The Boardroom Doesn’t Need More Specialists. It Needs More Enterprise Leaders with Relevant Domain Depth.

Directors increasingly see gaps in board expertise. The answer is not adding more specialists. It may be finding more enterprise leaders who also have meaningful depth in domains relevant to the company’s strategy.

For decades, corporate boards have appropriately sought directors with broad enterprise experience. CEOs, CFOs, business unit leaders, and other accomplished executives bring an understanding of strategy, capital allocation, financial performance, leadership, succession, risk, and how decisions in one part of a company affect another. That experience remains enormously valuable.

But new governance research raises a different question: Is broad enterprise experience enough when increasingly specialized domains are becoming important to corporate strategy?

PwC’s 2026 Annual Corporate Directors Survey provides a striking example. Fifty-five percent of directors believe at least one member of their board should be replaced. Among those directors, 39% cite insufficient expertise as the primary reason, up from 21% in 2025. Yet only 27% say specialized expertise such as AI or cybersecurity is very important when evaluating prospective directors, compared with 81% who say the same about alignment with the board’s culture and ways of working. PwC also found that 71% identify AI as the leading skill their boards need to strengthen for more effective oversight. [pwc.com]

There is an interesting tension in those numbers. Directors are increasingly identifying insufficient expertise as a reason an existing director should leave, while specialized expertise remains considerably less important than cultural alignment when evaluating who should join.

Perhaps boards are confronting the wrong choice. They don’t necessarily need to choose between an enterprise leader and a domain specialist. They need more enterprise leaders with relevant domain depth.

By relevant domain depth, I mean having made consequential decisions in an area important to the company’s strategy, not simply having been exposed to it. Some boards will need specialists, but specialization alone isn’t the answer to the broader capability problem. For many board seats, the more valuable profile may be an enterprise leader who also possesses substantive experience in a strategically important domain.

Boards See an Expertise Problem

PwC isn’t alone in identifying concerns about board capabilities. The BDO 2026 Board Survey, based on more than 200 U.S. public-company directors, found that nearly half say technology and innovation expertise is needed to strengthen board composition. Risk identification and prioritization was cited by 48% as an important capability to enhance. Yet only slightly more than one-third agreed that their boards currently possess the right skills and experience to oversee AI, cybersecurity, and data governance. [bdo.com]

The National Association of Corporate Directors’ 2026 Governance Outlook provides another perspective. Only one-third of directors say they are strongly confident in their board’s collective skill set, while about 14% are concerned that their boards don’t have the capabilities required for the year ahead. The research also highlighted strategy execution, CEO succession, workforce capabilities, and technology transformation as significant priorities entering 2026. [nacdonline.org]

The surveys ask different questions and use different methodologies, so their results shouldn’t be treated as a single data set. Nor do they establish that a shortage of enterprise leaders with domain depth caused the capability concerns directors are reporting. But the broader signal is similar: directors themselves see room to strengthen board capabilities. That raises the more interesting question of what kind of capability a board actually needs.

The Answer Isn’t Simply More Specialists

If artificial intelligence becomes important, recruit an AI expert. If cybersecurity becomes important, recruit a cybersecurity expert. If data becomes critical, find a data expert. Follow that logic too far, however, and a board could become a collection of specialists representing whichever issues happen to be prominent at the moment.

That isn’t necessarily what effective governance requires. The board needs directors capable of understanding how individual issues affect the enterprise as a whole. Technology investment affects capital allocation. Cybersecurity affects operations, customers, and reputation. Supply-chain decisions affect working capital, geopolitical exposure, and resilience. Regulation can affect strategy, products, investment, and the economics of an entire business.

A highly accomplished specialist may understand a particular subject far better than anyone else around the table but have relatively little experience making those kinds of enterprise-wide tradeoffs. Conversely, an experienced CEO or other senior executive may possess exceptional enterprise judgment while lacking meaningful experience in a domain that has become particularly important to the company’s strategy. Boards shouldn’t necessarily have to choose between the two.

The more valuable director profile may increasingly be an enterprise leader with relevant domain depth.

