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KPMG’s 2026 CEO Outlook surveyed more than 1,300 CEOs of large companies worldwide, 400 of them in the United States. Among the US CEOs, 84% name AI a top investment priority for the next three years, and 65% will spend at least 10% of their capital budget on AI next year.

The returns are more modest. Only 9% say AI agents are transformational for their organisation. 39% report significant efficiency or growth gains, and 43% a moderate impact from targeted use cases. Meanwhile 89% expect to grow headcount over the next three years, while 53% plan reductions in some areas.

BCG surveyed 563 executives, from CEOs to directors. Only 36% say the senior leaders in their organisation are prepared for what AI is asking of them. The strongest signal sits in personal use: of the leaders who use AI day to day, 45% run an AI-mature organisation, against 19% of those who rarely or never use it.

Time spent learning shows the same pattern. Executives who spend more than a tenth of their working time learning to use AI in their own work are 1.7 times more likely to lead an AI-mature organisation. BCG describes three roles leaders now move between: visionary, co-developer and steward.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracks every announced CEO departure at US organisations, from listed companies to non-profits. August 2026 saw 186 exits, a jump from July. Over the first eight months of the year the count stands at 1,226, which is 18% below the 1,504 of the same period in 2025.

After two record years of departures, the market is calming down. Of the August exits, 22 were the planned end of an interim leadership period. Temporary leadership has become a regular part of how boards manage a transition.

Spencer Stuart's annual index of S&P 500 boards counts 364 new directors in the past proxy year, the lowest number since 2016. Only 24% of them are first-time directors, down from 31% a year earlier. Current and former CEOs make up 37% of the new arrivals, up from 30%.

Spencer Stuart reads it as boards leaning on seasoned judgement while AI and geopolitics raise what is asked of directors.

Russell Reynolds tracks CEO changes across 13 global stock indices. In 2025, 234 CEOs left, 16% more than the year before. The average tenure of a departing CEO fell to 7.1 years, from 7.4 in 2024.

The first half of 2026 shows the turn. Departures fell to the lowest first-half level in Russell Reynolds' tracking. And 30 of the 131 incoming CEOs, 23%, had led a listed company before: the highest first-half share in nine years of measurement.

Harvard Business Impact's annual global study into leadership development finds organisations prioritising the adoption of AI-based talent management and internal mobility, with respondents expecting leaders to make far greater use of AI in strategic decision making during 2026. Scalability was named the most important attribute when selecting a leadership development programme, and a large share of organisations still buy their leadership development externally.

The picture that emerges is of a leadership layer being asked to absorb new tools and new judgement at speed, while the organisations around them look for programmes that can reach many people at once rather than a select few.

Korn Ferry surveyed 250 board directors and CEOs in the US, the UK and wider EMEA in April 2026. Half of the boards say succession planning started too late at their last CEO transition. Only 15% say their organisation did a very strong job of preparing its first-time CEO. Just 10% say the new CEO was already fully connected to and trusted by the board.

Only 17% review succession plans every quarter. Among first-time CEOs, 49% feel confident managing the risks around AI and technology.

A multinational study among 404 university faculty members across the United States, Paraguay, Peru and the Dominican Republic examined how leadership practices reach engagement. The finding: organisational climate is the mechanism in between. Leaders who model the way and inspire a shared vision shape the climate, and it is that climate which drives engagement, rather than the leader's behaviour acting directly on people.

The researchers deliberately avoided the common weaknesses of leadership research, including overstated causal language, and treat leadership practices as something organisations can actually develop rather than a fixed trait.

Diligent asked 104 directors of US listed companies about AI in their own board work. 82% used generative AI for board work in the past six months, up from 66% in September 2025. Yet 54% say there is no guidance for directors at all. Only 6% have a policy written for the board itself.

Around 30% use AI to summarise board books, and 49% know of fellow directors using consumer AI tools for board work.

The 17th annual survey of UK interim managers by the IIM puts the average day rate at £907, up 1%. In the private sector it passed £1,000 for the first time, at £1,004. Assignments last 10.0 months on average, up from 9.6.

