AI leadership and the future of corporate governance: Changing demands for board competence

Book chapter, 2019

This chapter focuses on the future of one subset of labor - corporate boards. Corporate boards make complex strategic decisions in uncertain environments, such as mergers and acquisitions, new product launches and digital transformation, all of which influence organizations and the nature of labor. However, corporate boards are increasingly struggling due to digitalization, and it is predicted that artificial intelligence (AI), and the “big data” on which AI is based, will become one of the greatest board issues in the next ten years. There is currently limited research on how corporate boards should respond to this challenge. Thus, this chapter presents preliminary results from a research project that includes a systematic literature review and expert interviews, while also touching on how AI could change the future of board work. The findings indicate that boards will need to develop two competence areas to successfully steward firms into an AI-based future: (1) guiding AI operational capability and (2) supervising AI governance capability. The Boards 4 AI Leadership Matrix is presented as a tool to facilitate the development of these competence areas. This chapter concludes that the future boards are unlikely to be replaced by automatization within the foreseeable future although AI is expected to have a fundamental impact on board work.