Upgrade Your Board

Happy Friday!

Is your Board of Directors AI fluent? If not, they've become a structural drag on your firm’s ability to navigate what's ahead.

Directors are almost always selected because they own stock, have some domain expertise, or have special stakeholder relationships. Few, if any, are fluent in what generative AI, agentic workflows, and massive efficiency gains imply for the things they’re most responsible for. Things like the firm’s fundamental value proposition, core operations, competitiveness, alternative revenue models, risk and data security, and critically, the firm’s long-term value.

Most Boards now include AI in their agendas and risk discussions, but fluency remains rare. And it's fluency, not just awareness, that enables decisive maneuvering.

Your company’s basic go-to-market strategy gets blessed by the Board, usually in the form of a 1-5-year plan. It’s a plan for the future, not the past. The strategies and tactics in that plan, and ultimately its approval, rely on a common understanding of the marketplace. But in 2025, and especially over these past three months, the 1-5 year marketplace has become anything but certain.

Given that, your Directors need to transition from an administrative oversight mindset, founded on the plethora of 'we've-always-done-it -this-way' assumptions, to an entrepreneurial, founders', first-principles-based mindset.

The Board your company needs now should have these attributes:

• Genuine, practical AI fluency across most directors. Enough to cut through vendor hype, understand workflow compression in engineering contexts, and press for answers like: “How exactly are we converting those saved hours into new, higher-margin revenue streams instead of just lower fees?”
• Entrepreneurial business model courage. Directors should be comfortable championing (and funding) shifts to fixed-fee outcomes, licensed tools, capability-as-a-service, data-driven adjacencies, and more.
• Professional liability and engineering risk judgment. Ensuring that human oversight, full traceability, ethical guardrails, and a professional engineer’s stamp remain non-negotiable even as speed accelerates.
• Talent-transformation leadership. Experience/willingness to rewire the culture, career ladders, and compensation from “billable utilization” metrics to “AI-orchestrated client impact.”
• Sharp strategic foresight. The ability to spot and decisively back opportunities like predictive asset services, digital-twin monetization, or M&A that position the firm ahead of the curve, not behind it.

Punchline: Investors and analysts are starting to price in AI fluency, or the lack of it, when assessing long-term enterprise value. You need to upgrade your Board to include where the market's going, not just where it's been. A Board designed to meet the moment can help your organization retain or increase its value, turning AI into a powerful opportunity to evolve from selling time to selling unique human judgment, creativity, domain wisdom, and ultimate accountability. Value that clients will continue to pay a premium for.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Dave

Feedback and blowback are always welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

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