The CAIO Conversation You Need to Have With Your Board

The Brief

AI has made it onto most board agendas. The conversation, however, is usually at the wrong altitude.

Boards want to know about AI opportunity — competitive positioning, productivity gains, innovation potential. These are legitimate questions. But the conversations I hear about most often stop there. The risk side of the ledger gets a slide, not a discussion.

The board conversation that actually needs to happen covers three things that most management teams aren’t surfacing:

First, liability exposure. Not abstract AI risk — specific liability. What decisions is AI informing in your organization, and what is the legal and regulatory exposure if those outputs are wrong? This is a governance question, and boards have fiduciary responsibility for it.

Second, spend accountability. How much is the organization spending on AI, what is it producing, and who is accountable for the ROI? Most boards are approving AI investment without a framework for evaluating return. That’s a capital allocation problem.

Third, talent and capability gaps. The skills required to govern AI are different from the skills required to deploy it. Does the organization have the CAIO function — formally or fractionally — needed to manage what it’s building?

The boards that are asking these questions are getting ahead of the ones that aren’t. And the management teams that are surfacing them proactively are building trust faster than the ones waiting to be asked.

The Number

42% — the percentage of Fortune 500 boards that have added AI-specific expertise at the board or C-suite level as of 2024. That means 58% of the largest companies in the US are governing AI with no dedicated expertise in the room. The number is higher, not lower, in mid-market.

The Move

Prepare a one-page AI governance briefing for your next board or leadership meeting that covers three things:

1. A complete inventory of consequential AI deployments currently in production

2. Current AI spend vs. budget, with a trend line

3. The three highest AI-related risks the organization faces and who owns each one

If you can’t produce that page today, you’ve identified your governance priorities.

The Question

“Does our board have enough information about our AI deployments to fulfill its fiduciary responsibility — and if not, whose job is it to give it to them?”

Also published on LinkedIn

Brian Diamond | BrianOnAI.com | Onaro.io | The CAIO Brief — weekly for AI leaders