Insight Partners Launches Empower to Prepare CIOs for Board Roles

November 2, 2026 – AI and software investor Insight Partners has launched Empower, a program that helps Global 2000 CIOs plan and prepare for board seats, startup advisory positions and other portfolio-career paths while they are still in their operating roles. Empower launches with 10 delivery partners, including Diligent, Heidrick & Struggles, Riviera Partners, and Global Mentors Group, and has already enrolled more than 50 CIOs over a 12-month pilot. “Strong board and advisory opportunities often come through people who know your experience, understand the perspective you can bring to the boardroom, and are willing to open the right doors,” said Emmet B. Keeffe, managing director, Insight Partners. “Building the right strategy and relationships can take years, which is why CIOs should start long before they need them. Empower gives them the structure and the network to do it.”

As AI adoption speeds up across the enterprise, boards are facing a shortage of the expertise needed to oversee the technology and help guide companies through the transition.  In Diligent Institute’s 2026 What Directors Think survey of 200+ U.S. public-company directors, only eight percent reported strong AI expertise on their boards, the lowest of any skill area surveyed, while 28 percent said AI expertise is what they want in their next director appointment. Similarly, founders building enterprise software are having to make high-stakes decisions at an increasing pace and need advisors who have led technology transformation at scale. Sitting CIOs are among the best-qualified people to fill both seats, and Empower helps them navigate that shift with clarity and rigor.

Boards have historically been composed to address the defining questions of their era. For decades, those questions were financial. Today they are technological. AI business transformation, AI oversight, cybersecurity governance, and infrastructure investment are now board-level decisions with public-market consequences. CIOs have led some of the largest capital and transformation programs in the enterprise, and they are accountable for the systems that now define competitive advantage. Boards have traditionally recruited executives who have run a business unit and its profit and loss, a seat CIOs rarely hold, and thus their expertise remains largely underrepresented in the boardroom.

“CIOs have not traditionally been front of mind in board searches, but that is changing,” said Josh Narva, partner – talent advisory, Riviera Partners. “Private company boards have long valued operators who combine technical expertise with firsthand experience of leading businesses through transformation. We are now seeing that recognition grow on public company boards as well. As AI, cybersecurity, and technology investment become central to board decisions, the experience CIOs bring is increasingly relevant to the full governance agenda.”

For 30 years, Insight has invested in relationships with founders building enterprise software and the operators inside some of the world’s largest companies. Today, that spans 550+ active investments and 470+ enterprise partnerships covering 3,400+ senior technology leaders. Executive relationships are treated as career-long partnerships, and that is the foundation of Insight Partners for Enterprise.

millionways Brings a New Behavioral Intelligence Lever to Executive Recruiters

Hunt Scanlon Ventures has completed its investment in millionways, a New York-headquartered company that builds a behavioral intelligence layer of AI for human agent workforces, utilizing a proprietary Large Psychology Model called Thorsten-4. The platform focuses on understanding human signals, motives, and behavior patterns, with applications used across AI governance, executive hiring, talent management, and enterprise environments.

“millionways is a trailblazer in this newly emerging space,” said Scott A. Scanlon, CEO and co-founder of Hunt Scanlon Ventures and a senior advisor to company co-founders Martin Cordsmeier and Max Weidemann. “As investors, we see behavioral intelligence as a new layer of AI infrastructure, giving artificial intelligence a missing layer – the ability to interpret the human dynamics behind communication and decision-making. In our view, organizations that can better understand the convergence of leadership and human behavior patterns will create meaningful competitive advantage in the years ahead. Behavioral intelligence will become central to everyday enterprise decision-making,” he said.

Mr. Scanlon noted that artificial intelligence is already making big inroads and reshaping the human capital sector. “Organizations have embraced AI to automate workflows, improve performance, and generate insights on people. As those capabilities mature, the next phase is poised to move beyond productivity and efficiency toward improving the quality of human judgement,” he said. “Reducing this friction is an essential next step for businesses in general, but a critical one for the human capital ecosystem.”

