In this episode of On Boards, hosts Joe Ayoub and Raza Shaikh welcome Jamie Green, co-founder and CEO of Tutaki,  an AI-powered workbench designed to make board directors significantly more effective. 

Drawing from his background in consulting at McKinsey, Green created a technological solution to solve a widespread challenge in board rooms across the U.S. and abroad: information overload and limited time to prepare. Tutaki is an AI system that acts as an expert co-pilot to help directors surface context, identify risk, and deliver impact. 

Jamie also shares how AI is reshaping governance, what it means for liability and independence, and where the future of boardrooms may be headed.

Key takeaways

1. Problems with board overload

• During his time as a consultant at McKinsey, Jamie would deliver 300-page strategy decks to board members 48 hours before a meeting 
• Directors would arrive unprepared, leading to conservations about updates and recaps rather than strategic discussions. The lack of preparation risked slow decision making and stifled innovation.

2. New Zealand boardrooms 

• Jamie, based in New Zealand, said board practices in his home country are similar to the U.S. but New Zealand directors tend to have a wider board portfolio — some are on as many as 8 boards. 

• New Zealand has shifted to increase liability for board directors to hold them accountable for reading all board materials. If the business is impacted by the lack of action by a director, they can be criminally liable.

3. Practical pain points that led to Tutaki

• Information overload: directors are expected to digest hundreds of pages, news articles, and compliance documents across multiple boards.
•  Contextual awareness: recalling what was decided three months ago or tracking delays in projects across several meetings often requires wading through thousands of pages.
•  Portfolio management: professional directors often sit on 5–8 boards, making it difficult to organize materials, track follow-ups, and maintain oversight across them all.

4. AI as a co-pilot, not a replacement

• Tutaki is used to aid directors with meeting preparation by analyzing board materials, delivering internal information, relevant news reports, competitor updates, and deep dive reports.
• While Tutaki might suggest functions by providing certain information, Green said that the AI serves as a tool and the person using it is still liable
• The AI tool is meant to help directors spend more time doing critical thinking and being effective in meetings by being prepared with the context of the material. 

Quotes

• “We help you do the thinking, but the thinking is still yours, and ultimately that’s the end game.”

• “I  think the power of all this stuff is getting you the context in the way that’s meaningful as opposed to just dumping hundreds of pages of information that you have to sift through.”

• “If you had an AI tool listening to every conversation you had, every email, every document for the last three years on this board, I guarantee it would be a pretty damn good director.”

Links

Tutaki 

Guest Bio

Jamie Green is the co-founder and CEO of Tutaki, an AI-powered workbench designed to make board directors radically more effective. Drawing on his background in strategy consulting at McKinsey and hundreds of conversations with chairs and directors, Jamie built Tutaki to solve one of the boardroom’s biggest challenges: staying on top of exploding information, tightening compliance requirements, and limited time to prepare. Today, directors from over 100 organisations across APAC, North America, and the UK use Tutaki to transform how they prepare, engage, and make decisions.

 Jamie is pioneering a new model of “augmented directorship,” where AI acts as an expert co-pilot to help directors surface context, identify risk, and deliver 10x impact. With experience across governance, AI product design, and startup leadership, Jamie is at the forefront of the movement to reshape how boards operate in a world defined by complexity, liability, and technological change.

Transcript:

Joe: Hello and welcome to On Boards, a deep dive at what drives business success. I’m Joe Ayoub, and I’m here with my co-host Raza Shaikh. Twice a month, On Boards is the place to learn about one of the most critically important aspects of any company or organization; its board of directors or advisors, with a focus on the important issues that are facing boards, company leadership, and stakeholders.

Raza: Joe and I speak with a wide range of guests and talk about what makes a board successful or unsuccessful, what it means to be an effective board member, and how to make your board one of the most valuable assets of your organization.

Joe: Before we introduce our guest, we want to thank the law firm of Nutter McClennen & Fish who are again sponsoring our On Boards Summit this year taking place on October 20 [00:01:00] in their beautiful conference center in the Boston Seaport. Nutter has been an incredible partner with us in every way. We appreciate all they’ve done to support our podcast.

Our guest today is Jamie Green. Jamie is the co-founder and CEO of Tutaki, an AI-powered Workbench designed to make board directors significantly more effective.

