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How intelligent is your board? AI literacy is fast becoming an essential boardroom skill as organisations navigate rapid technological change. Is your board ready and what’s your AI game plan?
Integrating human and machine intelligence is crucial for directors to understand comparative advantages and how best to coexist, according to AICD chair Naomi Edwards FAICD in her address to the Australian Governance Summit in March.
"The sooner we integrate human and machine intelligence inside a boardroom, the better we understand how to work together, where our comparative advantages lie and how we best coexist,” she says.
Despite many board chairs feeling “extremely uncomfortable” about using agentic AI in the boardroom and mounting counter-arguments on the basis of possible legal concerns and “the potential stifling effect of being recorded by the AI”, Edwards thinks the situation will change.
Embrace technology or it will roll over the top of you, says Tim McKibbin, CEO of Real Estate Institute NSW (REINSW), which introduced a virtual AI board adviser – Alice Ing – in May 2024. The bot runs off OpenAI’s ChatGPT system and was developed in collaboration with SMS.
McKibbin explains Alice has the ability to interrogate enormous amounts of data very quickly to provide the human board members with information they can consider, interpret, check and use.
Australian law is clear that only “natural persons” can be directors. However, forward-thinking boards are experimenting with AI tools that can collate years of board papers in moments, surface emerging risks and sharpen the quality of management reporting.
Adoption remains uneven, but these early use cases offer insight into how board practice may evolve in the next few years.
Alice Ing wonderland
McKibbin says the practical application of Alice Ing has a number of advantages. “We could be in the boardroom and one of the board members might ask how many cases of underquoting have we had? Alice is able to look at the NSW Fair Trading website, ministerial press releases, anything she can source. She’ll interrogate legislation and we can prompt her with examples.
“Alice exists in her own space and we pay a monthly fee for her to be living in her ‘own home’. If we provide her with board papers and anything else being discussed during a board meeting, we purge that from her memory. But in her immediate data bank, she has publicly available legislation and anything else we stumble across that we think would be useful.”
He says the board asks Alice questions about governance or about how it should approach different things. “Her responses come back in the blink of an eye. You can’t take it as gospel, we have to check it, but we’ve found it of enormous value.”
McKibbin believes the AI revolution “is going to shake up the way we do things”.
“We need to be repositioning ourselves for the future. Given the pace of development in technology, I imagine over the next 18 months there will be conversations about privacy, ethics and legality, but if you aren’t prepared to adapt, then you’ll be left behind.”
He says REINSW brought Alice into the boardroom to make a statement about the organisation. “We see a future where people can use AI responsibly and discover benefits and opportunities.”
Telco on task
Craig Emery is Telstra Group company secretary and general counsel. He says if boards are trying to evaluate the potential for AI to assist their organisations, it’s important they move beyond talking about it and being educated by others, to using it themselves. This will accelerate learning.
In February, Telstra launched a board AI agent that interrogates past board and committee papers, minutes, actions, annual reports, previously published ASX releases and group policies. Directors interact with the agent in the same way they might any other AI agent, with chat and prompts, to undertake a range of tasks that could include reviewing past papers and minutes on specific topics.
Emery explains how it supports directors in preparing for board and committee meetings. “The primary purpose of it is to improve the searchability of board materials and assist the directors to engage more effectively with the information they already have.”
Guardrails limit the AI agent to materials that have already been provided to the board, which was a “deliberate design choice”.
“We did that to ensure the responses directors get from the agent are based on information provided to the board, and not a wider data set, which includes management materials,” he says. “We’ve built and housed it locally to manage privacy, cyber and data governance risks, and it aligns with our internal standards and policies for handling highly sensitive board information. It’s not connected to any public or external large language model and we’ve tested it extensively to make sure it doesn’t hallucinate.”
Quality check
Telstra is also using AI to improve the quality and readability of board papers, developing basic prompts that were shared with management teams who prepare papers.
Setting up the AI agent took several months and while he acknowledges it’s still early days, Emery says results appear positive. “We’re seeing real improvement in the quality of our papers. We’ve recorded double-digit reductions in percentage terms on the length of the sentences and big reductions in the use of passive language.”
Use AI daily
With the pace of change likely to increase, building your personal proficiency and creating a daily habit of using AI is an essential ingredient to starting to understand the scale of what’s possible, according to Emery.
“We’re all identifying the processes that we either own or are participants in that we can improve by deploying AI,” he says, adding the purpose is to recognise overly time-consuming administrative work.
“If you let yourself be captured by that, then you miss the chance to apply wisdom and judgement, and that’s where you really add value as a company secretary. You’ve got to get the compliance part of your job right, but you want to be able to add value. Through the sensible deployment of AI, you can enhance your ability to do that and add value to the companies you work for.”
All on board
Telstra’s board has embraced the use of the AI agent enthusiastically, says Emery. “We have been clear and our board well understands that the agent is designed to support directors, not replace their judgement or their decision making. It’s there to help directors absorb content, test recommendations and enhance their appreciation of materials. It’s there to make the exercise of their judgement better, rather than replace it.”
Mindset really matters
Emery is convinced the mindset directors bring to the boardroom about using AI is crucial. “What I’m curious about now is, what are directors going to learn and notice as they use this tool? Because they will discover ways to use this that assist them as directors that I haven’t thought of. That’s the exciting thing. It would be easy to feel intimidated by the technology, but the opportunity to reimagine how we do work and how we add value is just so profoundly interesting and exciting. Boards should have the same mindset as they think about how can we more effectively govern and guide the organisations we serve, enabled by technology.”
Should machines have a seat at the board table?
AI is no longer optional. “It’s about matching ambition with responsibility,” says Jason McQuillen, partner at MinterEllison Consulting and head of its AI advisory.
“Organisations need to look at different postures they could take – whether that’s leading-edge, fast follower, selective experimenter or something else. Then they can set foundational governance, build capability and actively assess use cases across the spectrum, from basic productivity through to transformation.”
He warns that simply ignoring AI is no longer an option. “It’s incumbent on boards to actively set their strategy. The strategy might be conservative, but you need to have one. Not considering it is arguably getting into the dangerous territory of not acting in the best interests of the company.”
Access the AICD’s AI use by directors and boards: Early insights report here.
This article first appeared as 'What's your AI game-plan?' in the June/July 2026 Issue of Company Director Magazine.
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