Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

Twenty twenty-six will be a year of financial corrections, AI-driven biological breakthroughs, and new thinking about cybersecurity and executive protection—at least according to the CEOs I recently asked to provide bold prognostications. Here’s how 12 of them responded.

Rick Caccia, CEO of AI security platform WitnessAI, believes 2026 will bring the first major AI-driven cyberattack that causes significant financial damage. After that happens, he predicts corporations will augment their existing security budgets, and those deals will close three times faster than current cycles as companies move fast to secure their systems.

“Currently, enterprise AI spending remains largely compliance-focused as companies prepare for regulatory requirements in the absence of active threats,” Caccia says. An AI-powered attack will highlight the need for additional security investment, he says, adding, “This will create a new market dynamic where AI security moves from ’nice to have‘ to ’business critical‘ overnight.”

Ted Bailey, founder and CEO of Dataminr, and Balaji Yelamanchili, CEO of ThreatConnect, see business leaders demanding threat intelligence that’s tailored to their specific organizations in 2026. Amid tight budgets and staffing shortages—not to mention AI threats—companies need real-time intelligence about threats, communicated in the context of their........

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