Insight Partners also works closely with CIOs through its CIO Council and programs that support their leadership teams in technology discovery and sourcing. Empower helps those same CIOs bring their expertise to boards and advisory roles, by helping them navigate three critical gaps:

• The Perception Gap. Many CIOs don’t consider a board or advisory path until late in their careers, and many haven’t built the visibility, relationships or positioning to turn operating credibility into advisory demand. In an Insight assessment of CIOs in the Empower community, 90 percent had no written transition plan and only 27 percent felt well prepared for a board role, though most say their employers would permit outside board service.
• The Preparation Gap. The paths from the CEO or CFO seat to the boardroom are well worn, with search practices, placement programs and sponsoring directors built for them. CIOs have no equivalent: no curriculum that translates running enterprise technology into governing it, from fiduciary duty and audit and risk committee work to AI oversight, and no playbook for advising a 50-person company.
• The Network Gap. Nearly 70 percent of directors say their board used personal networking or word of mouth to identify the candidate pool for its most recent director, according to the National Association of Corporate Directors. Advisory roles work the same way. A portfolio career network is a fundamentally different network from the one the operating role builds. Vendor contacts, industry peers, and internal stakeholders rarely translate. Board and advisory relationships are built in different rooms, and it can take years to develop the kind of trust that makes them valuable.

“I had spent a decade leading digital transformation at the world’s largest companies, yet when I stepped away from operating, I realized I had not planned sufficiently for what came next,” Karenann Terrell, board member, Eaton, UiPath and Fractal; former chief digital and technology officer, GSK. I was reacting to the opportunities in front of me instead of having a structured path into boards, non-profit and advisory roles. A program like Empower would have been incredibly valuable in helping me define and plan the portfolio career I wanted which positioned my experience differently… all while I was still in my operating role.”

Closing The Gap

Empower is designed to run alongside the operating role. An intake process maps each member’s ambitions against the full range of what a portfolio career can look like, from public boards and advisory engagements to private directorships and consulting practices, or some combination of all of them. From there, the program offers a curated path specific to those goals, drawing on education, positioning, and network as each member’s path requires.

Related: Investigative Diligence Moves Earlier in Executive Search

“As an early member of the Empower community, attending a portfolio career design and preparation retreat gave me the space to intentionally think through what I wanted my next chapter to look like,” said— Cindy Hoots, board member, Zoom and McCormick; former CDIO, AstraZeneca. “Working closely with the Empower team helped me understand the different paths available, what a portfolio career could realistically look like, and how to start preparing for it. Through conversations with peers who had already made the transition, I moved from simply thinking about it to taking concrete steps forward. Most importantly, I realized I could make the shift into a full-time portfolio career much earlier than I had expected. It has been an incredible journey so far.”

Each area is delivered alongside partners that have been selected, vetted, and onboarded to meet CIO-specific needs. Empower’s anchor partner, Diligent, helps participants build boardroom readiness through certification programs and opportunities to connect with experienced board members. As a leader in AI governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions serving more than 700,000 board members, Diligent brings the board and technology communities together to help prepare more technology leaders for board service and strengthen dialogue on AI oversight, governance, and business transformation.

Diligent is joined by nine additional partners that extend Empower’s reach across board readiness, advisory work, consulting, coaching, network development, personal brand management and portfolio-career preparation. Additional partners include Global Mentors Group, Heidrick & Struggles, Major Futures, Moelam, NYSE, Ren, Riviera Partners, T200 and Ulu Ventures.

“Technology has been on the board agenda for years, but AI is changing the scale and pace of the transformation directors must oversee,” said Brian Stafford, CEO, Diligent. “Boards benefit from leaders who have guided transformation firsthand and can connect AI ambition to measurable business value while ensuring it is deployed responsibly. We’re thrilled to collaborate with Insight Partners to bring senior technology leaders and the board community together, in turn strengthening the boardroom’s ability to oversee AI transformation.”

Relationships That Compound

For CIOs, serving on a board or advising founders offers an outside view of how other companies approach governance and AI transformation, and sharpens their work in the operating role today.

“Insight’s CIO Council has been incredibly valuable in helping me stay close to what my peers are doing and what is coming around the corner from an innovation perspective,” said Seth Cohen, 3X CIO (Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo and Reckitt Benckiser). “At the same time, what sets the community apart is its focus on long-range leadership. Empower teaches a smart, disciplined principle: the best time to think about a future portfolio career is a decade in advance. This brings clarity and intentionality to long-term career planning while keeping the focus squarely on operational impact today.”

For Insight’s portfolio of 550+ companies, Empower widens the pool of enterprise CIOs who can pressure-test products, serve as design partners and open doors to their peers. For Insight, it deepens career-long relationships with the operators who are responsible for enterprise technology decisions and offers a clearer view of what enterprises are adopting.

“We believe CIOs are leading one of the most complex business transformations of our time, and that experience has value far beyond their operating roles,” said Alberto Padilla Rivera, EVP, Insight Partners. “What is often missing is the preparation, positioning and relationships to translate that leadership experience into board and advisory opportunities. As AI redefines what boards and founders need, Empower brings together the people and partners to help CIOs build that foundation while still operating and shape a portfolio career around where they can make a meaningful contribution.”

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Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media