North America Report

The 2019 Worldcom Confidence Index is an invaluable benchmark for the confidence levels of business leaders.  In our second annual Confidence Index, we commissioned Advanced Symbolics Inc. (ASI), a research company that uses artificial intelligence (AI), to create a fully representative understanding of what audiences are saying. We captured and analysed the online contributions, in nine languages, of 58,374 CEOs and CMOs globally. This enabled us to identify which topics are highest on the leadership agenda, and how confident or concerned leaders are about the topic. 

Since we published our first Confidence Index, world events such as: the US/China trade war, Brexit, Amazon forest fires, the Hong Kong crisis, the increasing pace of global warming and the resurgence of diseases such as Measles, have continued to create a more uncertain world. Our second Confidence Index shows exactly how confident or concerned business leaders are about dealing with these challenges.  

This year’s findings have uncovered a 21% decline in confidence globally since 2018.

In this second annual North American Confidence Index, we captured and analysed the online contributions of 25,835 business leaders from Canada, Mexico and US. There are some interesting similarities and differences with the global results.

The top six findings for North America are:  

#1 North American confidence plummets by 44% from 2018

#2 Influencers are the top audience for leader attention, but leaders are very concerned about communicating with them – producing the second lowest CI score for an audience on the North American index

#3 Employee-related topics dominate leaders’ agenda

• Employee-related topics take five out of the top six topic places
• Upskilling and reskilling the most discussed topic
• Leaders are concerned about reaching this audience. Employees has the lowest CI score of all audiences

#4 Leaders have concerns about their ability to protect their brand in a crisis. This features at #19 of 23 topics in the index

#5 Global trade agreements and tariffs undermine confidence. This topic appears at #17 of 23 topics on the index

#6. North American leaders are mildly confident about the impact of the way political leaders communicate on social media. But leaders in the US are very concerned – with a CI score of just 15.17. 

The Global report for the Worldcom Confidence Index 2019 can be seen here. You can view the full North American report here or see the deck below. To have the best viewing experience please use full screen mode.