Raza: Drawing on his background in strategy consulting at McKinsey, Jamie built Tutaki to solve one of the boardroom’s biggest challenges; staying on top of the explosion of information, tightening compliance requirements, and limited time to prepare. Currently, directors from 100 organizations across Asia Pacific, North America, and UK use Tutaki to prepare, engage, and make decisions.

Joe: Jamie is pioneering a new model of augmented [00:02:00] directorship where AI acts as an expert co-pilot to help directors surface context, identify risk and deliver impact. Tutaki is at the forefront of a movement that will reshape how boards operate in a world defined by increasing complexity and technological change. Welcome, Jamie. Thank you for joining us today on On Boards.

Jamie: Oh, it’s amazing to be here. Thank you for having me.

Joe: Excellent. So, let’s start with your background at McKinsey because it did have some influence on where you are today. Talk about a little bit what you did as a consultant with McKinsey in terms of your board work.

Jamie: Yeah, great question. McKinsey’s amazing because it gives you quite a broad view of organization strategy and engagement with management and boards. I mean, most of what I was doing was strategy, M&A, and what [00:03:00] that looks like is you spend a very crunched period of time coming up with a very dense documents, usually 300 pages, heaps of graphs, a lot of insights, and you hand it over to a board and management team. You try and give it a week’s worth of time, but often it comes to their table 48 hours in advance, and it’s complex.

Some of the hardest questions a company has to decide is, do I spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this company, and you’re asking directors to give their view on that in a very condensed amount of time. So, you’d arrive at these meetings with directors and you’d see the looks on faces of what’s going on, and I’m sure you’ve seen it, the blank looks of, “Damn, did I read that thing or did I miss this?” And there’d be generic questions, and as a director, you’re hoping that other people fill your gaps.

But that was my first kind of look into this period of preparation for these directors. I mean, a lot of them are professional, they’re sitting on other boards. This is one of many that they have to get through. And for the board meeting, usually it’s the Thursday of the third week of the month, and you’ve [00:04:00] got a couple in that week, so there’s just so much to get through, and looking at that and going, “How does this process work? How can you actually help directors prepare better and be effective in meetings?” Because the dumb questions need to be asked. They do. Someone needs to ask them.

But if everyone is just asking that, it feels like an update session, a learning session, as opposed to a strategic decision session, and I think that’s the risk if you don’t actually prepare and have that effective process, is you just talk about the same stuff month in, month out and you don’t actually move the business forward.

Joe: So, after McKinsey, what drew you to startups, and what about your consulting experience shaped your thinking?

Jamie: Yeah. Great question. I’m sure there’s many listening at the moment and probably tried and true consultants. I got a bit used to telling people what to do and I felt like I needed to live and breathe what I said. So, at the end of consulting, you have those three routes; you stay in consulting and become a partner, not to say that’s easy by any means, or you join a corporate and try and steer an oil tanker, [00:05:00] or you jump on the speedboat per se and try and launch a startup. And I thought at that point, you’re only going to be young once, you aren’t going have much energy, try and do the startup world and really live and breathe what you say.

I think one of the things that McKinsey gives you is that breadth of experience. You work across 10, 15 organizations in a very short period of time across a very diverse set of questions, so that gives you that generalist skillset where you can jump into a company or launch a company and do everything effectively.

I mean, my background is engineering, so I could also work in that realm and understood the technical components as well as the operational side, and I really wanted to take that and a problem that I’d seen firsthand in this new wave of technology and really launch something that solve that need in an effective way, which is Tutaki.

Joe: So, talk about the founding of Tutaki and, as you put it, the practical pain points that inspired it.

Jamie: Yeah. So, the background [00:06:00] really is, throughout my journey in startups, I met a guy called Adam Clark, and Adam had launched and exited a number of startups, one being M-Com, which was sold to Fiserv, which I’m sure most of your listeners have heard of. It was one of the first online banking or mobile banking platforms. And at the time, he was sitting on five boards and had this constant series of pain points, one being information overload.

The world is moving faster than you ever expected before, and the compliance requirements are greater than ever before, so what it means is not just board documents getting longer, it’s all of the news articles you need to read, all of the stuff you need to stay up to date with, all of that vast amount of information is needed to be digested to be an effective director because if you’re just coming in with the context of the business now, you’re no longer giving the value you need to. So, that was one, it’s this pain point of information overload.

