when this shift lands. A slide that used to celebrate hockey-stick growth against ballooning burn now has to celebrate margin discipline instead, and most executive teams built their entire operating rhythm around the old story. Compensation plans reward growth. Hiring plans assume growth. Board reporting templates track growth against plan, not burn against runway. Changing the metric on a slide does not change the muscle memory underneath it, and that gap is where I spend most of my coaching time right now. I ask CEOs one question before we touch strategy: if your next funding round fell through tomorrow, would your business survive eighteen months on what it already generates? Most cannot answer yes. Theodore sees this daily in the growth equity deals he now oversees. Companies raised in 2021 on growth multiples are being re-underwritten on EBIT multiples, and the CEOs who resisted that shift the longest are the ones now negotiating from the weakest position.
Price Compression Meets Margin Expansion
Mark Wald, CEO of SPRCHRGR, told me plainly what happens to commoditized work: “the price should really drive down to meet what the commoditized market rate is.” AI is commoditizing more categories of work every quarter. If your offer looks like everyone else’s offer to a buyer with an AI tool in hand, your price ceiling drops.
Fred Voccola, CEO of Simpro, is proof the same force that compresses your price ceiling can expand your margin, if you apply AI to your own cost structure instead of just your product. “We’re doing it what I call an AI native way,” he told me. “We’re 45% profit margin, growing 30% a year.” That is not a typical software economics story. Growth and margin usually trade against each other. Fred’s company runs both at once because AI carries cost that used to sit on his payroll.
I tell clients to run a test before their next planning cycle. Price out what a customer could get from an AI tool handling 80% of the same job you sell today. If that number embarrasses you, your price ceiling has already dropped, whether you have accepted it yet or not. The CEOs who run this test now are rebuilding their offer around the 20% AI cannot touch. The ones who skip it will find out from a customer instead of their own spreadsheet. Fred did not protect his margin by holding his price steady. He protected it by cutting the cost of delivering the work in the first place, which is the only lever left once the market sets the price for you. I have run this exercise with manufacturing CEOs, agency owners, and SaaS founders in the same month, and the number that embarrasses them is rarely the one they expected. Every industry commoditizes at a different speed, but none of them commoditize slower once an AI tool crosses the quality bar your customers actually need. I have watched entire categories move from premium to commodity in under two years once that bar got crossed.
The table below shows the two paths CEOs are choosing right now, and what each one produces.
| Approach | What It Looks Like | Outcome for the CEO |
| Legacy growth model | Chase growth at any margin, fund losses with fresh capital, add headcount to scale output | Rising burn, dependence on the next funding round, margin erosion as competitors’ prices fall |
| AI-native model (Fred, Simpro) | Deploy AI and digital labor inside the business, hold headcount flat, price on outcomes instead of hours | 45% profit margin at 30% annual growth, with SMB customers on the platform tripling free cash flow in four months |
That second row is not theoretical. Fred told me Simpro has “rolled out over 25,000 digital workers” into small field-service businesses that used to run on 5% margins. He said those customers are “literally tripling their free cash flow or their profit margins within four months.”
Smaller Teams, Higher Stakes
Fewer people are doing more work, and the tolerance for a bad hire has dropped to almost zero. Asad Zaman, CEO of Sales Talent Agency, told me about a friend running go-to-market at an AI company doing more than $150 million in revenue with only 35 salespeople. “So they have less salespeople by an order of magnitude compared to SaaS era companies at a similar revenue stage,” he said. That is the standard Jason Veiock, CEO of Bearing, hires against.
Jason told me he now has candidates share their screen during interviews and show him their actual prompt history with an LLM. “If you’re not doing it every single day, then you’re not going to thrive,” he said. He called that daily habit “a superpower,” and said a candidate who will not exercise it “really has no place on a team like mine.”
I coach CEOs through this exact hiring shift every quarter now. The instinct is to protect headcount, because letting people go feels like admitting the plan failed. But protecting a bloated team while a competitor runs lean with AI is its own kind of failure, just a slower one. I ask clients to rebuild their org chart from zero once a year now, not from what they already have, but from what the work actually requires with AI doing the parts it can already do. Most find they need fewer seats than their current chart shows, and the seats they do need require more judgment than the ones they are cutting. I have started asking candidates the same live-prompt question Jason uses, because a polished resume tells me nothing about how someone will perform under the exact kind of pressure this uncertainty creates. The org charts that survive this stretch are thinner at the middle, not just the bottom, because AI is absorbing coordination work faster than it is absorbing judgment work.
