UK firms facing five-month delays due to rising decision complexity

The research, which polled over 250 senior leaders across the UK, reveals that there is a growing “confidence deficit” at the heart of UK decision making.

In sectors where strategic decisions direct multimillion-pound investments, from critical infrastructure expansion and outage response to insurance and climate mitigation, more than one in five leaders (22%) say they regularly have to revisit major strategic decisions because of incomplete or inaccurate data, leading to delays of five months on average.

The confidence deficit

Three quarters of firms (76%) say decision-making has changed significantly over the past five years. Four in ten (40%) say decisions are more complex than ever, a third (35%) say they take longer to make, and 37% say they are also having to make significantly more strategic decisions than before.

Compounding this, the pressure to act at pace is intensifying, as over a quarter of leaders (28%) feel expected to move faster than ever.

When looking at why delays are arising, a fifth of firms (20%) say the sheer volume of data now available has left them with a less joined-up view than they had five years ago, and a quarter (23%) report greater "decision fatigue" as a result.

Nearly a third (31%) say concerns about data quality are actively undermining confidence in major business decisions. A further 31% say understanding where their data comes from has become a business-critical issue in its own right.

The AI trust gap

The research also reveals that these problems are being amplified as organisations integrate AI into their decision-making. 71% of leaders are not confident in the data used to generate AI insights, while more than a fifth (22%) are not confident in the data used to train the models behind them - creating the conditions for errors to be learnt and repeated while costs and delays accumulate.

Reflecting on solutions to the problem, four in ten (39%) say better access to high-quality, trusted data would directly enable faster decision-making, while a third (34%) say trusted location data specifically helps them make more confident decisions and reduce costly project delays.

This may explain why accuracy of data and analysis ranked as the top priority for almost half of firms (47%) - nearly twice as important as cost (24%). Reliability and trustworthiness of underlying data came second (36%), followed by ease of use and the ability to simplify complex decisions (35%).

Tina continued: 

"As AI increasingly influences strategic decision-making, the quality and provenance of the underlying data that powers it becomes even more critical. That’s why organisations working in these critical industries, and in an increasingly complex world, need to look at location first. When leaders have trusted, accurate location data, they have the confidence to move quickly and decisively, connecting the dots between operational, customer and network intelligence in ways that fragmented or incomplete data simply cannot. That is what enables organisations to get decisions right the first time.”

These findings form part of OS’s Building Decision Confidence Report, which examines the growing importance of reliable, high-quality data in enabling faster, more informed decision-making across the UK’s utilities, telecoms and financial services sectors.

You can download the full building decision confidence report.

Methodology

Research conducted by Censuswide among 251 C-suite and organisational planning decision-makers in UK organisations across Utilities, Telecoms and Financial Services. All respondents manage projects worth £100,000 and over. The data was collected between 20-27 March 2026. Censuswide is a member of the Market Research Society (MRS) and the British Polling Council (BPC), and a signatory of the Global Data Quality Pledge. Censuswide adheres to the MRS Code of Conduct and ESOMAR principles.