The second was contextual awareness. So, as a director, you’ve got, depending on the board, one pack might be a hundred pages, but you go, “I think we discussed that [00:07:00] three months ago.” So, you have to go back three months’ worth of documents, each of them being a hundred pages. You are also potentially as an executive on a company, you’ve got limited time, how do you find this information? So, what it means is when you turn up to the meeting, you feel like you’ve discussed something before. You write down an action, which is the same thing as it was three months ago. Or you’re talking about a project that’s, you feel like it’s been delayed three months, but you don’t quite know. So, how do you have that thread of contextual awareness across board meetings?

And then the third was just general portfolio management. What have we said on this previously? Where does this sit in my emails? What document does this sit in? And not just for one board, but for a portfolio of boards if I’m on a number of boards. So, how do you be that personal workbench for a director?

And that’s our goal, really, is to be the vertical system of action that solves the needs across all three steps of the board meeting; the pre-meeting, the end meeting, and the post-meeting, and we’re just starting with the pre-meeting space for directors, so built to be the outcome or the system of action for the director specifically.

Joe: So, [00:08:00] just a little bit about New Zealand, I know that Tutaki is not just for New Zealand boards, but talk a little bit about how board practice in New Zealand compares with the US and other countries.

Jamie: Yeah, that’s a great question. From a structural point, they’re very similar. I mean, it’s a unitary board. They’ve all got fiduciary duties. There’s subcommittee structures depending on the size of the organization, but I’d say in general, New Zealand directors tend to have a wider board portfolio. It’s not uncommon that some of our customers will be on eight boards and they’ll be diverse, some of them larger, some of them smaller, but they can be on quite a few boards.

Then the US tend to be a bit more reserved. A lot of companies in New Zealand are starting to do AI minutes, smaller companies, not necessarily larger ones, but the US that’s pretty slim. You would be a potential risk taker or a progressive director if you had AI minutes in the US board, so that’s a different one. There’s a lot of more regulatory pressures in the US, obviously. It’s a bit more intense in that space.

But [00:09:00] generally speaking, the pain points, the process is roughly the same. I mean, like you mentioned at the start, we’ve got customers pretty diverse across the world at this stage, and it’s the same process. I get the BoardPAC, we have conversations. I take my notes, I go to the meeting, and it’s just how you most effectively run that process.

Joe: I think you mentioned when we talked actually a couple months ago, that compliance requirements for boards in New Zealand are becoming stricter, especially when it comes to liability. What has happened?

Because that’s obviously an aspect that makes all of this information, all of the things you’ve said, even more vital for board members because if you’re going to be held liable, then there’s an extra level of concern and maybe stress for board members, especially if, with all due respect to whoever they are, if you’re in eight boards, that’s a lot of boards.

In this country we would say you’re over boarded, but it is what it is and we know that we’ve talked to people in [00:10:00] European countries that have the same practice; lots of boards, and they need help just to keep up with the material. But what’s going on? How has liability in New Zealand shifted to make it become something that board members need to be very, very aware of?

Jamie: Yeah, it’s a great question. The case that’s used a lot in New Zealand and the Institute of Directors and other training organizations is this case of a company called DexMat, and basically, it was supposedly a turnaround case, but what happened was a bunch of visible oversight that was missing and there was some accounting issues, inventory management issues, and what happened was there was hundreds of millions of dollars of lost value over a very short period of time.

While the directors didn’t face any criminal issues for that, it has kind of spurred on the shift of increasing liability for directors whereby you can’t claim that you just didn’t read something anymore. It is your full liability to read them, and if you don’t and it’s an [00:11:00] impact on the business and something happens, if you’re trading in solvent, for example, then you are criminally liable for that.

This is kind of one of those cases that gets brought up a lot, and because of that, it’s actually becoming more and more of a risk to be a director. Like you said, over boarded is a big one and now that the value case for a professional director has to be pretty meaningful for you to take on a new board, like there is just more and more risk for you and more and more things like we talked about before to be across, to make sure that your risk is being mitigated.