For the first time the survey asked about fractional work: 25% of respondents' most recent assignments were fractional. The mood is sober. 73% of interims expect no growth in the coming twelve months.

Researchers from Anadolu, Gaziantep and Izmir Democracy University analysed PISA 2022 data covering educators in Brazil, Malaysia and Macao, roughly nine thousand respondents across three economies with very different performance levels. They tested how leadership behaviour reaches wellbeing and job satisfaction.

Leadership behaviour was directly associated with both outcomes, but the effect ran substantially through two mediators: professional autonomy and organisational trust. Where those two were weak, leadership behaviour translated far less into wellbeing, across all three economies.

A systematic review of the literature on leadership behaviour in private sector digital transformation identifies two distinct research streams that are usually treated separately: effective strategic leadership behaviour and effective operational leadership behaviour. The review finds that relation-oriented and task-oriented behaviours need to be aligned to the cultural context to be effective, and that a leader's own digital competence shapes how supported employees feel.

The implication is uncomfortable for the traditional split between visionaries and operators: transformation appears to require both capabilities in the same leadership layer.

Bain's annual report shows buyout deal value rising 44% in 2025 to $904 billion, with exit value at $717 billion. Yet distributions to investors stayed at 14% of net asset value. Some 32,000 unsold companies worth $3.8 trillion are waiting for a buyer, and holding periods average around seven years.

The June midyear report adds the hard part. Deals now need roughly 10% to 12% annual EBITDA growth to deliver, against about 5% before. The value has to come from running the company better, because rising multiples no longer do the work.

BCG's fourth AI at Work survey covers 11,749 people in 14 markets. 30% say AI agents are already part of their workflow, up from 13% a year earlier. And 47% spend more time managing and directing AI than doing the work itself. Among managers and leaders, 65% expect agents to take over at least half of their job within three years.

The cost shows up in the head: 48% of leaders report more mental strain. Strategy makes the difference. A clear AI strategy from the top lifts measurable business impact by 25 percentage points, against about five from better tools.

McKinsey analysed more than two hundred family-owned businesses across fifty countries and ten sectors. The finding upends the usual story: after a CEO transition these companies underperform on revenue, shareholder returns and earnings for five years, and it happens whether the successor is a family member or an outside hire. The culprit is rarely the heir. It is the leader who leaves.

Some outgoing leaders exit too abruptly, handing over a title and a pile of inherited problems. Others never really leave, operating behind the scenes in ways that quietly undercut the successor. The best transitions, McKinsey found, treat the exit as its own carefully designed project, begun years early. Tellingly, the firm's own book on the subject is called CEO For All Seasons.

Heidrick & Struggles analysed requests for independent senior talent at large and mid-sized companies in the Americas and Europe. Interim C-suite engagements have risen 151% since 2021. Nearly a quarter of interim requests are tied directly to an organisational transformation.

A 2026 LinkedIn poll by the firm, informal but telling, found 80% of leaders planning a transformation this year and 42% not confident they have the leadership and resources to carry it out. 87% named execution, alone or together with strategy, as the struggle. Only 10% said strategy alone.

Microsoft's annual Work Trend Index surveyed 20,000 knowledge workers who use AI, in ten markets including the Netherlands. Organisational factors such as culture, manager support and talent practices account for 67% of the reported AI impact, against 32% for individual effort. Only 19% of respondents sit in what Microsoft calls the Frontier zone. Half are still emerging.

Only 26% say their leadership keeps clear alignment on AI. Microsoft sells AI itself, so we read these numbers as a strong signal. A measurement it is not.

Stanford's independent annual AI Index finds 88% of organisations using AI in at least one business function in 2025, up from 78%. Corporate AI investment reached $581.7 billion, up 130%. Generative AI reached about 53% of the population within three years, faster than the PC or the internet.

Yet the scaled use of AI agents was still in single digits for nearly every business function. The breadth is there. The depth is not yet.

