AI is here to stay. Time to change everything you know about how your board operates?

The question is a little facetious. But only a little. After all, AI has had a huge impact on most organizations’ strategy agenda, and in at least one case an AI has a voting seat on a board. It’s a source of anxiety for boards, regardless: According to a recent Deloitte survey, boards are spending more time discussing it, and a healthy 40 percent say AI “caused them to think differently about their boards’ makeup.”

Deloitte VP Michael Vad, in a follow-up piece, doesn’t argue that board structures need to be blown up—or, thank goodness, more populated with bots. But in his article “Why AI Demands a New Board Logic,” he does insist that leaders have been much too slow to address AI’s impact on their industry and organizations. 

The biggest challenge, Vad writes, is that the board’s knowledge isn’t deep enough for it to treat AI as an integral element of the organization, not just a new technology trend that an outside expert can be called in to share. AI needs to be positioned “not as a standalone technology matter, but as an enterprise-wide issue affecting strategy, value creation, organizational capabilities, accountability, and trust,” he writes.

But despite his article’s title, Vad isn’t calling for a radical retooling of board structures. Rather, he advocates for a deeper engagement with foresight than it has perhaps been practicing. Meetings every three months no longer cut it; discussions around risk need to be more pointed. “If an organisation uses AI, there are risks, and if it does not use AI, there are risks,” he writes. “The Board’s responsibility is to find the appropriate balance between managing the risks it can responsibly accept and pursuing opportunities that may be too significant to ignore.”

An article from the World Economic Forum this week makes a similar case, suggesting that there are too many “spectator boards” that aren’t having the deeper conversations about risk that their organizations need. “Competitive advantage increasingly comes from asking better questions, not receiving more information,” its authors write. “For example, boards should ask: Which assumptions underpin our strategy? Which would fail first? What signals would tell us we’re wrong?”

AI is an important factor in these conversations, and there’s nothing wrong with ensuring that your board members are well-versed in it. But ultimately what these articles prescribe isn’t a commitment to thinking more about AI, but a commitment to behaving with a greater sense of urgency. AI may not be the biggest concern on leaders’ minds right now: A relatively somber CEO survey released earlier this week by Chief Executive suggests that costs, government policies, and global instability are greater stressors.

As a level-set for boards, Deloitte’s Vad suggests a useful exercise: The board should have a conversation the next time they meet about what they wish they knew the last time they met. “A practical question for the Chair could be, What would we wish had reached the Board six months earlier, and how should our governance system adjust to surface it?” he writes. That process will reveal what they need to be better informed about. And it also prompts a discussion about what’s keeping them from being better informed.

No organization wants to be blindsided. But studying up on AI alone won’t fix that. However, a stronger commitment to foresight and candid conversations about risk may.