AI is changing who becomes CEO — and the skills needed to get there

Millennials now account for 55% of India's C-suite, signalling a shift not just in who occupies the corner office but also in how leaders get there. At the same time, traditional career paths are giving way to more diverse leadership journeys.

LinkedIn's latest research shows that single-industry experience among India's C-suite has fallen from around 80% to 58%, reflecting a growing preference for leaders with experience across companies, functions and industries.

“Leadership today rewards greater range. The value of deep expertise has not gone away. But in an AI-shaped economy, leaders are being asked to make decisions faster, with less certainty, and across problems that do not sit neatly within one function,” says Kumaresh Pattabiraman, India Country Manager and Vice President, LSS Product, LinkedIn, in an interaction with Business Today.

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Leadership careers are becoming less linear

The traditional formula of spending decades in one company or industry before reaching the top is steadily changing.

According to Pattabiraman, while leaders across generations have navigated disruption, today's executives have risen at a time when movement across organisations, business functions and industries has become far more common.

"What this tells us is that the route to leadership in India is changing," he says.

That shift reflects the changing nature of business itself. AI is creating challenges that cut across technology, operations, talent and customer experience, requiring leaders who can connect ideas across disciplines rather than operate within functional silos.

"So, India's C-suite is becoming less linear because business itself is becoming less linear," Pattabiraman says.

Learning has become a leadership skill

The shift is also changing what executives need to learn.

“Skill building has moved from being a personal development exercise to a valuable leadership discipline,” says Pattabiraman

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Nearly 92% of Indian CEOs say their role now requires continuous skill-building to keep pace with rapid technological change. LinkedIn's research also shows that four of India's five fastest-growing C-suite skills are AI-related, including AI Agents, AI Productivity, AI Strategy and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). AI Agents alone is growing at nearly 18.6% year-on-year.

"The pressure on leaders today is that they have to move before every answer is clear," says Pattabiraman.

"It is no longer enough to rely only on experience or wait for a perfect playbook. Leaders need to keep updating how they think, what they understand and the questions they ask."

But he is quick to point out that this does not mean every CEO needs to become a technology expert.

“Leaders need enough fluency to make sharper decisions, separate real business value from noise, and course-correct before the market forces them to,” he adds.

CEOs face a skills blind spot

While organisations increasingly expect employees to embrace lifelong learning, the same expectation now applies to leaders.

LinkedIn's research shows that 51% of Indian C-suite leaders acknowledge a blind spot around the future roles, skills and capabilities their organisations will need.

Pattabiraman believes addressing that gap starts with leaders themselves.

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“Leaders need to use labour market insight, internal skills data and real business priorities to make learning more targeted,” he says.

"Teams watch what leaders prioritise. If leaders ask better questions, challenge old assumptions, experiment with new tools and are open about what they are still learning, it gives the rest of the organisation permission to do the same."

That matters in the AI era because people won’t build new skills at scale if learning feels like a compliance task. It has to feel connected to the work, the strategy and the future of the business.

What tomorrow's CEO looks like

The next generation of CEOs will not necessarily be the ones with the deepest technical expertise, they will be the ones who know how to apply technology to business decisions.

For Pattabiraman, AI fluency is becoming a leadership capability rather than a technical skill. The ability to ask better questions, distinguish meaningful business value from AI hype and adapt continuously will increasingly define successful leaders.

"The goal is less about training everyone on everything, and more about helping people build the capabilities that will matter next and showing that the C-suite is learning alongside the organisation, not simply asking others to catch up."