Boards today are deeply engaged — the conversations are happening, the meetings are full and the questions are being asked. But are they the right ones?
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Boards are paying attention. More than 62% now set aside agenda time for full-board AI discussions — more than double the 28% that did so in 2023. But only 27% have incorporated AI governance into their committee charters, and just 6% have established AI metrics for management reporting. They've shown up to the conversation. They just haven't decided what winning looks like.
They are aiming to lead the AI topic. They know the skill gap is real. And with turnover of less than one new director per year in the S&P 500 — 0.8% annually, according to George Anderson, who leads board advisory work at Spencer Stuart and advises some of the country’s most prominent boards — most boards can’t onboard their way out of the skill gap. So they lean in.
They seek education, engage deeper questions of management and ask harder questions. The less mature boards land on the question that seems most reasonable: "What's your AI strategy?" It signals attention. It demands accountability. And it reliably produces the wrong result.
This is not a story about a failure of leadership. It is a story about a rational response to the wrong question.
The business is always the point. AI is how you get there faster. It doesn’t just execute tasks — it changes which tasks are worth doing, which roles make sense and where margin goes. Ask for an AI strategy and you’ll get one — but what arrives back is a demonstration of effort, not a plan to move the business.
The most visible answer to "what are we doing about AI" is often a person — so that's what organizations produce. Someone gets appointed to own AI across the entire organization, sitting above the business units where decisions actually get made, accountable for activity over outcomes.
Projects get selected for visibility and speed over impact. The unglamorous work of actually improving the business — fixing decision rights, redesigning incentives, improving how the business runs — gets deprioritized because it doesn't have "AI" in the name. The result is a board deck full of pilots while the real work of transformation hasn't started.
Dr. Janet Sherlock has seen this play out firsthand. The founder and CEO of Org.Works spent nearly a decade as chief digital and technology officer at Ralph Lauren, previously served as CIO at Carter’s, led the digital and omnichannel practice at Gartner and holds a doctorate in organizational change from USC. When a CEO she was advising asked whether he needed a chief AI officer, she walked him through the org implications, the cost, the distraction from teams already doing good work. He agreed with her analysis. Then hired one anyway. "It's the easy way to show I'm doing something," he told her. His board wanted visible action. A named executive delivers that.
Sherlock sees boards falling into one of two traps. "You either have boards that are so intimidated they only look at it from a high-level risk perspective. Or there's that other one — I know we should be doing something — and it's that frenzy," Sherlock told the author. One is too cautious. The other moves without direction. Either way, the board is governing the question rather than the outcome.
Being informed and governing are not the same thing. The organization does not move faster because the board learned more.
Anderson of Spencer Stuart sees the same pattern. The boards getting this right embed the AI question inside conversations they were already having — around growth, capital allocation and operating model design. Less mature boards ask about AI as an isolated topic instead.
"As an isolated question, it’s hard to give a productive answer," Anderson told me. "Are we talking about a dimension of our strategy or our operating plans?" The question invites a report on activity. It doesn't invite accountability for outcomes.
The right question is not "What’s your AI strategy?" It is: "How will our core business metrics dramatically improve over the next 18 months?" When the CEO answers — faster time to market, better in-stock rates, lower cost to serve — the follow-up is: "What combination of process changes, organizational redesign and technology including AI gets us there?"
That reframe changes the dynamic. Business leaders own the outcomes, not the tools. Technology becomes an enabler of business transformation rather than a separate agenda. And AI gets evaluated on whether it is the right solution for a specific problem, not whether it satisfies a board expectation.
When boards ask that question, Anderson told me, the conversation shifts. "How do we see AI fitting in with all of that?" he said. "That seems to lead to more productive discussion." Growth, capital allocation, operating model — AI earns its place inside those conversations, not as a separate agenda item.
Boards have well-developed governance frameworks for finance, legal risk and audit. Those work because they are built around outcomes and accountability. AI deserves the same rigor. Not a headcount. Not an initiative count. A clear line between what the business is trying to achieve and whether progress is actually being made.
The companies that pull ahead will not be the ones that ran the most pilots. They will be the ones where the board asked better questions and held the business accountable for results. In a market where AI is compressing timelines and expanding margins for those who use it well, the cost of asking the wrong question is no longer abstract.
The imperative is not a better AI strategy. It is a better business strategy — one where AI earns its place by moving the metrics that matter.
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