Carta analysed startups and funding rounds on its own equity platform. Of the startups that closed a round there in 2025, 36% had two founders, rising to 40% in SaaS. At the same time 36% of startups founded on Carta in 2025 had a solo founder, up from 31% a year earlier.

Ownership tells the rest of the story. At seed, the median founding team still holds about 56% of the company. By Series A that is 36%. Equal splits are becoming more common: 27.3% of three-founder teams now split evenly, up from 21%.

Deloitte surveyed more than nine thousand leaders. The headline is a gap between doing and doing well: around sixty percent already lean on AI to support their decisions, yet only about five percent believe they manage that relationship effectively. Alongside it, most leaders call building an adaptable workforce critical to success, while only a small fraction feel they are leading that change well.

The message is not that AI is coming. It is that AI is already in the room where decisions are made, and most leaders are improvising. The skill of the next few years is not adopting the tools but building the judgement to use them, and the honesty to admit how new that judgement still is.

A team of economists, including researchers from Stanford and several central banks, surveyed nearly 6,000 senior executives in the US, the UK, Germany and Australia. 69% of their firms actively use AI. The executives themselves use it for 1.5 hours a week on average, and 28% do not use it at all during the working week.

Nine in ten see no effect yet. 89% report no impact on labour productivity over the past three years, and more than 90% see none on employment. For the next three years they expect productivity to rise 1.4% and employment to fall 0.7%. Their employees expect employment to rise 0.5%.

Techleap's sixth State of Dutch Tech counts 11,301 active tech companies and €2.64 billion in venture capital raised in 2025. Only 21.6% of Dutch tech companies make it to scale-up, below the European average of 24.1% and far below Germany at 39.2%.

AI shows the same gap. The Netherlands has the highest density of AI talent in Europe, 10.9 professionals per 10,000 inhabitants. Yet only 21.2% of Dutch AI start-ups scale, against 31.1% across Europe.

Atomico's analysis, building on its State of European Tech report, shows Europe generating 17% of new global enterprise value in technology while capturing only 10% of global exit value. By its estimate, Europe has underfunded its tech companies by about $375 billion over the past decade.

The returns are there: European venture capital delivered a ten-year return of 17.2%, against 13.1% in the US. Atomico argues the value leaks away at the stage of scaling and exit, and asks regulators to help keep it in Europe.

The fourth biennial study by the Dutch Council for Interim Management surveyed 43 interim agencies. The average hourly rate, including the agency margin, is €157, 18% higher than in 2023. An average assignment lasts 11.96 months.

For the first time the market is clearly split. One in three agencies saw revenue fall over the past two years, while 43% expect growth. Almost half, 48%, expect lower revenue because of stricter enforcement against false self-employment.

Advisers from the leadership consultancy ghSMART, writing in Harvard Business Review, examined why founder transitions are among the most consequential moments in a company's life. Their central finding is stark: a founder-CEO handover carries a risk of failure or performance downturn that is two to three times greater than a transition between non-founder chief executives.

Drawing on dozens of interviews and client cases, the authors trace the difficulty to how influential founders remain, and set out how founders, successors, boards and investors can plan the moment early, design an ongoing role that helps rather than hinders, and make sure the successor is genuinely set up to lead rather than left in the founder's shadow.

A recent academic review of the startup-to-scaleup literature, published by Springer Nature, gathers what the research consensus says about why some young companies make the leap and others stall. Leadership and vision run through all of it: founders set the direction, attract the capital and build the culture, but scaling asks something different of them.

The pattern the authors describe is precisely a change of season. Early-stage companies tend to thrive on visionary, improvised leadership; scaling rewards a more structured, managerial approach, which the review calls a complete shift in mindset. Founders who scale learn to delegate, build management systems and align teams around shared objectives, rather than remaining the single point every decision passes through.

Statistics Netherlands measured AI use among businesses with two or more employees. In 2025 one in six used AI, double the share of 2023. The spread by size is wide: 66% of firms with 250 or more employees, 45% of firms with 50 to 250, 27% of firms with 10 to 50 and 14% of the smallest.

Marketing and sales are the most common uses. The ICT sector leads, with 54% of firms using AI.