Why AI Readiness Is Vital
to Your Leadership Succession Plan

What Traditional Succession Plans Miss and Why AI Readiness Is Critical

Most succession plans still prioritize leaders using criteria that mattered a decade ago:

• Can they manage a P&L?
• Do they have operational excellence?
• Have they delivered results in their present role?
• Can they manage stakeholders and navigate internal politics?

These aren't the wrong questions to ask.

They're just not enough anymore.

The Future Your Leaders Face Looks Nothing Like Today

The core problem, as explained by Korn Ferry's Jerry Collier, Solution Leader, EMEA Assessment & Succession, is that most succession plans are "optimized for today, not tomorrow."

You’re preparing leaders for the business as it exists now, not the AI-transformed one that’ll exist tomorrow.

Consider what might happen with an airline business. Today, their customer service mostly relies on call centers with agents handling thousands of queries. But agentic AI could change this.

With little or no humans leading it, agentic AI might soon be able to:

• Guide passengers through their journey, from arriving at the airport, through the terminal, all the way to their destination
• Advise them about less crowded or cheaper parking areas
• Direct them to shorter security and immigration lines
• Confirm that their bags are loaded at one end, and which carousel to collect them from at the other end

“You can transform the experience using agentic AI,” Collier explains. “But what does that mean for you as a CHRO? If these capabilities are already reshaping how work gets done today, what decisions, judgment, and leadership will your successors need to handle in three years’ time?”

Annual Reviews Can’t Match AI's Pace

But it's not just about future orientation. Traditional succession now faces limits in an AI-driven world.

The succession process moves too slowly. You review and evaluate talent annually, maybe twice a year. But AI capabilities change every few months. By the time you've identified a gap, the world has moved on.

Rewarding Familiar Faces, Not Future-Ready Leaders

What's more, succession often rewards visibility over potential. The leader with powerful allies at the top, the one everyone knows, gets the nod, even if someone less visible has more capability to lead through transformation.

The Blind Spots in Your Succession Assessments

You need to broaden the questions you ask to reflect what it takes to lead an AI-integrated business when identifying potential leaders.

Some questions to consider include:

• Do your leadership candidates know how to redesign the business to include AI?
• Can they lead teams where some members are AI agents, and the rest are human?
• Can they make judgment calls about when AI helps and when human expertise matters more?

Most succession plans don’t fully account for whether leaders can adapt at the speed AI demands or address the fear people feel as work changes. The criteria that matter for leading in an AI world simply aren't on the scorecard yet.

This has real consequences. Organizations promoting leaders without AI readiness struggle to scale AI beyond pilots and fall behind competitors who got succession right.

But perhaps the costliest outcome is that they lose their best people.

“Organizations that aren’t preparing their workforce for AI are seeing higher attrition among high potentials and future leaders. In fact, high performers are leaving faster than lower performers,” notes Todd Blaskowitz of Korn Ferry.

The window to fix this is narrow. The leaders you're developing today will step into roles within three to five years, whether they're ready or not.

How to Make AI Readiness Part of Your Succession DNA

Your succession planning approach can't simply add "AI skills" as a checkbox. You need to weave AI readiness into how you define leadership requirements, identify future leaders, and develop them over time.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Design Succession for an AI-Powered World

Start by asking what your business will look like in three to five years. What will your industry demand? What AI capabilities will leaders need to navigate it?

This isn't abstract planning. A retailer moving to AI-powered inventory needs different leadership than one running traditional stores. This shift in perspective changes who looks ready and who doesn't.

Update Your Success Profiles to Include AI-Readiness

AI-readiness should be part of your definition of what great looks like in each role.

That means including comfort with AI tools, ability to lead integrated human-AI teams, readiness to redesign workflows, and the capability to drive culture change.

When these expectations are built into your Success Profiles, you can use existing assessment and selection approaches to understand how closely leaders align to them—without treating AI readiness as a standalone skill.

This moves AI from being a technical skill to being a core leadership competency.

Learn more about the AI-ready leader.

Give Successors Hands-On AI Experience Before They Lead

Provide your people with real AI experience over time before they step into leadership roles.

You need to invest in leadership and professional development programs that also focus on strategy, not just technical training.

Give them hands-on exposure to actual AI projects. Involve them in governance discussions, so they understand the trade-offs, risks, and ethical questions that come with AI.

When You Hire Externally, Demand Proven AI Experience

When hiring from outside, look for AI literacy, plus a proven track record of leading through AI transformation.

Watch out for candidates who drop buzzwords without real understanding. Probe with specific questions, like “How have you led teams through AI adoption?” or “What AI projects have you scaled?” to separate talk from experience.

Reward Leaders Who Develop Talent, Not Hoard It

One of the most common problems in succession planning is that your leaders tend to hold on to their best people. They don't want to lose top performers to other parts of the organization, even when those moves would give those people the AI experience they need for leadership.

You need to reward senior leaders for developing talent in their teams, letting high performers move to stretch roles elsewhere, and bringing in successors from other divisions to gain experience.

If your incentive structure rewards leaders for keeping teams intact rather than growing the next generation, your succession plan won't work. Make talent development and mobility part of how you review and compensate senior leadership.

What CHROs Should Do Now

Don't wait for the next succession event to start. The leaders you're developing today will step into roles in just a few years, and they'll need capabilities most succession plans aren't building.

Start by reviewing your successor pool against AI-Ready Leader Success Profiles to understand where capability gaps may exist. Which leaders show the learning agility to grow into AI-enabled roles? What experiences and development will they need next?

AI readiness is no longer a "nice to have." It's a core predictor of future leadership success.