Digital Transformation Starts in the Boardroom
- Marion Heil
- vor 2 Tagen
- 6 Min. Lesezeit
AI and technology investment has become the #1 priority for executives globally - ahead of product innovation, customer experience, everything.
AI and technology investment has become the #1 priority for executives globally.
And yet, when you look at what’s actually happening in the boardrooms overseeing these decisions, the picture looks very different from the ambition.
Last year, MHP together with the German Supervisory Board Association published a report called “25 for 25” – insights on digital competence in supervisory boards, developed with 25 active supervisory board members, for 2025. The core finding was both encouraging and sobering: supervisory boards increasingly see themselves as a strategic driving force in digital transformation - and at the same time, they're the first to acknowledge that their collective digital competence still needs significant development.
Supervisory boards increasingly see themselves as a strategic driving force in digital transformation - and at the same time, they're the first to acknowledge that their collective digital competence still needs significant development.
That combination of ambition and honest self-reflection is, I think, a very good starting point.
After many years of working with boards and executive teams, what I have seen is this: digital transformation is talked about as if it were primarily a strategy problem. In reality, it's a people problem. And it starts at the top.
The Supervisory Board: The Oversight Challenge
There's a principle that's easy to state and genuinely difficult to act on: you cannot provide meaningful oversight of something you don't understand well enough. And for some supervisory boards today, digital transformation sits in exactly that grey zone.
The numbers are telling. In 2025, 44% of companies globally listed AI experience as a director qualification - up from 26% the year before. That shift in recruiting criteria is real, and it reflects a growing recognition that boards can no longer treat technology as a specialist topic to be delegated to one committee member.
Boards in the German-speaking world have come a long way in recent years - stronger audit practices, more rigorous risk governance, greater independence. But technological literacy across the full board is still uneven, and most board members would be the first to say so.
Technological literacy across the full board is still uneven.
When I look at board composition through the lens of digital readiness, three questions tend to surface:
Is there genuine digital expertise in the room? Not just someone who has been on the advisory board of a tech startup, but someone who has driven transformation at real scale - who has lived through the organizational complexity, the culture resistance, the decisions that turned out differently than planned. That kind of experience is still relatively rare at supervisory board level across our markets, and it's becoming one of the most sought-after profiles in board searches.
Is there diversity of perspective on how technology creates value? Digital transformation looks very different depending on whether you're approaching it from a customer experience lens, an operational efficiency lens, or a risk and compliance lens. Each of these is valuable. The boards that navigate transformation most effectively tend to have all three represented - not just the one that comes most naturally given the board's existing composition.
Does the board know which questions to ask management? This sounds almost too basic. But there's a meaningful difference between a supervisory board that asks "Are we on budget and on timeline?" and one that asks "How are we building capabilities we can actually sustain, and how do we groom the talent to do so?" The first question monitors a project. The second one governs a transformation. That shift in framing takes time, and the right people in the room.
There's an irony worth naming here. The tools to help supervisory boards work more effectively in this environment already exist - AI-powered board portals that surface hidden insights in board reports, flag gaps in management papers, support agenda planning, and compress the time from information to judgment. According to a 2025 survey by OnBoard, more than two-thirds of board professionals already report using AI tools for board work. And yet the same survey found that uptake is highly uneven - with administrators and support staff least likely to use these tools, often citing training and usability as barriers. More tellingly, McKinsey found that only about 15% of boards currently receive AI-related metrics from management at all. The infrastructure for smarter board oversight is there. The habits and expectations around using it are still catching up.
From a search perspective, the demand for supervisory board directors with genuine technology and digital transformation backgrounds has grown substantially.
The demand for supervisory board directors with genuine technology and digital transformation backgrounds has grown substantially.
The challenge is that the available pool - experienced, credible, independent, available - remains comparatively small. Finding profiles who combine technological depth with the broader judgment that effective board work requires is one of the more interesting search briefs we work on. And it will stay that way for a while.
The Management Board: Running the Business While Reinventing It
If the supervisory board's challenge is understanding, the management board's challenge is execution - and it's a harder one, because it involves doing two things at once that are in genuine tension with each other.
A recent Sedgwick survey of Fortune 500 executives captures the paradox well: 70% say their companies now have AI risk committees, 67% report progress on AI infrastructure - but only 14% say they are fully ready for AI deployment. Formal governance structures are racing ahead of real organizational readiness. That gap doesn't close by itself. It closes when the right executive team is in place and aligned.
A few things I observe in companies going through a digital transformation:
The CEO carries the credibility for transformation - or the momentum stalls. This isn't about a CEO who delivers a compelling keynote about AI. It's about sustained, visible attention to transformation as a strategic priority, month after month. The moment an organization perceives that transformation has become someone else's brief, it adjusts accordingly. Quickly.
The CEOs to navigate this well tend to combine strategic clarity about direction, genuine intellectual curiosity about technology and data, and real skill at bringing people with them through uncomfortable change. That's a specific profile - not every excellent CEO has it, and it's worth being honest about that in succession planning.
The role of dedicated digital leadership has matured. The CDO debate was louder five years ago. Companies have generally landed in a more nuanced place: the need for a Chief Digital Officer depends on the stage and nature of the transformation, not on what peers are doing. What matters more than the title is the positioning: does this person have real authority, a genuine seat at the table, and visible CEO backing? Or are they expected to drive change without the actual mandate to do so?
The composition of the management board shapes which questions even make it onto the agenda. Executive teams with predominantly financial and operational backgrounds - not unusual in Austrian and German industry - tend to approach digital transformation through a cost and efficiency lens by default. That's a legitimate and important starting point. But customer experience, data strategy, talent development - these require different mental models. When companies ask us to look at their executive team as part of a succession or organizational review, the question of cognitive and functional diversity is increasingly central to that conversation.
The Space Between the Two Boards
What I find most interesting, and most worth paying attention to, is the dynamic between supervisory board and management board when digital transformation is on the agenda.
Management is often deep in execution complexity: architecture decisions, organizational redesign, vendor relationships, capability building over time. Supervisory boards are thinking about risk exposure, regulatory implications, capital allocation. Both conversations are necessary. But if they're running in parallel without enough connection - a shared understanding of what transformation actually means for this particular company in its market - then the structure that's supposed to support the company can inadvertently slow it down.
Governance capabilities consistently lag behind AI project speed.
More than two-thirds of technology leaders surveyed recently say governance capabilities consistently lag behind AI project speed. That's not just a process problem. It's a signal that the people governing and the people executing are not always working from the same map.
Bridging that gap isn't primarily a process question, though better reporting formats and more focused committee work certainly help. It's fundamentally a people question: having directors who understand enough to ask the questions that really matter, and executives who feel safe bringing the real challenges to the table rather than the polished version.
Bridging the gap is fundamentally a people question: having directors who understand enough to ask the questions that really matter, and executives who feel safe bringing the real challenges to the table.
That's what good board composition is for. And in the context of digital transformation, it may matter more than ever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marion Heil is the founder and managing director of Board+CEO Advisors, a Vienna-based boutique specializing in executive search and board advisory for C-Suite and supervisory board mandates. She is based in Vienna.
