CEO tenures are getting shorter and fewer incoming chief executives have prior CEO experience, the data shows, making the two-time CEO exceedingly rare. All told, corporate America has turned into a CEO meat-grinder; it’s chewing up and spitting out leaders at a pace not seen in a decade and a half.
“What we’re seeing right now is clearly a sign of stress,” says Dirk Jenter, professor of finance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. AI is only one part of the reason why.
There are circumstances like Narayen’s in which shareholders are displeased with a CEO’s ability to deliver on an AI vision. “Investors are not necessarily super patient,” Jenter says. “They see billions being spent on AI investments, and they see sort of very little in short-term return on investment, and that puts a lot of pressure on company leadership.”
But investors are also expecting CEOs to achieve overall growth on par with the extraordinary gains recorded at companies at the center of the AI revolution, the so-called “Magnificent 7.”
“There’s increasing pressure on all CEOs to be growing at similar kinds of rates,” says Anthony Nyberg, a management professor at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business. “[It’s] not actually sustainable or manageable for those companies.”
Activists are increasingly targeting CEOs. “Five or ten years ago, activism was largely about corporate policies,” Jenter says. “Now they’re going directly after the top leadership of companies.” Thirty-two U.S. CEOs resigned within a year of an activist campaign, a 38% increase over the four-year average, Barclays’ data shows.
Experts also argue that CEO turnover is catching up after a backlog from the COVID era, during which boards favored continuity.
All told, CEOs are getting less time to deliver on their visions. The average tenure for S&P 1500 CEOs hit 8.5 years last year, down from 9.2 years in 2024—and the shortest since 2019.
The rapid turnover is requiring boards to fulfill their succession planning responsibilities, and they’re increasingly dipping into their companies’ own ranks to replace chief executives.
The share of externally hired CEOs hit 60% in 2025, up from 57%, a historic low, in 2024. But there are signs that boards have been caught off-guard by the pace of CEO turnover. Nineteen new CEOs were appointed from their company’s board last year, the most since 2020, according to Spencer Stuart, “suggesting that some companies are not ready for succession.”
Almost always, internal CEO hires lack prior chief executive experience, a trait that shows up in the data. In 2025, 84% of newly appointed S&P 1500 CEOs in 2025 were serving in their first enterprise CEO role, reversing a multiyear trend toward CEOs with prior public-company experience.
As the number of first-time CEOs has increased, the age of new CEOs has dropped, hitting 54.4 in 2025, down from 55.8 in 2024. The share of incoming CEOs 60 and above fell to 18%, after hovering near 30% for the past two years.