That might be an executive who ran a significant business while leading a major digital transformation. It might be a financial executive with substantial experience making technology investments or overseeing cyber and data risks. Or it could be an operating executive whose business was transformed by changing technology, regulation, supply chains, or other forces relevant to the company seeking a director. These aren’t specialists brought onto the board to answer management’s technical questions. They are enterprise leaders whose domain experience enables them to ask better questions of management.

Importantly, this doesn’t mean every director needs deep expertise in every strategically significant domain. Board composition is a collective exercise. The relevant question is whether the board’s enterprise leadership, taken as a whole, contains sufficient depth in the domains particularly important to that company’s business and strategy.

Nor can domain depth simply be historical. Experience acquired years ago can become less relevant as technologies, industries, regulations, and markets change. Meaningful domain depth therefore also requires the ability and discipline to keep that knowledge current.

Look Behind the Checkmark

Deloitte’s 2026 research provides an interesting view of current board composition. Its analysis of BoardEx data covering the career histories of Fortune 100 directors found that every Fortune 100 board included at least one director with CEO experience, with finance and operations leadership experience nearly as common. Yet only 38 Fortune 100 boards included directors with technology leadership backgrounds, and 28 included current or former data and analytics leaders. [deloitte.com]

Those statistics don’t tell us that Fortune 100 boards lack technology expertise, nor do they tell us that directors with CEO backgrounds lack technology experience. The categories can overlap. A former CEO may also have led a significant technology transformation, while a technology executive may have held substantial responsibility for investment, strategy, people, operations, and risk. Deloitte’s categories don’t tell us how often those experiences intersect. [deloitte.com]

And that’s precisely the information boards should care about. Knowing that someone was a CEO tells us something important. Knowing that someone has “technology experience” tells us something else. Neither label necessarily tells us what the individual actually did, the decisions for which the person was accountable, or the judgment developed through that experience. Titles describe careers, but boards need to understand the experience behind them.

That distinction becomes especially important with board skills matrices. Spencer Stuart’s 2026 U.S. Board Index reports that 80% of S&P 500 boards disclosed a director skills matrix in their most recent proxy. It also argues that a skills matrix is only as valuable as the information it contains and should reflect directors’ current, relevant expertise and the board’s most important needs. [spencerstuart.com]

Meanwhile, EY’s discussions with stewardship leaders from institutional investors representing approximately $55 trillion in assets under management found that some investors believe simply describing a director as having “technology” expertise may no longer provide sufficient information. Some want greater specificity about what directors’ technology skills and experiences actually encompass. [ey.com]

The important question isn’t whether the box is checked. It’s what experience sits behind the checkmark. “Technology” can describe profoundly different experiences. So can “international,” “operations,” “risk,” and even “finance.” The next evolution of the board skills matrix may therefore be less about adding more categories and more about understanding the depth, relevance, and recency behind them.

A skills matrix shouldn’t merely help describe the board that exists today. It should help inform decisions about the capabilities the board may need tomorrow.

Board Composition Should Be Informed by Strategy

AI makes the board capability question particularly visible, but it isn’t the underlying issue. PwC found that 71% of directors identify AI as the leading skill their boards need to strengthen. [pwc.com]

The 2026 What Directors Think research from Corporate Board Member and Diligent Institute, based on more than 200 actively serving U.S. public-company directors, similarly found that 44% would put AI and other digital or technology risks and opportunities among the most pressing subjects for their next board meeting, just behind strategic planning at 47%. The report also says boards are increasingly considering adding members with specialized AI expertise. [boardmember.com]

But AI is today’s example, not the underlying governance issue. Depending on the company, the strategically relevant domain could be advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, cybersecurity, regulation, energy, financial markets, international operations, supply chains, or something else entirely. That is why board composition should be informed by strategy, rather than by whichever governance issue is attracting the most attention at a particular moment.