Geopolitical Shocks Demand Real-Time Response, Not a Five-Year Plan
Static planning breaks the moment a border closes or a tariff changes overnight. Kriti‘s manufacturer example is not rare. She described customers calling to cancel orders the moment a quote goes stale, and she said her company does not sell technology so much as it sells the ability to “plan and replan and dynamically respond to the situation.” Kriti‘s team now treats a stable week as the exception, not the rule, and builds every quote with that assumption baked in from the start.
Mike Stacy, CEO of ID90 Travel, runs a business exposed directly to geopolitical shocks. He told me military activity in Venezuela hit part of his business, and he lost both major Russian airline clients when the war started. Despite that exposure, his company posted a 95 NPS score with airline clients and holds 100% contract renewal. He credits that to his team, not to luck. When the ground moves under your business, the team you built before the shock is the thing that determines whether you keep your customers during it.
I ask every CEO I coach the same question after a shock hits the news. What would your team do in the next 48 hours if this happened to you? Most cannot answer it. The ones who can are the ones already running the kind of real-time replanning Kriti described, with pricing, staffing, and supply commitments built to move fast instead of waiting for a quarterly review. The CEOs I trust most in this environment run a standing weekly review of exactly three questions: what changed this week outside our control, what does it cost us if we do nothing, and what is the smallest move that buys us time. That habit costs an hour a week. I have coached three CEOs through a client market disappearing overnight in the last two years alone, once from sanctions, once from a canceled trade agreement, and once from a war that closed a shipping lane. None of them saw it coming with enough notice to matter. All three survived because their team already knew how to replan without waiting for permission.
CEOs Must Run Capital Like a Fund Manager, Not a Founder Chasing Growth
Ryan Baird, CEO of Baird Augustine, told me the best entrepreneurs are “the best allocators of resources,” and that most founders undercount how much of their scarcest resource, their team’s attention, gets spent every time they greenlight a new project. Split your team’s focus across two priorities and you are now competing against companies whose teams are fully focused on one. I push CEOs to name that tradeoff out loud before a project gets a green light, not after the team is already stretched thin and resentful. Ryan tells his own team the same thing before every deal review: name what you are giving up before you argue about what you might gain.
Capital discipline shows up in what you are willing to walk away from, too. Mike told me his rule for cutting a bad bet is simple: avoid the sunk cost fallacy of spending good money after bad. “Set the metrics of success or failure up front, and when the numbers say stop, stop,” he said. I push every client to write their kill criteria down before they fund anything new, not after. A number on paper is harder to talk yourself out of at two in the morning than a feeling ever will be. The CEOs who skip this step are the ones who tell me six months later that they always had a bad feeling about the project, as if a feeling they never wrote down counts as a decision they actually made.
What This Means for Your Next Twelve Months
Here is what I tell clients when they put these four patterns together: capital is not free anymore, so run your business like it has to fund itself. Your price ceiling is dropping because AI is commoditizing more of what you sell, so put AI to work inside your own cost structure before a competitor beats you to it. Your team is smaller and each seat matters more, so raise your hiring bar and verify daily AI fluency instead of assuming it. Geopolitical shocks will keep landing without warning, so build a team and a pricing model that can replan in real time instead of waiting on a quarterly cycle. None of these moves require you to predict the next shock. They require you to build a company that does not need to. I built my own coaching practice around this same discipline: no promise I cannot back with a named result, and no strategy that only works if the market holds still.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do CEOs lead through economic and geopolitical uncertainty in 2026?
Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, sees the CEOs who handle this stretch best doing three things: cutting reliance on outside capital, deploying AI inside their own cost structure, and building teams small enough to move fast when conditions change. Asad Zaman put it well when he described strategy under pressure as knowing every problem in the business, pushing resources into a few of them, and deliberately letting other fires burn.
Should I keep raising venture capital, or focus on making my company self-sustaining?
Aim for self-sustaining before your next round. Glenn Gow tells clients that the businesses surviving this stretch treat their next funding round as a backup plan, not a growth strategy. Theodore and Eric both walked away from that dependency by tightening EBIT and targeting Rule of 40 economics instead of chasing valuation.
