New report reveals the high stakes of AI adoption for those at the top
Chief executive officers are growing more concerned about losing their jobs because of failed AI adoption, according to a new report, which highlighted the stakes faced by leadership in the ongoing technological transformation in workplaces.
A global study from Dataiku, conducted by Harris Poll, unveiled that 80% of CEOs believe their job is at risk if AI fails by 2026.
Another 77% also believe that a fellow CEO will likely be ousted in 2026 due to a failed AI strategy or an AI-driven crisis.
The findings indicate that AI adoption is increasingly linked to CEO tenure, amplifying the pressure on chief executives to lead effectively amid technological advancement.
"In 2025, CEOs feared falling behind in AI. In 2026, they fear something far more dangerous: being held accountable for it. AI is no longer an innovation story — it is a performance mandate," the report read.
These job security concerns from CEOs stem from real-world data, where CEOs are seeing shortening tenures amid rising pressure to deliver soon after their appointment.
Data from the Russell Reynolds Associates (RRA) earlier this year showed that the average outgoing CEO tenure dropped to 7.1 years in 2025, down from the 7.4 years in 2024, and well below the 8.3 years in 2021 and 2023.
The RRA report also noted that the proportion of CEOs departing within 30 to 36 months also went up 79% year-over-year, while appointments lasting less than a year accounted for five per cent of all CEO departures globally in 2025.
RRA attributed the shorter tenures to the greater pressure faced by recent CEOs to make progress in their organisations within two to three years amid major shifts at work, such as rapid technological change.
"Today, CEOs are expected to demonstrate momentum almost immediately, even while they are still building their teams and navigating increasingly complex external demands," said Laura Sanderson, RRA EMEAI Co-Lead, in a previous statement.
This trend in leadership is backed by Dataiku's findings, where 62% of CEOs say their board is actively applying pressure to deliver measurable AI-driven outcomes.
"Boards, in particular, are no longer passive observers," the report read. "The pressure isn't increasing, it's hardening into expectation."
Fragmented leadership on AI
Yet despite the rising accountability for CEOs, the report found that they are not deeply involved in the decisions that shape AI outcomes in organisations.
Just 60% of CEOs said they participate in more than half of AI-related decisions, while only six per cent said they are involved in nearly all of them.
According to the report, decision-making when it comes to AI is increasingly distributed to chief information officers, data leaders, technical teams, and external vendors, among others.
In fact, the report found that CEOs are only stepping in when it comes to AI vendor selection after the decision has been made, not before it.
"That gap creates a critical disconnect: CEOs are accountable for AI success, but not consistently embedded in the decision-making processes that determine it," the report read.
"CEOs may set direction, but execution is fragmented across layers of the organisation. And when those layers misalign, accountability still rolls up to the top."
Florian Douetteau, CEO and co-founder of Dataiku, described the situation as a "cognitive dissonance."
"CEOs are staking their jobs on AI, but still questioning its outputs and struggling to control the systems they say they own," Douetteau said in a statement.
The report noted that companies that succeed in this phase of AI adoption are the ones that can govern it, measure it, and prove its impact under scrutiny.
"The companies that close that gap will be the ones building AI worth being accountable for. That is what separates a bet from a business," Douetteau added.
