A quiet admission from boardrooms across continents has hardened into a measurable pattern: 90 per cent of senior executives at large global firms acknowledge they miss strategic targets because of poor execution, not flawed strategy, according to a study by The Economist Intelligence Unit. The figure, cited in management literature and echoed by practitioners from Mexico City to Stockholm, captures a structural weakness that digital acceleration is now amplifying. As transaction volumes surge—Indonesia’s digital payments jumped 42.86 per cent year-on-year to 5.15 billion transactions in April 2026—the cost of execution failure shifts from missed objectives to real-time financial and reputational damage.

Viewed from northern Europe, the mechanism behind the gap is increasingly understood as a behavioural rather than a technical problem. Swedish change-management researchers Mikal Björkström and Ola Rosenlind identify five recurring traps: unclear goals, bypassing the people affected, lack of key-person sponsorship, resource overstretch, and premature declaration of success. Their work, grounded in organisational psychology, finds that resistance is not a system error but a predictable human response to change that ignores dialogue and co-creation. This aligns with field observations from Latin America, where consultants note that even when objectives are clear and resources adequate, the absence of rigorous follow-up—specific deadlines, named owners, honest progress reviews—turns plans into shared wishes. Only 26 per cent of employees globally have regular progress reviews with their manager, a FranklinCovey study shows, leaving accountability diffuse.

The impact is visible in sectors where digital transformation is most acute. Portugal’s technology market is consolidating: the LUZA Group’s acquisition of Syffer responds to a European Commission finding that only 8.63 per cent of Portuguese enterprises use AI, below the EU average, while ICT specialists represent just 5.2 per cent of employment. The talent shortage, flagged by the OECD across high-qualification occupations, forces firms to buy capacity rather than build it. In Indonesia, the financial sector confronts a parallel strain. Islamic banks have grown assets 10.49 per cent to Rp1,061.61 trillion while holding gross non-performing financing to 2.28 per cent, a sign of maturing risk management. Yet the same market saw 579,459 fraud reports lodged with the national anti-scam centre between November 2024 and May 2026, with Rp638.9 billion in victim funds frozen. Regulators in Jakarta now mandate anti-fraud strategies covering detection, investigation, and sanctions under POJK No. 12/2024, pushing banks and fintechs to deploy AI-driven anomaly detection that reads risk across transactions, user behaviour, and device channels.

The next milestone is not a single event but a capability threshold that financial supervisors and corporate boards are beginning to codify: data liquidity. The concept, articulated by treasury practitioners in Mexico, describes the capacity for reliable, contextualised information to flow securely to decision-makers in time to act. Without it, artificial intelligence amplifies bad data rather than sharpening judgment. The prerequisite, industry leaders stress, is not more technology but disciplined data governance and a culture that rewards clarity—leaders who state the decision, the rationale, and the risk accepted, then protect time for what is important over what is merely urgent. The watchpoint is whether organisations can embed these practices before the next cycle of digital investment hardens existing execution gaps into structural disadvantage.