129 Q UA RT E R _ 0 2 _ 2 0 2 6 Business Pioneers When AI is the engine of growth, the board’s role is to ensure that executive leadership under stands AI’s value potential and how to capture it. This foundation enables the board to collaborate with and provide direction to management to make informed strategic investments and assess whether it possesses the necessary leadership, capabilities, talent, and capital to deliver. - Directors should focus on determining whether management has the entrepreneurial experience, technological know-how, and trans formational leadership experience to run an AI-driven business. The board’s role is particu larly important in scrutinizing the sustainability of these ventures—including required skills, impli cations on the traditional business, and energy consumption—while having a clear view of the - - - range of risks to address, such as data privacy, cybersecurity, the global regulatory environment, and intellectual property (IP). The board’s role is to direct and oversee the rewiring of the operating model at scale. This level of intervention will require a suffi cient number of board members with product and broader AI experience, so they can act as thought partners and credible challengers to management. - Example: A global logistics company lever aged decades of trade data to develop a new AI-driven intelligence platform, transitioning from being a shipping provider to an information business. Support for the venture increased after the board validated defensible data moats, stable model performance under drift, and sustainable compute cost. Boardroom test questions include the following: - Which competitive advantages does AI enhance or threaten? Does our AI business case target a large enough value pool to reshape our market? What key resources are needed to do that, and do we currently have them? Do we have dedicated people who can man age the environmental, regulatory, legal, and reputational risks that come with being a business pioneer? - How do we need to evolve our innovation pipe line to match the pace of technological change? - Internal Transformers For companies with the ambition to embed AI across their operations, the board’s role is to direct and oversee the rewiring of the operating model at scale. While all archetypes involve some operating-model changes, internal transformers stretch this across multiple functions in the enterprise—a uniquely complex challenge. Boards play an important role in challenging management to certify that operational gains are structural rather than temporary and that they meaningfully improve the business’s productivity. This focus requires detailed knowledge of systems and dependencies, as well as the technological foundations (particularly enterprise architecture) that enable cross-functional process modernization. Boards will need to be particularly diligent in probing resilience, observability, and explainability to certify that systems are stable, trackable, and quickly corrected as needed. The board’s task is to encourage management to balance ambition with adoption, making sure that the organization has a robust upskilling program and incentives aligned to the changes needed on the front line. Example: One global manufacturer’s board questioned management about whether AI-driven planning, supply chain, and maintenance systems were interoperable and stress-tested before approving new capital. This helped ensure that the AI initiatives were resilient and could scale. Boardroom test questions include the following: Is AI truly rewiring how this company operates or just automating isolated tasks?