Talent, succession and next generation readiness

Ask a family business what worries it most about the next ten years, and AI is likely top the list. Family businesses across Asia Pacific (ASPAC) are right to take AI seriously, but the KPMG Global Family Business Report 2026 makes a quieter point with louder implications: building the technology is not the hard part of the next decade. Building the talent, both inside the family and beyond it, capable of deploying that technology well, is.

AI dominates the family business agenda: KPMG’s Global family business report 2026 survey of 577 family businesses across ASPAC confirms it. But when family businesses are asked directly what talent-related challenges and capability gaps they face, AI turns out to be the visible symptom, not the underlying condition. Perhaps, the real decade-defining challenge is not how much family businesses invest in AI, but how well they can build, develop and invest in their people, including within the family itself.

Family businesses in ASPAC identify their largest skills and capability gap as AI strategy and deployment (45 percent). But the next two gaps are unmistakably human: developing strategy and an entrepreneurial mindset (33 percent) and people leadership (29 percent). Combined, these human-capital gaps are cited by more respondents than the AI gap — and neither can be closed by procurement.

Asked about talent-related challenges specifically, building future-ready skills and capabilities is the top concern (38 percent), sitting alongside attracting high-quality external talent (34 percent), upskilling and reskilling the existing workforce (33 percent), and next-generation readiness and capability development (31 percent) — all talent-management problems, not technology problems.

Asked which risk areas they anticipate building into board agendas over the next two to three years, ASPAC family businesses rank talent attraction and retention equal with cybersecurity and data protection at 41 percent — just behind AI governance and strategy at 46 percent, and well ahead of succession and leadership transition at 31 percent. In Japan, talent attraction and retention is already the single largest anticipated board risk area, at 59 percent, ahead of AI governance (51 percent) and cybersecurity (50 percent). India's board agenda remains AI-first (70 percent), but talent attraction (43 percent) and succession (44 percent) are close behind. In China, talent attraction and retention already tops the board risk agenda outright, at 39 percent.

Investment in future management capability will be fundamental to family business success over the next decade — and a lack of investment in talent, particularly family talent, is where the greatest risk appears to lie. Across ASPAC, family businesses expect to increasingly blend family and third-party professionals as the preferred management model by 2035.

China is the one market where family-led leadership remains the plurality expectation (39 percent). South Korea is the only market where outside professional leadership alone, rather than a blend, is the most-cited expectation (40 percent), reflecting a gradual, reform-driven shift toward professional management alongside continued family ownership.

The blend model is, by construction, a talent-management model. It does not resolve succession by removing the family or excluding outside professionals; it requires exactly the capabilities this survey shows are in short supply — people leadership, maintaining culture while professionalising, and managing family versus non-family career paths and compensation. None of these get easier by spending more on technology.

Family businesses should also be cautious because their confidence in next-generation readiness does not track consistently with the underlying evidence. Asked to rate confidence in the next generation's readiness to assume leadership on a 0–10 scale, China and India report the highest confidence — 67 percent and 61 percent of businesses scoring 9 or 10. Singapore (30 percent) and Australia (25 percent) sit in the middle. Yet Japan (7 percent) and South Korea (12 percent) — the two markets where governance data shows the most advanced shift toward professional and blended leadership, report by far the lowest confidence.

The markets most advanced in building non-family leadership capability report the least confidence that their next generation is ready; the markets where family control remains most concentrated report the highest. It could be surmised that confidence in these markets tracks familiarity rather than any evidence of capability. If talent management is the real decade-defining task, family businesses can no longer afford to base readiness on relationships alone.