What should a CEO do when tariffs or a trade disruption hit without warning?
Build a pricing and operations model that can replan in hours, not quarters. Jason Veiock frames the choice as a competitive one, not just an operational one, asking whether the rest of the world is waiting too before you decide to hold still. A company that only knows how to execute a static annual plan will lose ground to one that already built the muscle to replan weekly.
Will AI push my prices down no matter what I do?
For commoditized work, yes. But margin math does not have to move with it. Fred Voccola, CEO of Simpro, says the operational shift required to protect margin against falling prices is “almost as if the assembly line was invented,” moving his teams from producing 100 units of functionality to 5,000. Glenn Gow tells clients that whoever makes that operational leap first captures the margin while everyone else fights over the falling price.
How many people does an AI-first company actually need?
Fewer than you think, and the ones you keep need to be exceptional. Dylan Serota, CEO of Terminal, told Glenn that when valuations got rationalized during the rate hikes, his unicorn clients had to bring their cost structures down fast, and a lot of that meant shifting roles to nearshore talent in Latin America and Canada instead of expensive domestic hubs. Headcount decisions now come down to output per seat, not seats filled.
Should I keep growing headcount or cut it during a slowdown?
Look at your cost structure against your actual revenue trajectory, not your revenue target. Dylan told Glenn his clients were “coming off of having a cost structure that was way too large for revenue that was starting to decline,” which forced downsizing that should have happened earlier. Glenn Gow tells his coaching clients the same thing: cut the gap between your cost base and your real revenue line before the market forces you to.
What financial metrics should a CEO track to manage risk right now?
Start with the Fed funds rate. Ryan Baird told Glenn that most business owners cannot say where it sits, even though it anchors every risk conversation he has with a client. He starts every session by asking what a CEO thinks their biggest risks are and what they are actually trying to achieve, then works backward from there.
How should I allocate capital when everything in the business feels urgent?
Rank your problems before you rank your opportunities. Glenn Gow tells clients under pressure that most CEOs default to funding whatever feels loudest that week instead of whatever the metrics say matters most, and that the fix is deciding the ranking in a calm moment, not a chaotic one.
Is it smart to automate parts of my business with AI agents right now?
Yes, and the return can show up faster than most CEOs expect. Ryan‘s team automated the debt placement process for loans under $25 million, from intake through rate comparison across five lenders, to the point where one person can now handle every deal in that range. Glenn Gow points to this as the clearest kind of AI win: it removes headcount pressure without removing the service.
How do I know when to cut a project instead of doubling down on it?
Set your success and failure metrics before you start, not after the numbers come in. Glenn Gow tells clients to write down the number that kills a project before they fund it, not after, so the decision is already made before ego gets involved. That is the difference between cutting a loss on schedule and riding it down out of pride.
Do I need a formal mandate to force AI adoption across my company?
Some CEOs need one to move fast enough. AJ Bruno, CEO of Quotapath, told Glenn that after leading his company through the SVB collapse, rising rates, and two rounds of layoffs, he made an unconditional call: every software company has to be AI-first by the end of next year or it will not survive. Glenn Gow does not think every CEO needs to declare it that bluntly, but he agrees the deadline is closer than most leadership teams have budgeted for.
What is the biggest mistake CEOs make when hiring during uncertainty?
Treating the interview process the same way they did two years ago. Glenn Gow sees CEOs skip this test constantly: they hire on resume and pedigree and let AI fluency go unverified until the gap shows up in performance three months later, when it is far more expensive to fix.
How do I decide whether my company is actually ready to handle the next shock?
Check whether your team can operate without you in the room. Glenn Gow asks new coaching clients one question to test this: what breaks first if you disappear for two weeks? The answer to that question tells you more about your readiness than any forecast on your desk.
What You Do Next
You do not need to predict the next tariff shock or the next rate move to lead through this. You need a cost structure that does not depend on either one going your way. Glenn Gow works with CEOs on exactly this problem: where to apply AI inside your own operations first, how to size your team for what is actually coming, and how to build a pricing model that survives a shock instead of getting rewritten by one. If you want to walk through where your business stands right now, book time with Glenn and bring your toughest number.