Raza: Jamie, I think we set up the problem really well, and it’s very, very obvious to anybody who’s in the boardroom. Let’s talk a little bit more about how Tutaki actually works, how it actually would fit with existing tools that board members use for board package, including tools all the way from BoardPAC to BoardVantage, how does Tutaki work in conjunction with what boards currently use?

Jamie: Yeah, the short answer is [00:12:00] alongside them. So, if I give a couple use cases of directors that use different tools in how they use Tutaki, so there’s all the way from the board has nothing or the director has nothing and they use Tutaki as a full portfolio management tool.

So, how that would look like is the secretary for the organization or the CEO, whoever’s sending out the board papers, would just cc Janet, which is our LLM for you, then they would be uploaded automatically. You’d get an email saying your BoardPACs are ready. You’d jump in, there would be a dashboard of what’s happened with that organization over the last month, including internal information, external news reports that might be relevant, what your competitors are doing, and then from there you can jump into a series of deep dive reports. So, I’ll get into the structure of how that engineering works. So, that’s one case is I have nothing.

The second case is we use board tools already, so BoardVantage, Diligent for some of these larger organizations or if you’re smaller, you might use Boardworks if you’re a [00:13:00] not-for-profit, that sort of thing.

We work completely alongside them. So, for a director, all you need to do is get the BoardPAC. Now, for some of these organizations, that can be difficult because they’re locked in the black box. How that works for us is we just have a conversation with the CTO and whoever’s the secretary managing that process will do a secondary upload, takes 10 seconds, and then you have your own portal there.

At some stage we’d love to integrate. Right now, they’re out in a bit of a black box, and then longer term we’ll have a lot of those processes as well in terms of agendas and minutes and the like.

Raza: Now, you are positioning this as a co-pilot, as an augment for directors, so it needs to kind of behave or think like a director. How did you train the AI for that, like for basically becoming very adept at all the questions and use cases that will be asked of it.

Jamie: Yeah, this is the crux of the IP really, so without [00:14:00] giving away any trade secrets, we’ll get into the detail. Directors are very, very broad by definition. I mean, there’s the professional director that has this set of questions or very kind of compliance-related director that has their checklist of questions that they’ll get down. That’s an easier thing to solve because you just go, “Hey, when I look at a financial document, what are the 50 questions that I need to ask?”

But the general approach or structure is, there’s three elements. One is how does a director actually think, and that’s kind of the core of Tutaki, across every document that gets uploaded, how do you actually want to interpret this information? Because there’s one thing is getting good information. The second is how you use that, so that’s one, it’s how do you actually think like a director?

The second is what is the relevant context on which to think? So, that’s internal information, external information, and we do a lot of work there to chunk up the relevant information in the right way so that it can be interpreted.

And then the third is what I like to call the actual [00:15:00] workflow prompt. So, if our listeners, I’m sure a lot of them have heard of prompt engineering. This is basically that architecture. So, the director element is going, “If I’m a director, what is the structure in which I should think?” And then the second element is, “Okay, how should I think about these documents?” And then the third element is, “Okay, what should I do with that thinking?” And that general flow is then how we get to the output for you, and what it means is that you don’t have to be a prompt expert, you don’t have to get the right information in the right way, we can just run that workflow for you in a really targeted format.

Raza: But just at the technical level, you were able to leverage existing models or foundational models to build all of this on top, or did you have to do any specific model training yourself as well?

Jamie: Yeah, we do. So, we don’t train on any of your data. I’ll just put that one out there. All your data is private, secure. It’s a private LLM. If you delete something, it’s permanently deleted. So, there’s that security aspect. The only [00:16:00] training we do is on your user interactions and thumbs up, thumbs down, equivalent things.

So, the architecture we just talked about is the general process, and then the next level is then, how do you tailor it to what you want to see? What does Raza actually want to see over time? And that’s where the questions you ask if you give us that feedback will then input into how that director thinks.

So, if you are more of a financial director and you care about more about forecast against actual and the likes, then you can tell us that, and then those prompts will then evolve over time to give you more and more of that information.

Now, for us, we need to make sure that there’s some bandwidth in there of say like 10 to 20% of stuff that you haven’t said you’re interested in, but you should probably see so that you don’t get too finite in certain areas, but that’s the learning that happens. It’s less on your data and more on your engagement with the tool, and so that’s basically the flow.

