Middle market leaders focus on what they can control

A Capital One survey of more than 1,000 middle market business executives shows 89% are confident they can expand—with a deliberate playbook built on the levers they can control: organic growth, product innovation and market expansion.

In a year of stubborn inflation, shifting trade policy and uneven consumer demand, middle market leaders remain confident their businesses will grow over the next 12 months as they focus on strategies for attracting more customers, improving products and services and expanding their markets. 

Capital One’s 2025 Middle Market Strategic Investments Survey of 1,011 U.S. financial decision-makers found 89% believe their businesses will grow in the coming year and 73% believe the current environment offers more opportunities than challenges. 

These financial decision-makers are putting strategy into action by focusing entirely on the factors they can control amid macroeconomic crosswinds. While they cite inflation (60%) and economic uncertainty (53%) as their top external concerns—forces no single company can influence—they aren’t waiting for conditions to clear. Instead, they are focused on serving customers and building their businesses. Thirty-two percent said organic and customer growth was their priority, while 24% cited product and service innovation and 21% listed market expansion. Taken together, they show that middle market leaders are focused on strategy rather than sentiment.

While many businesses focus their resources on acquiring new customers, developing and expanding relationships with existing clients can be a more efficient path for organic growth. This strategy relies on assets a company already controls, such as deep knowledge of its existing customer base and sustained operational investment, typically resulting in a longer payoff curve than acquisitions or product launches.

Investment preferences support this strategy. Forty-three percent of leaders identify customer experience as a planned area of investment over the next year, and 41% name marketing and sales. At the capital deployment level, sales and marketing ranks as the second highest priority, which 48% of respondents cited—second only to cybersecurity and risk management at 49%.

In the context of organic growth, cybersecurity becomes vital because it represents the operational foundation upon which customer trust depends. A middle market business that grows organically is one that retains, deepens and expands relationships with the customers it already has. Those relationships are increasingly digital, increasingly data-rich and increasingly exposed. Cybersecurity isn’t a separate line item from growth—it’s the precondition for it.

The same logic applies to investments in customer experience and sales enablement. Leaders pursuing organic growth are building the operational muscle to keep and expand the customer relationships they already have.

For many middle market companies, product and service innovation is now inseparable from artificial intelligence (AI).

Two-thirds of leaders (66%) identify AI as a top-planned investment area for the next 12 months, more than any other category. Twenty-nine percent name AI as the technology likely to produce the biggest return on investment over the next year, well ahead of marketing and sales (13%) and IT infrastructure and cloud (10%). 

Adoption has moved well past the pilot phase. Slightly more than half of businesses (51%) report they’re in the implementation and scaling stage of AI deployment, and another 16% describe their integration as complete. 

Forty-seven percent of respondents said they planned to invest in data and analytics, and 42% cited research and development as a capital deployment priority. Leaders increasingly recognize that innovation won’t come from AI in isolation. Data infrastructure, analytics capability and product development capacity are needed to turn the technology into something customers will pay for.

However, ambition may be outpacing capability for some companies. Fifty-eight percent of businesses report a technical skills gap related to AI, which is shaping how and where companies are choosing to invest.

As the chart below demonstrates, a majority of respondents plan to invest in AI over the next 12 months. A significant number of leaders said they expect to invest in IT and cloud infrastructure, data and analytics and cybersecurity, with customer experience, marketing and sales and workforce and talent.

Talent is part of the foundation, too. Sixty-eight percent of businesses are investing in formal training and professional development programs, and 57% are leveraging technology-based learning tools. Half of the leaders surveyed said training the current workforce is a top concern, 49% point to retaining top performers and 48% listed managing rising compensation and benefits costs.

Perhaps the most telling figure in the entire survey is that 89% of leaders agree that their current or planned investments are adequate to achieve their goals. Confidence in growth—and the plans to foster it—is running high. Leaders aren’t just hoping for a good year, they’re engineering one. 

Middle market leaders are deploying capital, hiring, training and acquiring under a defined three-part strategy, and they’re doing it with conviction that their plans are the best for their businesses. They’ve accepted that the macro environment isn’t theirs to dictate, and they’ve responded by tightening their grip on everything that is under their control. 

For commercial banks, the implication is that the most valuable partnerships in 2026 are those built around execution, not just access to capital. At Capital One, we’re navigating many of these same changes alongside our clients. We, too, are thinking about how we can expand our existing customer relationships, leverage data and analytics and retain talent. 

Our experience plotting our own pathway is central to how we serve middle market clients. Having a partner who is navigating these changes provides critical expertise for middle market companies plotting their own course for growth. 

 “Every middle market company should work with a banking team who fundamentally understands their business and with whom they feel comfortable embarking on a long-term relationship,” McCarrick said. “In that way, choosing a commercial bank is much like choosing a physician—it comes down to expertise, shared values and the right chemistry. That’s one of the best ways to make sure your company stays healthy and continues to grow.”

Learn more about custom solutions you can bank on and how a dedicated industry team can help move your business forward.