C-Suite Outlook 2025: Human Capital Insights for Asia

16 March 2025 / Report

Our 2025 C-Suite Outlook survey shows C-Suite executives across Asia are preparing for ongoing economic and geopolitical challenges by focusing on accelerating digital transformation, integrating AI throughout their organizations to improve innovation, and building leadership capabilities that include knowledge of AI and other technologies.

Based on a survey of 1,722 global C-Suite leaders including 640 executives from Japan, China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, and The Philippines, the survey asked their views on the issues and events they expect to significantly impact their business in 2025. This report summarizes those responses and the strategies they intend to use to meet those challenges and the implications for CHROs in the region.

Key Insights

C-Suite leaders in Asia cite an economic downturn/recession and inflation, rapid advancing AI technology, and sustainability among the factors they expect to have a high impact on their organizations in 2025.
Labor shortages and higher labor costs are also considered high-impact issues, with around two-thirds (66%) of C-Suite executives in Japan anticipating severe labor shortages and 48% bracing for higher labor costs. These are by far the highest numbers among the regions surveyed. This shortage is particularly felt in sectors such as IT, manufacturing, construction, and health care; as a result, wages in Japan have been steadily rising, although not as rapidly as in some other countries.
Because of their focus on higher labor costs and talent shortages as high impact issues for 2025, C-Suite executives across Asia intend to focus on enhancing people productivity, attracting, and retaining talent and upskilling and reskilling talent as internal priorities for 2025.
C-Suite executives in Asia consider intensified global trade wars (40%) greater risk of conflict in Asia-Pacific, and foreign cyber attack, and increased tensions in the Taiwan Strait to be the leading conflict-related geopolitical business risk their organizations face in 2025. They cite higher energy prices, decoupling or derisking from China, and energy supply as the chief economy-related risks for 2025.
C-Suite executives in Asia rank innovation, investment in technology, including AI, and introducing new products and services as their primary strategies for growing profits. More C-Suite executives in India and ASEAN plan to use Technology and AI to improve profits compared to others in the region.
Innovative thinking and technology and AI skills are the main leadership requirements that C-Suite executives in Asia believe are necessary to drive future growth. In the current volatile business environment, many executives are looking for a mix of hard skills and more human-centric traits such as agility and resilience and change management skills.
A total of 49% of C-Suite executives in Asia and more than a third of CEOs globally expect rapidly advancing AI technology to be an organizational game changer in 2025. C-Suite executives in Asia say that so far, the most significant AI-related improvements in performance have been in innovation, workforce productivity, and customer satisfaction. They also cite data privacy and security concerns, the quality of AI output, and a lack of expertise as the main impediments to AI implementation.