Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are no longer the preserve of tech geeks; with 75% of knowledge workers now using generative AI at work, they’re very much “business as usual”.
That means many of us are now applying AI tools to tasks that, a few months ago, we’d never have considered possible — or appropriate. Take writing board papers, for example; nearly one in five (19%) of the attendees at a recent Board Intelligence event told us they were already using AI in board reporting, with a further 23% actively exploring it. Of those using or exploring AI tools for board reporting, half were using generic generative AI tools like CoPilot and Chat GPT.
They may be onto something; with AI tools that can analyse and rephrase text at the click of a button, they could significantly improve the quality and impact of board papers, from management performance updates to business cases. Use the wrong tools or apply them to the wrong tasks, however, and you could be putting yourself and your organisation at risk — serving up your most sensitive data to other users and bringing “AI hallucinations” into some of your most important internal communications.
Over the past 18 months, our team has been immersed in this problem, as we’ve built AI features into Lucia, our board and management reporting platform. In that time, we’ve found three specific applications of AI that could help report writers, and their organisations, to make the most of this board pack-improving opportunity.
Read the definitive guide to AI for the board pack to find out more about how AI works, the potential pitfalls of using AI for board packs, and how to avoid them.
Imagine a colleague is dashing between meetings when they catch you in the corridor. They need you to give them the “in a nutshell” headlines from your board paper. What would you say? That’s your Executive Summary.
The Executive Summary is one of the most important ingredients in a high-impact board paper. By condensing the core messages from your report into pithy, relevant and actionable takeaways, you help your readers to focus on what matters while showing them that you can see the bigger picture, too.
AI tools, which are brilliant at summarising text, present an opportunity to make this difficult task easier. But they will get things wrong; they don’t understand the context, your market landscape, your organisation’s culture, or your audience. As such, it would be irresponsible to use AI to automate the process away — because when you do, you outsource the expertise and judgement that the board is expecting to see from you.
Instead, you can use AI to make sure you’ve got the key messages in your Executive Summary right. Here’s how:
The benefit of using AI in this way means that you can test your analysis of the information you’ve shared and produce a pithy summary for the board, while never leaving the driving seat.
Candour is essential for building trust between board and management but is often missing from board papers. According to our research with the Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland, nearly two-fifths of directors think their board papers aren’t upfront enough about the bad news.
It can be tempting to varnish the story, especially if you’re trying to get the board’s approval for a plan or investment. But there’s always bad news, and no plan is without risk or challenge. If either the bad news or the risks are missing from your paper, your audience will wonder why. As one board member once put it to us, “Until I hear the bad news, I’m not really listening.” Swerving the uncomfortable truths often only helps to draw the board’s attention to them; they’ll question whether you can see the risks and challenges or wonder if you’re trying to hide something and pull the wool over their eyes.
On the other hand, when you surface risks or share concerns, you display openness and ownership. It also gives you an opportunity to do something about it, bringing the issue to the attention of those who can help you tackle it.
It’s in balancing good and bad news — and sharing the honest, unvarnished insights that your board needs — that AI can help. Lucia’s Candid analysis feature, for example, scans your paper as you write it, analysing the degree of candour in your paper and sharing a real-time summary with you so you can benchmark the ‘positivity’ of your report against a best practice standard. This gives you an opportunity to assess whether you’ve struck the right balance and make the necessary changes if you haven’t.
You can’t drive a car by looking in the rear-view mirror. You can’t run a business that way either.
Your board paper should reflect this by looking forward, helping board members to see what’s on the road ahead. This means thinking about the outlook and the implications of the topic at hand.
When you do this, writing your paper becomes an opportunity to think about the change that is needed and to flesh out stronger plans. It is your chance to influence how the organisation uses its resources. It also shows your leadership potential; writing a report that looks both backwards and forwards marks you out as someone who’s capable of managing the business of today while shaping the business of tomorrow.
And yet, when we review board packs, they’re typically heavily biased towards the recent past. Nearly half (43%) of the directors we’ve surveyed since we started gathering data on board packs in 2019 say their board papers are too backward-looking.
So, how can AI help? One relatively well-trailed option is to use AI tools to sift through large volumes of data, spotting trends and patterns and mapping out a range of potential scenarios to inform your analysis of performance and build out future plans.
When it comes to communicating these insights, AI tools can provide useful real-time feedback on your writing. Lucia’s Forward Analysis tool, for example, measures the extent to which your reports contain forward- or backward-looking statements and then compares that to a best practice standard, helping you assess whether you’ve got the balance right — and then giving you an opportunity to correct it.
Our research over the past 18 months has identified three ways in which AI can transform the process of writing board papers — from helping to write Executive Summaries, to pointing out where writing could be improved to deliver more forward-looking and candid insights. Whether you’re AI-curious or fully on the bandwagon, it’s clear that this technology is here to stay. And when combined with management’s judgement and experience, it might be a valuable new tool for tackling age-old board pack problems.