The CEO Radar Q1 2025

After voters cast their ballots for change in dozens of national elections in 2024, CEOs are struggling to quickly adapt to a new global agenda focused more on trade and taxes, and less on environmental and cultural issues.

That’s the conclusion of the first edition of the CEO Radar—a new tool to help CEOs determine which issues truly deserve their time and attention. It unpacks the leading topics discussed on earnings calls, enabling chief executives to compare their agendas to those of their peers, and to the market’s expectations.

BCG and Bloomberg Media Studios analyzed what CEOs and analysts were saying on Q4 2024 earnings calls to produce the Radar, which spans roughly 300 topics across 4,667 Q4 earnings calls worldwide. It tracks which topics are trending higher or lower, what the narratives are behind those numbers, and the issues on which CEOs are leading or lagging the market.

This first quarterly edition comes at a propitious time, when CEOs worldwide are adjusting to widespread changes in national leadership and agendas.  

Almost everywhere, 2024 was a brutal year for the incumbents. Opposition parties won power around the world, from the United Kingdom to South Korea, Ghana, Panama, Portugal, Uruguay and Botswana, among others. In the US, Republicans pulled off a trifecta by regaining control of the White House and Senate and maintaining a slim majority in the House of Representatives.

These election outcomes reflect citizens’ frustration with the economic and cultural status quo. How CEOs navigate these shifts in public sentiment, new national priorities and the policies that drive them may well determine their success in the months ahead.

To help them master this evolving landscape, the CEO Radar goes beyond traditional anecdotal reporting to look at the hard data. Earnings calls function as clear and concise statements of what matters most to CEOs. The Radar uses proprietary AI to apply semantic parsing techniques to earnings call transcripts. By understanding when CEOs are discussing a given topic—even if they don’t use a set of specific keywords—the Radar creates trend analytics that allow CEOs to spot emerging themes and shifts in corporate agendas.

The three key takeaways from the Radar’s review of Q4 earnings calls are:

The Pivot to Economic Issues

These global trends are playing out differently at a regional level. We looked at issues where there were at least 25 mentions of the topic in either Q3 or Q4 in each region.

The movement away from DEI and ESG topics, and toward topics related to taxes and trade, was both deep and wide in Q4. But the trend is playing out differently in different regions, presenting challenges to CEOs who must create coherent global corporate policies while still addressing national political dynamics.

Trade topics were generally mentioned by CEOs globally more often in Q4 than in the prior quarter. These include Tax Policy (with mentions climbing 18%), Supply Chain Shifts (up 12%), Reshoring (up 6%) and Cryptocurrency (up 3%).

ESG topics took a hit, including Greenhouse Gas Emissions Target (down 41%), Board Independence (–39%), Community Rights & Relations (–38%), Environmental Supply Chain Management (–30%), Climate Change (-28%), Carbon Neutral (–27%) and Greenhouse Gas Emissions (–23%).

DEI topics also were less of a focus in Q4, with mentions of Diversity down 37% worldwide.

AI Agents Rising

AI remains a top-10 topic for CEOs, and their number-one tech topic by a wide margin. But the conversation is diverging along regional lines, while evolving to become more strategic and focused.

CEOs Are Lagging the Market       

Even though CEOs are cutting their mentions of DEI and ESG topics at a furious clip, they still care about those issues far more than do analysts, who serve as a proxy for the market. The differences in agendas between CEOs and analysts are revealed by the list of top topics for each group, ranked by number of mentions.

Despite significant declines in the number of mentions of environmental topics in Q4 CEO remarks, executives still have a ways to go until they match the disregard that analysts have for topics related to the long-term health of the Earth’s climate, such as Energy Transition, Carbon Neutral and Climate Change.

Where analysts are focusing their environmental attention, far more than CEOs, is on tactical ways to meet those long-term goals, like Lithium, Biofuels and Nuclear Power.

While changing political priorities are poised to slow climate action in some countries, businesses across the globe must still contend with the growing risks extreme weather poses to their operations, infrastructure, and supply chains. And while the outlook for regulations and incentives to curb greenhouse gases is cloudy at best, companies must still consider how these transition risks could impact their costs and competitiveness.

CEOs are more likely to keep investors and other stakeholders on their side by making a clear business case for sticking with climate agendas that mitigate risks and lay a foundation for future growth. 

Analysts mentioned Tariffs 95% more often in Q4 than in Q3, ranking it as the 13th most important topic on their list. For CEOs, it was only the 59th most important topic, with their mentions of it down 16% quarter-on-quarter. That signals that CEOs are less concerned about possible new levies than the market is.

Mentions of tariffs by both groups tended to cluster around November 5, the date of the US election.

Given the renewed emphasis on trade, a handful of topics are almost certain to rise in importance in 2025:

As new national leaders begin changing policies, DEI and ESG topics appear poised to continue to recede from prominence in 2025, while trade and economic issues lay claim to the headlines. Whether CEOs can change their focus as fast as the market—and find ways to accommodate regional differences in policies—may well be their top agenda item for the new year.

To assess CEO agendas on a global basis, we examined the Q4 2024 earnings calls of the 10,223 companies in the Bloomberg World Large, Mid & Small Cap Total Return Index (WLST). The index covers 99% of the market cap of the measured market.

The total number of earnings calls we analyzed was smaller than 10,223 because not all jurisdictions require publicly listed companies to report their earnings on a quarterly basis. Also, the Bloomberg database of earnings call transcripts includes only companies that conduct earnings calls in English, as well as some large Japanese companies for which we translate the calls into English.

In Q4 2024, 4,667 companies in the WLST Index conducted earnings calls in English—within the historical range of 4,500 to 5,000 companies per quarter. Here is the regional breakdown, based on where those companies are domiciled:

Bloomberg distinguishes between prepared remarks by CEOs and other C-suite members, and the questions asked by analysts. Within these categories of remarks, Bloomberg applies artificial intelligence to identify mentions of almost 300 topics. Topics can be mentioned multiple times in a given transcript. They are counted multiple times if mentioned in separate paragraphs, but counted only once if they are mentioned multiple times in a single paragraph.  

This methodology both reduces the “noise” inherent in a system that simply searches for any mentions of keywords, and it also spots references to a topic even when specific keywords are not spoken by the earnings call participants.

To be included as a CEO trending topic in this report, a topic had to be mentioned by CEOs at least 50 times in either Q3 or Q4. We excluded topics that refer to a company’s financial metrics or corporate actions, such as Revenue or Buybacks, because they are trending every quarter. We also excluded topics related to Commodities because they are of interest to a relatively small number of companies. Once those adjustments were made, we were left with a list of 209 topics discussed on Q4 earnings calls.