Board

In my article The Board in the machine, I argued that “Boards will find that there are no barriers to making the right decisions at the speed of light”. More recently, in AI is transforming governance: Six key Boardroom priorities, I observed that boards “are moving from overseeing hundreds of decisions made per day to millions made per second”. This acceleration of business decision velocity presents both an unprecedented challenge and opportunity for Directors and the Boards they serve.

The EU AI Act, which came into force on August 1, 2024, establishes significant penalties for non-compliance, including fines of up to €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover for serious violations. As regulatory frameworks for artificial intelligence rapidly evolve worldwide, Boards face a new imperative: navigating complex compliance requirements while maintaining the innovation speed necessary to compete.

In my previous articles about the AI Stages of Adoption and the Five Pillars of AI maturity and capability, I briefly touched on the role of the AI Centre of Excellence (AI CoE). Since publishing those pieces, I’ve spoken with numerous Boards and business leaders about AI adoption and the importance of board-level AI governance. A recurring question emerges in almost every conversation: “What are the practical steps to establishing an AI CoE in our business?”

In my previous article on the AI Stages of Adoption (AISA), I outlined how organisations progress through their AI journey—from Experimenting to Adopting, Optimising, Transforming, and ultimately Scaling. Since publishing that piece, many readers have asked the same follow‐up question: “How do we know when we’re truly ready to move from one stage to the next?”

Last night, I had the pleasure of returning to the Chief Wine Officer event series on behalf of AWS, this time addressing leaders from private equity portfolio companies on a topic close to my heart: turning organisational data into strategic value. The evening, hosted at Spring at Somerset House, brought together executives eager to explore how to accelerate value creation through data monetisation within PE timeframes.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the velocity of business decision-making and how organisations operate, compete, and create value. With AI, boards are moving from overseeing hundreds of decisions made per day to millions made per second - and they must be confident that each of those decisions is transparent, explainable, and correct.

In 1998, I walked into the headquarters of our newly acquired newspaper group in Leeds, a result of a private equity-backed management buyout of United News & Media’s regional newspaper and magazine titles. Tasked with ‘doing the internet’, I found a small semblance of online activity in the form of a basic advertising website for the Yorkshire Post. A couple of weeks of getting my feet under my desk yielded a digital goldmine - 271 years of content waiting to be transformed into digital assets.

As organisations adopt artificial intelligence (AI) more widely, a critical challenge emerges: how do you build and manage teams capable of delivering on AI’s promise of increased productivity, enhanced customer experiences, accelerated innovation, and sustainable competitive advantage?

In my early years at Amazon Web Services (AWS), I created a tool for building cloud business cases that went beyond measuring just total cost of ownership and now forms the basis of our approach to costing migrations. I later co-authored the Cloud Value Framework (CVF) which focusses on measuring cloud value across four areas: cost optimisation, risk reduction, increased agility, and resource efficiency. So it should come as no surprise that I often get asked by Boards and the executives I meet “How do we decide if we should make an AI investment and how do we measure its ROI?”

Over the past year, I’ve been asked regularly what the best way of selecting a Large Language Model (LLM) is. With over 146 LLMs listed in Ollama’s model library alone, selecting the right model has become increasingly complex. While ChatGPT dominates headlines, businesses must look beyond hype to match the right model to their specific needs. Choosing the right LLM isn’t just a technical decision—it directly impacts your organisation’s ability to drive innovation and achieve its strategic goals, making collaboration between technical and non-technical teams essential to ensure that both business needs and operational constraints are fully understood.