Board reporting and AI: Could there be a Board PackGPT in our future?

OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman described ChatGPT as being “incredibly limited, but good enough… to create a misleading impression of greatness. It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important.”

Why would the founder of this hugely successful AI tool put such a caveat around his work? What does this tell us about using AI to create a board pack — potentially the most important document within an organization, and one that requires thoughtful input from its writers?

Does AI have a role in board pack creation?

Modern AI tools are definitely proving themselves useful: over 100 million people worldwide have now used ChatGPT, and the emergence of many new AI assistants seems to have the potential to infiltrate nearly every area of working life.

However, to quote Bill Gates on AI, “businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.” Those who come out on top will be those who use these new capabilities wisely. This starts with recognizing that “large language models”-powered tools like ChatGPT only give the illusion of intelligence, and are in fact a lot dimmer than most people think. Yes, they may be good at putting words together, but they have no conscious reasoning, moral compass, or even a way to distinguish between truths and lies. All they actually do is aggregate words in a way that’s statistically likely to be correct.

It would therefore be misguided to rely on AI to automate and author your board pack. First of all, asking ChatGPT to write your papers would breach most organizations’ information security policy, and additionally, the AI wouldn’t know the context, understand the issues at stake, or be able to verify the accuracy of the content it produces. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. Two New York lawyers have recently been fined for relying on fake case citations made up by ChatGPT in a personal injury case. When AI gets things wrong, it has real-life consequences.

How can you use AI for board reporting in a safe, smart way?

So, if you can’t trust AI to create something from scratch, you should rather use it to augment and improve what’s already there. While it can’t be an author, it can play the role of a critical friend and editor.

Use AI as your board report’s editor but not its author

You can’t simply paste sensitive company information into public tools like ChatGPT (which typically have 30-day data retention policies and can share your data with other users) and ask them for advice. But Lucia, our board and management reporting platform, never shares or reuses your data. It’s the only AI-powered tool purpose-built for board and management reporting that doesn’t do so. Lucia uses AI to help authors consistently write high-impact, intelligent, and strategic reports. It’s based on the Question Driven Insight (QDI) Principle, a methodology a methodology that builds three essential qualities into your papers:

1. Focus on what matters: Ask and answer the most pertinent questions.
2. Be rooted in critical thinking: Assure the reader that robust, intelligent analysis has been done.
3. Communicate clearly and concisely: Share the key points in a way that’s easy for the reader to absorb.

Get real-time feedback from AI reporting tools as you write

Lucia helps writers embed the QDI Principle into their board and management reports at scale, systemizing the approach and quality of papers organization-wide. The live analysis panel reviews your copy as you type, giving you a real-time update on how the report stacks up and how it could be improved.

For instance, it can be hard to strike the right balance of sharing enough information without overwhelming the board with details. To solve this, Lucia’s AI tools can flag potential issues such as:

• Is a paragraph heavy on information but light on insight?
• Is it too backward-looking or overly focused on the good news?
• Is the paper too long and wordy?

Lucia can identify the strengths and weaknesses of a paper, helping the writer craft a better and more intelligible board or management report.

 

Get live feedback and real-time prompts.

Automatically summarize your board reports

Great papers start with a strong executive summary that answers the key questions upfront. Lucia can help you here, too. It allows writers to auto-create an executive summary, which they can then edit to ensure that it accurately reflects the paper and all its complexities.

 

Build your executive summary with just a few clicks.

Lucia and its AI tools can’t create the perfect board paper from scratch, but it can critique and guide writers in preparing high-quality reports. It can bring a systemized, organization-wide approach to board reporting that’s hard to do through training and templates alone. This, in turn, sets the board up for success, enabling directors to identify what matters faster, add more value, and discharge their duties to the best of their abilities.

Curious to see how Lucia’s AI tools can support you in delivering better board or management papers? Find out more here.