LEADERSHIP AND STRATEGY

IT IS THE EXERCISE EVERY BOARD NOW RUNS ON ITS EXECUTIVES, whether it admits to it or not. Take each officer in turn, strip away the tenure, the corner office, the two decades of firm handshakes, and one question is left standing: can this person actually lead through AI, cybersecurity and data governance, or will they nod gravely and forward it to IT? It is a fair question, and a serious one. If AI is going to remake how a company competes, the people running it either have the instinct for it or they do not, and a board owes shareholders the honesty to tell the difference. Charley Betzig, a Managing Director at the executive search firm Heller, judges that difference for a living, placing technology chiefs into the boardrooms hunting for them.“ AI is still in the early innings,” he writes on the Heller blog.“ Even as the pace of change accelerates, clear, measurable wins remain relatively rare.” Which is exactly the point. The board ' s job is not to chase the loudest AI story in the room, but to back the one executive who can quietly turn it into revenue.

Turn the same question back on the boardroom, though, and the answer is bleak. Two-thirds of board executives told McKinsey their boards have“ limited to no knowledge or experience” with AI, and nearly one-third concede it never reaches the agenda at all, filed somewhere behind the minutes and the catering. So the prudent board runs the test on itself first: not whether its executives make the cut, but whether it would. This is no longer a vague call for digital nous. It is a hard, specific shopping list: cybersecurity, data governance and hands-on AI oversight. And it is the line between the boards pulling ahead and the ones still booking a workshop to discuss booking a workshop.

The judges who skipped the reading The good news is that boards are hunting for exactly this. Spencer Stuart ' s latest index shows 46 % of new S & P 500 directors now arrive with technology experience, nearly triple the share of 2021. The payoff is measurable: the National Association of Corporate Directors finds a board with even one director fluent in AI governance is 2.8 times better at spotting the technology ' s risks early.

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