#corporate-affiliates

#corporate-affiliates

CMSWire's Marketing & Customer Experience Leadership channel is the go-to hub for actionable research, editorial and opinion for CMOs, aspiring CMOs and today's customer experience innovators.

Walmart employs more people than the Chinese Liberation Army, illustrating its growth from a mom-and-pop operation to a major employer in the U.S.

Most for-profit companies still confine nonprofit relationships to corporate philanthropy. Donations flow through foundations, annual reports highlight community contributions, and nonprofit engagement is framed as evidence of corporate responsibility.

Multinational firms are under rising pressure-from investors, regulators, and employees-to demonstrate positive societal impact in the places where they do business. With ESG-focused institutional investments projected to reach nearly $34 trillion this year and roughly 90% of large U.S. companies now disclosing ESG reports, these pressures are now a central part of corporate strategy.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the unprecedented step of designating a U.S. firm-Anthropic-as a supply chain risk. Anthropic's crime? It refused to violate industry-wide protocols against using AI for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. Hegseth's designation, which has until now been reserved for foreign firms, bars U.S. military contractors from doing business with the company.

Rather than stolen data making headlines, it was business stoppage that triggered attention. Moving into 2026, the board's focus should be on ensuring business continuity and building resilience in the face of emerging risks generated by AI usage and attack vectors, quantum computing and geopolitics.

People recognize polish, but they respond to purpose. What the industry is starting to learn is that value is in the principles those tools represent. Technology is initially and temporarily impressive, whereas values are unforgettable.

The report recorded a significant drop in the number of companies willing to report their work on non-discrimination policies, equitable benefits, an inclusive workplace culture, and corporate social responsibility - the four pillars of the CEI - as the current administration publicly disparaged DEI programs and rooted out initiatives across the federal government. The CEI saw a dramatic 65% drop in participation this year, falling from 377 Fortune 500 companies in 2025 to just 131 such companies in 2026.

You have probably heard about voluntary carbon offset-if not from elsewhere, from buying plane tickets, where, after you have paid for the ticket, the tax, the seats, maybe the luggage fee, and the priority boarding, you have an option to also pay to offset your carbon footprint. Companies get to do this, too, and, unlike you, they get to brag about it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a future-state conversation. It is here, embedded across enterprise systems, cloud platforms, security tooling, analytics engines and decision-making frameworks. The pace of adoption has been extraordinary, and so is the scale and intensity of the infrastructure required to power it. Against this backdrop, Microsoft's recent call for a "community-first" approach to AI infrastructure is both timely and necessary.

Businesses are acting fast to adopt agentic AI- artificial intelligence systems that work without human guidance-but have been much slower to put governance in place to oversee them, a new survey shows. That mismatch is a major source of risk in AI adoption. In my view, it's also a business opportunity. I'm a professor of management information systems at Drexel University's LeBow College of Business,

New analysis published today (6 February 2026) reveals a structural issue that is eroding valuations, limiting exits, and trapping founders in their businesses, with around 80% of UK private companies failing to sell. The White Paper, The Owner Dependence Problem in UK SME Businesses, published by Exit Factor, highlights how excessive reliance on founders is undermining business value across the UK SME sector. The White Paper analyses businesses with annual revenues between £3m and £30m and demonstrates how owner dependence materially restricts strategic options for owners.