In Spain, the 2026 business agenda is marked by two major movements. The first is the consolidation of artificial intelligence as a central priority: it leads both in declared importance and in resources allocated, indicating that organisations are moving from exploration to a clearer phase of integration into processes, capabilities and decision-making models.

The second major shift is the growing importance of talent management and ways of working, which ranks among the leading priorities and records one of the largest increases compared with 2025, rising by 18 percentage points. This figure confirms that technological transformation cannot be understood apart from people: the adoption of Al requires new skills, continuous learning, cultural adaptation and more agile and crosscutting organisational models.

KEY CHALLENGES ON SPAIN’S BUSINESS AGENDA

• Al enters the integration phase. The challenge is no longer just to adopt it, but to incorporate it with strategic, ethical and reputational criteria, ensuring governance, training and measurement capacity.

• Talent becomes a condition for competitiveness. Technological transformation requires new capabilities and work models capable of turning innovation into real value

• Communication must better demonstrate its impact. Its role as a lever of trust and relationship with stakeholders needs to be supported by more robust metrics linked to business outcomes.

• Sustainability needs to strengthen its credibility. Sustainability shows a lower relative priority, with a 20-percentage-point drop, but it does not disappear from the agenda. In a context of greater regulatory pressure and social debate, the challenge will be to move from commitment to evidence, connecting sustainability with competitiveness, resilience and value.

• The push for responsible leadership: from recognised priority to management capability. Although its importance is widely acknowledged, it remains one of the areas with the greatest distance between recognition and activation. Progress will require turning it into decision criteria, indicators, incentives and accountability mechanisms.

• The management of intangibles requires more integration. The low identification of a specific function to manage intangibles means that 10% of organisations acknowledge not having a clear function to manage them. This offers a clear opportunity: we must move towards more cross-cutting, coordinated models that are closer to decision-making in order to generate real value.

SPAIN: AI AND TALENT AS DRIVERS OF TRANSFORMATION