How AI Is Isolating the Consumer Products CEO

Consumer products is the sector where the CEO has taken the most personal ownership of AI transformation, and also the sector where executives are finding their roles hardest since AI arrived. Those two findings are related.

In our Q1 2026 Executive Survey Panel, 48% of consumer products respondents said the CEO personally owns AI transformation outcomes. That is the highest figure of any sector in the survey, well above the cross-industry average of 29%. Only 24% described a shared accountability model, and 14% said ownership was still unclear. 

At the same time, consumer products executives reported the most personal difficulty with how AI has changed their roles. 24% said their role had become somewhat harder or more stressful since AI became a business priority, the highest of any sector and more than double the cross-industry average of 11%. Only 24% said their role had become easier, compared to 43% across the full survey. Consumer products is the only sector in our data where the number of executives who say their role has become harder matches the number who say it has become easier. The difficulty is not with the technology itself. It is with everything the technology has added to the executive agenda: new decisions, new risks, new expectations from the board, and new questions from the organization, all landing on a leadership team that was not built for this moment. 

And the results are not yet materializing. 43% of consumer products respondents said AI had produced no measurable impact at all. Another 43% said they believed something positive was happening but could not put a number to it. Between the two groups, not a single respondent in the sector could point to significant, quantified financial returns from AI. 

Where the Sector Stands

The consumer products industry is not short of AI activity. McKinsey’s analysis of more than 140 digital and AI use cases across the CPG value chain found that 71% of CPG leaders had adopted AI in at least one business function. But McKinsey also found that no CPG player had truly scaled its AI capabilities, and that the sector was adopting AI at a lower rate than industries like technology or advanced manufacturing. BCG’s 2026 research on CPG marketing organizations reinforced the same pattern: seven out of ten leaders expected AI to help marketing functions work faster, yet only 13% said the technology was in widespread use or fully integrated into marketing workflows. 

Our own data tells a similar story from the leadership side. Only 10% of consumer products respondents said they had AI initiatives in production or fully integrated, compared to 23% across the full survey. 29% described their organizations as mostly talking about AI with limited implementation, and another 29% were still in a planning and experimentation phase. The activity is there, but the organizational infrastructure to turn that activity into outcomes is not. 

Why the CEO Ends Up Carrying It

When the leadership team around the CEO lacks the capability to share the load, AI defaults upward. Our data shows why that is happening in consumer products. Every single respondent identified leadership capability gaps in their organization. Not one said their leadership was well positioned. 68% cited C-suite AI literacy as a gap, the highest of any sector. 59% cited both vision beyond tactical AI implementation and cross-functional collaboration as areas where their leadership team was falling short. 

A CEO who owns AI transformation in an organization where the rest of the C-suite cannot contribute to it with confidence is carrying the weight alone. That weight shows up in the personal impact data. It shows up in the ROI data. And it shows up in the open-ended responses. One respondent wrote that “a joint, clear strategy should have been developed and adopted by the board. This was neglected. In fact, the use and application of AI are managed differently by department heads depending on their expertise, foresight, and personal interests.” 

That is a description of what happens when no one besides the CEO has been given both the mandate and the capability to lead. The department heads fill the vacuum with whatever they know, whatever interests them, and whatever their function can execute on its own. The result is fragmentation rather than transformation. 

The Cost of Concentrated Ownership

The pattern is self-reinforcing. A CEO who has taken personal ownership of AI and is not seeing results will feel pressure to do more, not to distribute more. The instinct in most executive cultures is to lean in harder when something is not working, especially when you own it personally. That instinct makes the problem worse because it keeps the rest of the leadership team on the sideline and delays the investment in the leadership capability that would eventually allow the CEO to let go. 

Consumer products respondents also told us that 48% could not yet assess whether their AI spending had been wasted, the highest figure of any sector. Organizations that cannot measure their returns and cannot evaluate their waste are investing without a measurement framework in either direction. That absence of clarity compounds the personal burden on the CEO, who is now accountable for outcomes they cannot define, in a transformation they cannot delegate, with a leadership team they have not yet built. 

And the hardest part may still be ahead. 38% of consumer products respondents expect 16% or more of their workforce to exit or transition within five years, and 43% plan to maintain current compensation while productivity rises. For the CEO who is already carrying AI transformation alone, that means they will also be the person making and communicating the workforce restructuring decisions that follow from it. There are few responsibilities in leadership that weigh more personally than telling people their roles are changing or disappearing, and few that carry more organizational consequence if handled poorly. BCG’s CEO Insomnia Index, a study of approximately 500 CEOs, found that many described the role as profoundly isolating and that one leader characterized the CEO as an “emotional shock absorber” for the organization. BCG’s research also found that when CEOs perceive their workload as unsustainable, they reach a tipping point where chronic stress becomes nearly unavoidable, eroding the cognitive functions that complex decisions depend on. A consumer products CEO who is already stretched by owning AI without a capable leadership team around them, and who cannot yet measure whether the investment is working, is not well positioned to lead the kind of workforce transition that 38% of the sector is expecting. That transition requires clarity, trust, and emotional reserves, and all three are harder to maintain when the CEO has been carrying the burden alone. 

What Consumer Products Boards Should Be Asking

The data suggests that the problem in consumer products is not a lack of CEO commitment. The commitment is there, and it may be too concentrated. The problem is that the leadership team around the CEO has not been built for AI, and until it is, the CEO will continue carrying the transformation alone, with the personal strain and organizational results that follow. 

Boards overseeing consumer products organizations should be testing three things. 

• Whether the current leadership team has the AI literacy, the cross-functional capability, and the change management experience to contribute to AI transformation alongside the CEO, or whether the CEO is compensating for gaps that should have been closed through hiring or development. 
• Whether the organization has a measurement framework that can tell the board what AI is producing in financial terms. When not a single respondent in the sector can point to significant quantified returns, the board should be asking whether the organization has given itself the tools to measure them, because that is a governance question the board can resolve this quarter. 
• Whether the CEO has the support they need to lead the workforce conversation that is coming, including the communication plan, the compensation philosophy, and the leadership bench to manage a transition that will affect how the remaining employees feel about the organization for years afterward. 

Consumer products has always been a sector that moves fast, listens to consumers, and adapts. Those instincts serve the sector well in an AI era. The question is whether the same energy is being directed at building the leadership team around the CEO, or whether the sector is asking one person to carry something that only a full C-suite can deliver. 

About the Author

Milos Tucakovic is a Managing Partner at Stanton Chase Belgrade. He is also Stanton Chase’s Consumer Products and Services Global Sector Leader.   

He brings 20 years of executive search expertise and nearly 40 years of experience in human resources and management. A licensed A&DC Assessor, Miloš also coaches CEOs and General Managers on leadership development.  

Miloš is a member of the Knowledge Committee of Serbia and previously taught management at the Academy of Applied Studies – College of Hotel Management in Belgrade for 16 years.