A director told me recently that her board spends more time discussing AI than almost anything else on the agenda, but they still leave every meeting unsure they've asked the right questions. It's not an isolated concern. I hear this regularly from board leaders, which is why I was keen to explore it with Simon Gordon, Senior Director and Head of Sales at JTC, during Building Future-Ready Boards, a live panel hosted by London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).
The full discussion recording is available on demand and well worth a watch, but here are the themes and insights that struck me most.
A decade ago, "future-ready" usually meant seeing around the corner, with a well-rehearsed playbook ready for whatever came next. The pandemic changed that, and rightly so. Nobody had a playbook for a shutdown of that scale, and boards learned they couldn't rely on assumptions that had held true even a month earlier.
What's replaced the playbook mentality is a different muscle altogether, built from constant curiosity, comfort with ambiguity and the ability to assess a situation and act with confidence. A program I co-taught at MIT, fittingly called Future Ready Boards, found that boards perform best when directors bring broad career experience but also have deep experience in a particular area. This creates a genuine chorus of different perspectives around the table. Diverse boards make stronger decisions because they challenge assumptions, broaden perspectives and reduce the risk of groupthink.
Ambition and governance discipline aren't opposites. Getting the balance right depends on asking better questions, not more complex ones. Two of the simplest come courtesy of director Roosevelt Giles: "Why?" and "How do you know?"
I'd add a third of my own, one I use often: "Why are these the options we're considering?" The most valuable board discussions often begin one step earlier, by challenging the assumptions that shaped the conversation in the first place.
That third question matters more than it sounds. During the 737 MAX program, Boeing's board was reportedly focused on sales and speed to market rather than engineering concerns. No one can know whether a different question would have changed the outcome, but boards are far more likely to spot emerging risks when they make space for what's not being discussed.
It’s exactly this kind of question that gives boards a real chance to catch something before it becomes a crisis. As Simon puts it, boards now need governance fundamentals and agility, with a genuine willingness to constructively challenge rather than simply approve.
Quarterly meetings were never designed for a world where something untrue on Monday becomes true, and business-critical, by Friday. Boards are supplementing their cadence with more frequent calls and lightweight, real-time dashboards, which keep directors "in the flow" between meetings rather than catching up on a full quarter at once.
This isn't about boards drifting into management's job; it's the opposite. It's about boards being equipped enough to spot something and ask, "I saw this. Does our data back it up, and should it go on the next agenda?" That's a far more useful conversation than an after-the-fact phone call asking what management is doing about something in the news.
AI dominated our conversation, as it does most boardrooms now. In Diligent Institute's most recent pulse survey, 82% of public company directors told us they're already using AI in the past 6 months for board work, yet 49% use free, off-the-shelf tools and only 6% have a board-specific AI policy. That gap between adoption and governance is the real risk, not AI itself.
Simon offered a useful frame here. Boards don't need an AI expert so much as one confident, literate user who understands the pitfalls, much as every board eventually needed someone comfortable with cybersecurity.
I'd add a cautionary tale from a Chatham House rules session we ran around AI use in the boardroom last year. A director used a free public AI tool to simulate a hypothetical hostile takeover scenario. The model treated that activity as a signal of credibility, so the "scenario" leaked as a real rumour and wound up in the news. AI can be a genuine thought partner for boards, even playing devil's advocate as an activist investor might, but it has to sit inside a governed, ring-fenced environment rather than the open internet.
For many boards, scenario planning is shifting from an annual tabletop exercise to a more regular exercise. Rather than running a full cyber-incident simulation once a year, more boards are carving out short segments of regular meetings to talk through a plausible scenario, asking whether they'd detect it and who they'd call, without needing a finished playbook. Simon noted this also strengthens shareholder confidence, because investors want a board that has stress-tested its assumptions rather than one promising to predict everything.
The clearest shift is this: Succession planning shouldn't be about finding a like-for-like replacement for a departing director. It should be about identifying the skills the strategy will need three to five years out. Curiosity is the trait to prioritise above all, since directors who go deep and keep learning tend to outperform those who arrive with fixed answers. MIT research even found that boards need roughly three digitally savvy directors, not just one, before performance measurably improves, at which point they outperform their peers by 35 percentage points. Many of the same themes, including board composition, oversight and future-readiness, are explored in this latest whitepaper on board effectiveness.
Simon's advice was to challenge yourselves as a board and be honest about where you're weakest. Mine was simpler still. If you haven't personally used AI tools yet, start now. When we were asked what the single biggest risk to a board is, we landed on the same word from two different directions: Stagnation. A board that stops evolving falls behind quickly, and the environment isn't slowing down for anyone.
Several of the shifts we discussed already have a home inside Diligent's platform. Diligent Boards helps directors reorder agendas around strategic discussion and keep governance materials secure in one place, and Diligent AI gives boards a governed, ring-fenced way to use AI for board work rather than the open internet.
If you would like to see what either looks like for your board, request a demo.
And if you want the full discussion first, watch the full Building Future-Ready Boards discussion on demand to hear more from Simon and me, including the audience questions on AI labelling and activist investors.
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