Leading Business Transformations in the Age of AI

Market leaders differ in how they perceive and react to challenges, build capabilities and use customer-centric business transformation to enable business model reinvention (BMR) and drive business outcomes.

What do the best-performing businesses do differently? Why do they prioritise customer-centric business transformation when responding to changes in the market? How do they respond to changes in the market? And which business outcomes do they focus on?

This year’s Market Winners Survey highlights that customer-centric transformation is a logical response to today’s business challenges. Our research reveals that top-performing companies differ in how they perceive challenges, build capabilities and reinvent business models.

While Market Winners around the world all share certain characteristics, Belgian Market Winners stand out from their international peers.

Belgian Market Winners tend to prioritise revenue growth more than cost savings when it comes to implementing customer-centric business transformations, resulting in higher revenue and profit growth in the 12 months following investments in customer-centric activities.

Even though they are aware that this prioritisation will change customer interactions, which will have a significant impact on their operating model in the coming years, Belgian Market Winners see this change in their operations as necessary to keep up with their customers and remain sustainable in the future. 

Lastly, Belgian Market Winners rely more on internal resources to undertake their transformation programmes even as they acknowledge their limited capabilities, notably in terms of technology. This reluctance to work with expert third parties could hinder the success of Belgian transformation programmes.

The Market Winners Survey is based on results of a market survey of 1,046 C-suite and senior executives in July 2024. To separate Winners and Underperformers in our respondents, we constructed a scale across key customer-centric business transformation metrics covered in the survey. Winners were identified as the top 15% and Underperformers as the bottom 25% of the survey population across these questions.

For this survey, customer-centric business transformation was defined as an initiative that aims to increase relevance and closeness with customers, provide richer experiences and support growth (revenue and/or market share) by enriching marketing, sales and/or service.