Greg Janicik, Ph.D.
Managing Partner
When a board names a ready-now CEO successor, what exactly is that person ready to lead? Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the investment, operating, and workforce decisions that reach the CEO’s desk. The board needs evidence that its prospective leader has made comparable decisions and led people through the changes that followed.
The next CEO will assume responsibility for AI as an enterprise-wide leadership imperative, with implications for strategy, capital allocation, and execution across functions. The executive team’s technology fluency and ability to lead transformation will affect how the company converts AI investments into business value.
Here are six strategies for boards to keep in mind when selecting a CEO equipped to lead in the age of AI.
Connect AI Ambition and CEO Succession
For boards evaluating successors, technology fluency and experience leading transformation now belong in the assessment of CEO readiness.
Greg Janicik, Managing Partner, Leadership Consulting at DHR, said boards increasingly expect CEOs to identify business value in AI and make investment decisions accordingly. Meeting that expectation requires an executive to establish priorities across functions, resolve competing demands, and accept responsibility for results.
Reconsider the CEO Scorecard
In a recent CEO search for a consumer goods company, the board included experience leading technological transformation among the seven attributes it considered most important for its next CEO, said Justin Menkes, Managing Partner, Leadership Consulting at DHR.
“Technological transformation is getting more weight now than it ever has,” Menkes said.
“Boards should look for credible evidence of the candidate’s personal leadership in that work,” Janicik said. Decisions about capital allocation, competing business priorities, and coordination across functions establish the scope of the executive’s responsibility.
Test Technology Fluency Through CEO Decisions
Technology fluency is a current understanding of emerging technologies and digital trends that an executive applies to business decisions. A technology-fluent CEO asks informed questions about investments, risks, and opportunities; translates technical concepts into business implications and trade-offs; and exercises practical judgment about value, scalability, and organizational readiness.
“You have to work hard to be current because it’s so easy to fall behind quickly,” said Janicik.
The reasons an executive approved an investment, deferred another, or revised an operating plan reveal how that leader weighed business value, data readiness, and execution risk.
A CEO’s decisions draw on business knowledge, relationships, and information from across the organization.
“The strength of humans continues to be synthesis, critical judgment, and critical thinking,” Menkes said.
Preserve Options Through Leadership Depth
A thin internal CEO pipeline limits a board’s choices when the company’s strategic requirements change. An external successor needs time to understand the company’s operations, relationships, and sources of value before determining where AI could change the business.
Familiarity with the organization and its stakeholders helps an internal candidate evaluate workflows and understand how the company creates value. The succession assessment also needs to establish whether the candidate can challenge existing practices and lead decisions across functions.
At a global materials company, supply chain disruptions exposed gaps in leadership depth. AI capability that might have supported the company’s response remained within the technology function, leaving supply chain leaders and the executive team without access to it.
4 Dimensions of AI Leadership
Successful boards evaluate AI leadership across four dimensions that provide specific criteria for evaluating a CEO successor’s ability to turn AI investments into business value:
- Strategic value creation encompasses setting AI priorities; reimagining products, services, and business models; and allocating capital, leadership attention, and resources to deliver measurable growth, productivity, and competitive advantage.
- Operating model and data readiness includes redesigning workflows, aligning operating models, ensuring data access and quality, and coordinating business and technology leaders to execute across the enterprise.
- Governance and risk ownership requires clear accountability and controls; management of legal, ethical, regulatory, cybersecurity, and model risks; and AI use that aligns with the company’s values.
- Talent, culture, and AI adoption involves championing responsible AI use, addressing workforce anxiety and trust, investing in reskilling and leadership capability, encouraging experimentation and learning, and leading changes in culture and workflow.
In response, the company established an AI leadership group reporting directly to the CEO, with members from across functions. The group connected business leaders with technology capability and gave them responsibility for selecting applications that addressed company priorities.
Leadership depth also affects how the company reassigns responsibilities as AI changes work. A bench that combines leadership capability with functional expertise gives the organization people who can take on new roles.
“The qualities that support that adaptability are agility, the capacity to learn new things quickly, and the intellectual curiosity to do so.”
– Justin Menkes
Assess Leadership Through AI Results
Presentations from senior executives give directors access to the leaders who will support the next CEO. Their accounts of AI applications and business performance reveal how they connect functional responsibilities with company priorities.
For example, a medical technology company’s board required each senior executive to present AI’s benefits within that leader’s function and support the presentation with metrics. The chief financial officer explained how finance was applying AI to automate processes and restructure the team. Leadership assessment during a succession project also gave the board added insight into the executives behind those presentations.
For organizations experimenting with AI to eliminate low-value work and reduce the time required to deliver products and services, the strategic challenge is connecting those individual applications to the company’s multi-year business and financial goals.
“The management team has to share their AI strategy with the board, so they can provide oversight governance.”
– Greg Janicik
Management and directors then agree on the metrics and review performance against them. Those measures give functional presentations a common reference point in the company’s AI strategy. For succession, the discussion concerns how potential successors account for their decisions, explain performance, and coordinate work beyond their own functions.
Strengthen Board Technology Acumen for Succession Decisions
Boards face their own technology fluency demands as they evaluate management’s AI strategy. Directors are pursuing continuing education, using resources from industry organizations, consulting outside advisers, and visiting relevant companies to discuss AI with their management teams.
Appointing a director who has AI expertise adds knowledge to those discussions, but the appointment also creates a dependency if other directors rely on that person to interpret management’s proposals.
“Everything gets translated through that one board member, and you’re not raising the whole boat,” Janicik said.
Directors need enough technology fluency to question management’s assumptions and assess the business implications themselves.
The next CEO will inherit the company’s technology investments, operating commitments, and leadership capabilities. AI strategy and CEO succession belong in the same board discussion because the company’s choices about growth, investment, and operations determine what its next leader must deliver. A ready-now designation earns its credibility when the board can connect a candidate’s record of judgment and execution with those demands.
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Preparing for Your Next CEO? Let’s Start the Conversation
DHR Global helps boards and senior leadership teams align CEO succession with the strategic, operating, and talent demands of AI transformation. Through succession planning, executive assessment, and leadership development, DHR can help organizations define the capabilities their next CEO will need, evaluate internal and external candidates, and build the leadership depth to turn AI ambition into sustained business value.