Shawn Cole, president and founding partner of executive search firm Cowen Partners, wants to sound an alarm: “We are literally facing the collapse of the C-suite as we know it.”
Cole has been working in executive recruiting for more than 20 years. He and his team set out to pinpoint a “date of no return,” the point at which the leadership population no longer supports “the game of musical chairs,” he said. They estimate that the peak departure window will arrive between 2029 and 2034.
The team pulled CEO and CFO age data for a sample of 50 S&P 500 companies from 2024 and 2025 DEF 14A proxy filings available through SEC EDGAR. To reduce industry bias, the sample included companies from a variety of industries and market-capitalization ranges, and 65 was set as the baseline retirement age, he said.
A quarter of the CFOs in Cowen’s sample are within five years of retirement, and across the CEO and CFO roles, 33.7% of those positions fall within the retirement window at once.
The danger is structural. Losing both leaders within the same window means an incoming CEO may be operating without a CFO who knows the organization, board, or operating rhythm, creating continuity risks, Cole said.
The most acute exposure appears in financial services, industrials, and health care, where deep pools of long-tenured leaders are expected to retire around the same time.
Cowen found that technology companies face a different version of the problem—less about age concentration at the top and more about the role itself being redefined. Do tech companies, in a sense, now need a new type of CFO?
“The CFO who steered a tech company through the pre-AI era brought one set of capabilities,” Cole said. “Leading the same company through an AI-driven reinvention of the core business calls for something different, particularly around how you allocate capital under real uncertainty.”
So succession planning in tech has to grapple with two things at once: the demographic reality every sector faces, plus uncertainty about what the role will demand going forward. “You’re effectively trying to hire for a job whose definition is still moving,” he said.
Cole’s advice: “Treat succession planning as a governance priority, not a last-minute search.” Boards that fail to build a credible succession pipeline will ultimately be held accountable for the consequences, he added.
And for the tech industry, succession planning could look very different.
