This report captures how our Council is navigating AI-driven change inside their organizations right now around budget conversations, workforce decisions, and organizational negotiations. 

It draws on member intelligence gathered across DXC events from Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 as a unique and proprietary pool of research data. It aims to capture and distill Council knowledge into actionable insights that our members can use to address their own challenges of the moment.

The data is synthesized into four themes:

• How accountability has shifted from influence to ownership
• What it looks like to shape enterprise AI transformation
• How members are repositioning design's value for a C-suite that reads results, not advocacy
• Where the design executive role is actively expanding in scope

The report surfaces those conditions, tensions, and documents what members are doing differently.

A new economy is taking shape. AI has made compute a critical factor of production — and when organizations can maintain output while fundamentally reducing the human labor required to produce it, leadership has a fiduciary obligation to act. The decoupling of organizational growth from headcount growth is not a future scenario. It is the operating condition we already inhabit.

2026 is a track-laying year. AI is being embedded across business functions, workforce models, and capital allocation decisions at every level of the enterprise. The window for design executives to be a driving force, not a responding one, will not remain open forever.

The most consequential design challenge of this moment is no longer the screen. It is shaping what AI is built to value, whose needs it serves, and how humans and intelligent systems learn to work alongside each other. The executives in this report inserted themselves before the policies were written, the models were set, and the budgets allocated. That is our work. It always has been.