Nor does every capability gap require another director. Deloitte’s July 2026 Board Practices Quarterly, based on a survey of Society for Corporate Governance members representing 92 public companies and 14 private companies, found that organizations building board AI capabilities were more commonly using management briefings and director education than recruitment efforts or board evaluation processes. [deloitte.com]

That makes sense. Boards shouldn’t recruit their way out of every knowledge gap. Education, management briefings, outside advisers, and continuing director development are all important. But there remains a meaningful distinction: education builds fluency; experience can build judgment. Learning about a domain isn’t always equivalent to having made consequential decisions within it and being accountable for the results. Boards need both, in proportions appropriate to the company’s circumstances and strategy.

The same principle applies to board refreshment. Spencer Stuart reports that new S&P 500 director appointments fell to their lowest level in a decade in 2026 and average turnover declined to 0.7 new directors per board. That isn’t inherently a governance problem. Effective directors shouldn’t be replaced simply to increase turnover. [spencerstuart.com]

But slow refreshment becomes more noteworthy alongside surveys in which directors themselves identify capability gaps. PwC found that 73% of directors believe their board assessment processes could improve and 49% say those assessments aren’t sufficiently candid. BDO found that 20% consider their boards ineffective at conducting member evaluations and executing refreshment strategies, up from 9% in 2025. [pwc.com] [bdo.com]

If a board concludes that an important capability is missing, eventually that conclusion should inform succession. The governance process should connect corporate strategy, required board capabilities, board assessment, and director succession.

Culture Matters, But So Does Independent Judgment

That brings us back to one of the most interesting PwC findings. Eighty-one percent of directors consider alignment with the board’s culture and ways of working very important when evaluating prospective directors, compared with only 27% who say the same about specialized expertise such as AI or cybersecurity. [pwc.com]

Cultural fit isn’t inherently bad. Boards depend upon trust and collegiality. Directors need to listen to one another, disagree constructively, reconsider assumptions, and function effectively together under pressure.

But the disparity raises a worthwhile question: If cultural fit consistently outweighs differentiated expertise, does a board risk reproducing its existing strengths and, along with them, its existing blind spots? PwC’s survey doesn’t answer that question or explain why directors assign those relative priorities, so it would be unfair to draw that conclusion from the data alone. But the disparity makes the question worth asking. [pwc.com]

Perhaps the ideal director is culturally compatible but intellectually independent: someone who can work effectively with colleagues while bringing enough different experience and judgment to challenge assumptions the board might otherwise share.

That also has implications for director recruiting. Finding enterprise leaders with relevant domain depth may require nominating committees to look beyond conventional labels. Enterprise leadership doesn’t necessarily require having served as CEO of a public company, just as domain depth doesn’t require having spent an entire career as a functional specialist. The more useful questions are what responsibilities the candidate actually held, what consequential decisions the candidate made, what accountability came with those decisions, and whether that experience is relevant to where the company is going.

Where Does This Candidate Have Enough Depth to Challenge the Enterprise?

For years, nominating committees have understandably asked whether a director candidate has enough breadth to contribute across the enterprise. Increasingly, they may need to ask another question:

Where does this candidate have enough depth to challenge the enterprise?

The answer won’t be the same for every company. That’s precisely the point. Board composition should be informed by the company’s strategy and the capabilities required to oversee it.

The objective isn’t a board filled with specialists. It is a board of enterprise leaders that, collectively, also possesses meaningful depth in the domains on which the company’s future increasingly depends.

The boardroom doesn’t need more specialists. It needs more enterprise leaders with relevant domain depth.

Sources

• PwC, 2026 Annual Corporate Directors Survey, September 2026. [pwc.com]

• BDO, 2026 BDO Board Survey: Governance Under Pressure. [bdo.com]

• Spencer Stuart, 2026 U.S. Spencer Stuart Board Index. [spencerstuart.com]

• Deloitte, Board Composition and Skill Needs, May 19, 2026. [deloitte.com]

• National Association of Corporate Directors, 2026 Governance Outlook. [nacdonline.org]

• Corporate Board Member and Diligent Institute, What Directors Think 2026. [boardmember.com]

• EY Center for Board Matters, Five Ways Boards Can Respond to Investor Expectations on AI, 2026. [ey.com]

• Deloitte, Board Practices Quarterly: How Boards Are Using AI Today, July 21, 2026. [deloitte.com]