How tech innovation brings strategic advantage in the boardroom

Are you ready for exponential technology? Author, non-executive director, chair and innovator Larry Marshall FAICD explains how understanding the data can put your business in front. Intelligent agents (IA) are pushing artificial intelligence (AI) further and faster.

There is plenty to keep CEOs and boards awake at night, but seeing around corners to avoid being disintermediated by technology is finally finding its way onto the board skills matrix.

It is difficult for a CEO and management team to be great at running the company in the here and now, and simultaneously looking out into widely diverse markets they aren’t in. They are left trying to see technology they don’t understand. Coming from so far away, it seems irrelevant.

However, as well as standing on the balcony, looking into the future, directors now also need to look far and wide across multiple domains in the present.

Nasdaq leads

It’s not easy for traditional directors to do this. But this is partially why the Nasdaq was invented — to enable the listing of technology companies whose boards tend to be populated by other tech CEOs, CTOs and entrepreneurs. This must also be the ASX’s evolution.

Technology innovation has gone from replacing your Kodak with a digital camera, to replacing your Nokia with a handheld computer that is also a phone — which then replaces everything from your digital camera, scanner and home security to flashlight, compass and clock.

Technology enables competitors to leap over market boundaries, crash through barriers to entry and come at you from completely unconnected industries. It enables a company that was never a competitor, playing in a completely different market, to disintermediate and destroy you even when you’re the market leader. Exponential technologies like quantum, synbio (synthetic biology), nucleonics and AI are far worse unless you’re the disruptor.

Fast pace

We had a bitter lesson in living exponentials through COVID-19. When you look at exponential technology one day, it’s a joke. The next week, it’s interesting. The week after, it has surpassed your wildest expectations. By the time you realise it can compete with your company, it’s too late. You’re Nokia trying to catch up with iPhone.

I saw my first intelligent agent (IA) at Stanford 20 years ago. Some 10 years ago, it was performing the basic functions of a financial controller, HR lead and operations manager. Have no doubt, it can replace most jobs today, but is far better at creating value. AI accelerates everything.

Transformation

When I came back to Australia and took over CSIRO in 2015, it needed a digital transformation.

Within a few years, we’d bred climate change-resistant crop strains, discovered the human immunity gene, predicted Disease X and enabled Australia to mass produce a vaccine within months of COVID-19 starting — all using AI to shave years off the normal R&D times.

We targeted these challenges using a startup process called “market vision”. This predicts the behaviour of a market and enables you to identify the killer product that could shift the market in your direction. The benefits are that you have the only product that satisfies the disrupted needs of everyone else’s customers. You win, no matter how powerful the incumbent. Silicon Valley doesn’t win because it has the best tech, but rather because it has the best market vision.

Using technology

Large language models have accelerated further and faster, expanding the data lake exponentially and enabling seamless communication between humans and the AI algorithms (technically, there’s still no “real AI” — a machine thinking for itself).

So, those IAs now communicate like humans. Large global companies use AI to find anomalies in their business that might signal improper behaviour — from financial to HR. They screen, interview and filter out job candidates, measure your culture and give you a more profitable structure.

Machine learning from large data sets enabled by the growth of the internet has accelerated predictive analytics. Algorithms can predict the future based on the past.

AI can help you predict the trends and dynamics of a specific market vertical, particularly markets like medtech, telecoms and energy. It can exponentially power your ability to create the right market vision. Your customers can’t tell you what your killer product is — but their data can.

Pulling the data

Just as putting your customer at the centre of any digital transformation is the difference between being successful and the other 80 per cent who fail, getting inside your customer’s head — and thereby, the market — is the key to successfully leveraging AI.

Market vision is the secret to deep technology innovation. Even a prize-winning invention can’t become a world-changing innovation without the right market vision. Australia may have invented the best solar cells, but China’s market vision innovated them.

AI is only one of the exponential technologies coming at us. If you weren’t already using it before all the hype of ChatGPT, then you can’t catch an exponential. Better take a hard look at the other exponential tech before it explodes onto your radar. It is far better to be the disruptor than it is to be the disintermediated.

This article first appeared under the headline 'The IA of AI' in the July 2025 issue of Company Director magazine.