Nobody wants to be dumb at AI. But nobody knows everything about it, not even the deepest experts. The field moves too fast. Boards are no exception.
Only 8% of directors rate themselves strong on AI. Put the other way: 92% say they are not. That matches what I hear from hundreds of board members internationally.
Here's the uncomfortable part: these are the people responsible for governing AI.
I've written two papers on what the board should look like in the AI era (links below). Senior directors tell me that once they read them, they can't unsee it. They also tell me their boards feel years away.
The distance is not the problem. Not starting is.
AI-first competitors are coming for the moat. Where they don't force the issue, activists will.
Why now
For fifty years, staying deeply informed cost too much and strategy changed slowly enough. AI flipped both at once. The lines have crossed.
The path is shorter than boards think. It takes a safe space from the chair and CEO: learn first, then work out what AI means for this company, then set direction.
The board's role is not the brake. It's power steering.
The first step is the first step. Take it.
The papers
Both are on SSRN. They were built with the boardroom, not just about it.
- Power Steering, Not a Brake (2026). Co-authored with Henk S. de Jong (board director, former CEO), Sampsa Samila (IESE professor), and Christoph Wollersheim (co-lead of Egon Zehnder's AI practice).
- The 48-Hour Board (2026). The operating model that comes after STAR.
Contributors across both papers
Nora M. Denzel (lead independent director, AMD; Director, Sony), Douglas Chia (former corporate secretary, Johnson & Johnson), Kai Haakon E. Liekefett (co-chair of shareholder activism defense, Sidley Austin), Dorlisa Flur (director, Sally Beauty and Blue Cross NC), Larry Quinlan (director, ServiceNow and UBS Americas; former Global CIO, Deloitte), and Krishnan Srinivasan (Chief Data Officer, Maersk).
The papers draw on the published work of Leo Strine (former Chief Justice of Delaware), Jeffrey Gordon (Columbia, Board 3.0), Indra Nooyi (former PepsiCo chair and CEO), and others.
The 8% figure is from the NACD director survey.