3 ways you can use AI to write your next board paper

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are no longer the preserve of tech geeks; with 75% of knowledge workers now using generative AI at work, they’re very much “business as usual”. Many of us are now applying AI tools to tasks that, not long ago, we’d never have considered possible — or appropriate.

Board reporting is no exception. AI tools promise to analyse, draft, and rephrase text at the click of a button, offering significant time savings while also potentially improving the quality of board papers. But is everything as it seems?

What benefits can AI tools bring to the board reporting process?

The benefits of using AI for board reporting aren't guaranteed. Use generic tools or apply the wrong tools to the wrong tasks, and it becomes harder to achieve the ROI you expect. If an AI tool doesn't know what good board reporting looks like, how can it help you deliver the insight your board needs?

You could also be putting yourself and your organisation at risk — serving up your most sensitive data to other users and bringing “AI hallucinations” into some of your most important internal communications.

While building Report Writer, our AI-powered board and management reporting platform, we identified three specific applications of AI that could help report writers, and their organisations, to make the most of this board pack-improving opportunity, while also saving time. These are:

1. Writing and refining your executive summary
2. Injecting candour and balance into your paper
3. Balancing forward- and backward-looking insights

Read on to find out more. If you'd like a primer first, read the definitive guide to AI for the board pack to find out more about how AI works, the potential pitfalls of using AI for board packs, and how to avoid them.

Use AI to refine your executive summary

Imagine a colleague is dashing between meetings when they catch you in the corridor. They need you to give them the “in a nutshell” headlines from your board paper. What would you say? That’s your Executive Summary.

The executive summary is one of the most important ingredients in a high-impact board paper. By condensing the core messages from your report into pithy, relevant and actionable takeaways, you help your readers to focus on what matters while showing them that you can see the bigger picture, too.

AI tools, which are brilliant at summarising text, present an opportunity to make this difficult task easier. But they will get things wrong; they don’t understand the context, your market landscape, your organisation’s culture, or your audience. As such, it would be irresponsible to use AI to automate the process away — because when you do, you outsource the expertise and judgement that the board is expecting to see from you.

Instead, you can use AI to make sure you’ve got the key messages in your executive summary right. Here’s how:

1. Write your board paper. You can use our purpose-built AI report generator, Report Writer, to do this. If you prefer to do it yourself, you can find practice templates for a range of common board reports in our “how to” video series.
2. Use Report Writer to generate a summary of the report's key points, which will be based on its analysis of the content of your paper. 
3. Review the AI-generated summary. Does it miss something you thought was key, get anything wrong, or include details that aren’t important? The AI tool in this case acts like a mirror, helping you to spot and correct gaps or inconsistencies in your report. If it didn’t pick something up in the summary, for example, it could be that you haven’t made the point as concisely or clearly as you thought, or that you’ve gone too deep on other, less important points. This gives you an opportunity to edit the content of your paper to ensure you’ve got the messages and the balance right, before you edit your summary.
4. Refine the AI-generated summary to create a version you are confident is accurate and board-relevant. You can read our definitive guide to the executive summary for a detailed “how to” guide.

The benefit of using AI in this way means that you can test your analysis of the information you’ve shared and produce a pithy summary for the board, while never leaving the driving seat.

Use AI to inject candour and balance into your paper

Candour is essential for building trust between board and management but is often missing from board papers. According to our research with the Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland, nearly two-fifths of directors think their board papers aren’t upfront enough about the bad news.

It can be tempting to varnish the story, especially if you’re trying to get the board’s approval for a plan or investment. But there’s always bad news, and no plan is without risk or challenge. If either the bad news or the risks are missing from your paper, your audience will wonder why. As one board member once put it to us, “Until I hear the bad news, I’m not really listening.” Swerving the uncomfortable truths often only helps to draw the board’s attention to them; they’ll question whether you can see the risks and challenges or wonder if you’re trying to hide something and pull the wool over their eyes.

On the other hand, when you surface risks or share concerns, you display openness and ownership. It also gives you an opportunity to do something about it, bringing the issue to the attention of those who can help you tackle it.

It’s in balancing good and bad news — and sharing the honest, unvarnished insights that your board needs — that AI can help. Report Writer, for example, scans your paper as you write it, analysing the degree of candour in your paper and sharing a real-time summary with you so you can benchmark the ‘positivity’ of your report against a best practice standard. This gives you an opportunity to assess whether you’ve struck the right balance and make the necessary changes if you haven’t.

Use AI to balance looking backward with looking forward

You can’t drive a car by looking in the rear-view mirror. You can’t run a business that way either.

Your board paper should reflect this by looking forward, helping board members to see what’s on the road ahead. This means thinking about the outlook and the implications of the topic at hand.

When you do this, writing your paper becomes an opportunity to think about the change that is needed and to flesh out stronger plans. It is your chance to influence how the organisation uses its resources. It also shows your leadership potential; writing a report that looks both backwards and forwards marks you out as someone who’s capable of managing the business of today while shaping the business of tomorrow.

And yet, when we review board packs, they’re typically heavily biased towards the recent past. Nearly half (43%) of the directors we’ve surveyed since we started gathering data on board packs in 2019 say their board papers are too backward-looking.

So, how can AI help? One relatively well-trailed option is to use AI tools to sift through large volumes of data, spotting trends and patterns and mapping out a range of potential scenarios to inform your analysis of performance and build out future plans.

When it comes to communicating these insights, AI tools can provide useful real-time feedback on your writing. Report Writer, for example, measures the extent to which your reports contain forward- or backward-looking statements and then compares that to a best practice standard, helping you assess whether you’ve got the balance right — and then giving you an opportunity to correct it.

Conclusion

Our research has identified three ways in which AI can transform the process of writing board papers — from helping to write executive summaries to pointing out where writing could be improved to deliver more forward-looking and candid insights. Whether you’re AI-curious or fully on the bandwagon, it’s clear that this technology is here to stay. And when combined with management’s judgement and experience, it might be a valuable new tool for tackling age-old board pack problems.