“Board members are going to start losing their jobs because of AI”

Governance has traditionally been more tortoise than hare, enabling long-term value creation through prudent calculation and careful deliberation, and leaving bursts of innovation and disruption to management. Yet there is undeniably a buzz among governance professionals today — a sense that an unprecedented change is afoot, and they have a part to play in making it happen.

At Board Intelligence’s inaugural 2026 Governance Summit at Mansion House, over 150 senior governance leaders heard that this change is radical, rapid, and unpredictable. Boards cannot stand still, and they will rely more than ever on governance teams to help them adapt.

Speakers including polymath ex-politician and podcaster Rory Stewart, Lloyds Banking Group corporate governance director Nicola Putland, and City grandee Sir Jan du Plessis — who attended as his final engagement before retiring as Financial Reporting Council chair — surfaced several key themes for governance professionals to reflect on as they make their 2027 plans.

Many of the board’s core assumptions no longer hold

Rory Stewart was characteristically blunt about the collapse of the post-1945 rules-based international order, anchored in US power. Globalisation, liberal democracy, and even peace were objectively on the retreat, he said, but leaders everywhere were struggling to imagine how such a world could work.

“The businesses in this room, our governments, our militaries, our trading arrangements, were built for a world that existed for 80 years and no longer exists,” Stewart explained. “You are no longer in a world where you can assume that tariffs are going to continue to come down, that you can rely on China, or that your supply chains are secure.”

The same is true, for different reasons, of the assumptions that many organisations and boards have made about AI.

In 2026, AI models solved the Navier-Stokes problem, which had evaded the most brilliant mathematicians for decades. Yet Board Intelligence CEO Pippa Begg said that some boards are still prevaricating on whether chatbots are ready for to manage call centre support.

“The mistake we are making there is judging AI on what it could do 18 months ago and underestimating the pace with which it's developing. It's moving far faster than most realise,” Begg explained.

To prove the point, she invited a little audience participation, asking the assembled company secretaries and general counsels what new AI tool they would like to see. They picked a skills matrix for board directors. In early 2025, building a prototype would have taken many months, but the Board Intelligence team was able to build a functioning tool during the Summit, in about three hours.

“Months of work have become weeks. Weeks have become hours,” Begg explained. Capabilities will only improve, but “we need to judge AI on what it can do today and assume that is the floor, not the ceiling.”

Opportunities abound, but risks are getting harder to manage 

Rapid progress can be hard to govern, and the downsides sometimes loom largest on the horizon. Quantum computing, for example, may unlock many new capabilities but its most likely immediate impact would be a global cybersecurity meltdown: very little of today’s encryption could survive a quantum hacker.

AlixPartners co-CEO Rob Hornby doesn’t believe ‘Q-day’ (the tipping point when quantum computers become powerful enough to break today's cybersecurity paradigm) is imminent, but did warn that bad actors are busy stealing secure commercial data in anticipation: “They're waiting for the time when they can crack open the keys and see what that data says.”

Boards therefore need not only to understand when quantum may hit, but also to rethink how their organisation and its suppliers treat data on a fundamental level today.

Stewart raised the dangerous interplay between AI and geopolitics. “This is a hinge technology which will find itself embedded at the very core of every bit of our national life almost immediately,” he explained.

“The problem is that defence and security, economy, and public services are founded on foundation models which exist only in the United States. The vulnerabilities are unbelievable.”

Stewart pointed to the US administration banning foreign access to the latest frontier models several times without notice, and its potential ability to cut access to models that organisations had already paid for. In the absence of a UK or European sovereign AI, this becomes a difficult risk to control or mitigate.

Robots will not replace us, but we can’t ignore them

Discussion at the Governance Summit naturally turned to what boards and governance teams could do in the face of radical change.

The lesson from Sir Jan du Plessis was not to lose sight of the basics. He talked about remembering the board’s purpose, which he said hasn’t changed over his 40 years in the boardroom. “I still believe the primary task of board directors is to maximise long-term sustainable value creation for shareholders.”

The chair’s role remained critically important, du Plessis added, in encouraging discussion (“too much formality is deadly, it absolutely kills debate”) and as leaders of what was still a team of human beings: “When everything goes wrong, and it will, you need a strong team, so team building needs to be done in times of peace.”

Yet it’s unrealistic to expect that board practice would stand still while the rest of the world sprints ahead. AI is already transforming governance workflows, making it easier for directors to access and analyse information, ask better questions and look at a topic from a different perspective. Lloyds Banking Groups’ corporate governance director Nicola Putland shared insights from her team’s deployment of “an AI lens” for their board and executive team – the so-called “board bot” developed in partnership with Board Intelligence and first covered by the Sunday Times back in April.

Speakers at the Governance Summit were adamant this takes nothing away from the people who make governance work. Whether in the boardroom or behind the scenes, AI’s value lies in augmenting rather than replacing us.

“Over the next few years, board members are going to start losing their jobs because of AI – not because AI replaces them, but because AI will expose the gap between the directors who add value and those who don't,” said Begg. “Judgement, clarity, and curiosity are in short supply. High-quality thinking has never been worth more.”

The difference is that great directors will apply these qualities to their new tools, while “lazy” directors will instead find it superficially easier to wing it.

With the divergence already underway and day-to-day use of AI by directors rapidly rising, there is a brief window for governance professionals to influence how AI will be used in their boardroom in the years to come.

“If we step back, this technology will be done to us, and we'll spend the rest of our careers managing the consequences,” said Begg. “If we lean in, we shape what it's used for and where the limits are set. This is not a job for the technology team or politicians. That's governance.”