Boardlogic by Formidium
There are endless comments on AI and boards these days, many of which are useful. However, a basic question has yet to be well addressed, namely: Where should AI live?
Right now, it looks like AI will live in multiple places around the boardroom: embedded in the board portal, as secure personal “co-pilots” for directors, and as background capability inside productivity and risk systems—each serving different moments of board work.
Given that there’s no single right answer (and there isn’t), boards that combine these layers with clear human-in-the-loop oversight and policy guardrails are likely to see the biggest gains in efficiency and insight without sacrificing accountability.
Why this is happening
- AI has moved from “nice to have” to a top-tier board priority, with directors using it for meeting preparation and analysis while still lacking formal usage policies in many organizations. This creates both momentum (good) and a governance gap (bad) that boards must close with frameworks and literacy programs.
- Advisory research in 2025 urges boards to adopt principle-based AI governance and ensure oversight across strategy, risk, talent, and ethics so AI augments director judgment rather than replaces it.
AI inside board portals
- Board portal providers are starting to roll out native capabilities like document summarisation and minutes acceleration, with some vendors leaning on enterprise clouds to add secure generative features for directors and governance teams.
- Real-time dashboards and AI-enhanced governance platforms are starting to emerge to move boards from monthly or quarterly packets to something more like continuous oversight, aggregating company data and industry news along with risk and macro-performance signals into one view.
- However, it’s all very much a work in progress and likely to be subject to sudden change as different approaches and capabilities become available.
Personal co-pilots for directors
- Enterprise-grade assistants (for example, Perplexity-class tools) are being framed as secure helpers for leaders: summarizing materials, tracking actions, and supporting decisions for directors individually while operating within policy, audit, and data protection controls tailored for sensitive board workflows.
- Governance bodies emphasize that supervisory boards should define clear boundaries for AI use, ensuring traceability, confidentiality, and retained human accountability around any director-facing AI. This advice holds as good policy for company staff as well as for board members themselves.
Background AI in other apps
- Beyond portals, AI is appearing in communications, analytics, and compliance systems used by directors and corporate secretaries—powering smarter board communications, trend detection in company performance and even annual board evaluations, and faster synthesis of risk information to improve discussion quality.
- As these capabilities spread, effective boards will standardize policies for model access, data segmentation, and bias testing across tool-sets to prevent fragmentation and shadow AI use, perhaps the biggest risks right now, seconded by AI hallucinations.
Will an AI ever become a stand-alone “board seat”?
- Current best practice views AI as assistive technology, not as an autopilot or voting presence; the technology is meant to inform directors with options and signal extraction, but fiduciary duty and decision rights remain with humans.
- Some boards are piloting targeted use-cases instead of granting agency to a single “AI board member,” focusing on measurable improvements in preparation time, responsiveness, and oversight quality under explicit governance guardrails.
Practical architectures for boards
- In the near near term, boards will use AI for packet summarisation, agenda preparation, and action tracking, wherever the AIs are housed, but with the constraint that directors’ personal AI tools are kept to approved repositories with retention and eDiscovery settings aligned to board record-keeping requirements.
- In the longer term, boards will stand up real-time governance dashboards and AI analytics for risk, strategy, and compliance, with board-wide literacy and policy adoption to close the usage-policy gaps.
- In the interim, boards will need to maintain principle-based AI governance, model risk management, and ensure human-in-the-loop processes so AI augments human judgment without displacing it.
In short, AI won’t live in just one place; it will be a layered capability—portal-native, personal, and background—governed by board-approved policies that anchor responsibility with directors while unlocking more speed and insight across the board cycle.
And if you think a board portal might help your board achieve its goals, learn more about our secure, user-friendly board portal Boardlogic here. Or schedule a demo with us here.