Raza: Yeah, well, you touched upon it and that’s really [00:17:00] important to be upfront on that part, which is confidentiality, security of information, and even liability, if there’s any. How do you guys view that part? How do you handle it? How do you give comfort to your clients and customers that all of their information is secure and private?

Jamie: Yeah, it’s a great question. There’s three elements to this. One is how do we store data? The second is what do we do with it? And then the third is probably what happens if I leave or what happens if I delete something.

So, how do we store it? It’s all a private instance and that goes to every organization. So, say you’re a director and you’ve got three boards. Let’s just say for our purpose is one of them is Apple and one of them’s Coca-Cola. And in the Apple instance you ask about Coca-Cola, it’s going to have no idea what that company is unless Coca-Cola exists within the Apple Board documents or equivalent.

So, we keep every company completely [00:18:00] separate for our larger directors such that the information doesn’t cross-contaminate, and then it also means that the answers are a lot more refined. So, you’ve all heard around AI hallucinations, that usually happens when you’ve got massive data sets and they’re very broad, and by doing this we can narrow down the context on which we’re asking questions and therefore reduce that. So, that one is we store everything privately in individual instances for the organizations on a private LLM so it’s not going back anywhere, so that’s one.

The second is how do we use it? And like I said before, we don’t do any training on your data at all. All of that architecture we’ve done in our side and then what we do with the documents is effectively, some of your listeners might have heard about, it’s just RAG, retrieval augmented generation. How do we chunk it up in the right way, store that information such that it can be retrieved for context.

And then the third one is, what do we do if you leave? So, in that case, everything’s permanently deleted. If you add in a board report, ask a question, delete it, ask the same [00:19:00] question, it won’t know that board report exists. And we’ve got bulk wipes. So, if you want to wipe all of your notes, you can do that with one click.

Raza: Jamie, what about liability? If somebody comes to you and says, “Tutaki tool gave me certain information that I relied on to do my function, and that turned out to be bad, incorrect, or somehow erroneous, you should be liable.” How do you handle the liability issue for Tutaki?

Jamie: Yeah, the way we frame it is we are a tool that you use, but ultimately, you are the person that’s still liable. So, we help you do the thinking, but the thinking is still yours, and ultimately, that’s the end game. I don’t think we’d be in business if we were liable for every single decision that came out of our platform. Look, we try and be as accurate as possible on most things, but ultimately, that liability sits with you.

Joe: So, I wonder about liability when it comes to the concern that I’ve heard many times, which is that [00:20:00] as this develops, and we’ll talk about where it might end, board members are less and less likely to read the material. I mean, if you’re getting 400 pages and your AI co-pilot can summarize it and give you the context, I guess part of the question is, why would you read it?

Now, the AI may say, “Well, here are four articles you can go read,” and that could make you a better board member. But one concern that we’ve heard is that board members will become more and more reliant on their AI consultant and less involved in the materials themselves, and then at some point, that liability will stick to them for not doing their job properly. They can say, “Well, I relied on this.”

Certainly, from your company’s point of view, it’s not your fault, it’s the board member, as you said, but now if board members are not reading the materials, and we have cited [00:21:00] information in the past that suggests that over 70% of board members don’t read all the materials. So, that’s a different issue, but it’ll become more and more apparent. And I just wonder about the role of a human board member, who now becomes very reliant for the three or four boards he or she’s on, to just keep up with the information. What kind of liability might that give rise to for the humans involved, not the company and certainly not the AI co-pilot who doesn’t care. What about that?

Jamie: Yeah, look, I think you only need to look at as far as schools today to see probably a version of that impact. You’ve got kids that are using AI to generate essays, and you’ve got teachers that are using AI to grade those essays, and what it creates is this complete void of critical thinking, and I think what you want to avoid with directors is helping them be [00:22:00] better and think better and get to the meeting with more context and more prepared. It doesn’t necessarily equate to reading more words. It’s how do you actually prepare better. As long as they’re still doing the critical thinking and being effective in those meetings, then that’s a great outcome.

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t read anything, and I think how it will turn out is BoardPACs will get better. So, it’s not that you are reading 200-page BoardPACs, it’s that the AI is actually creating a draft BoardPAC. It’s linked into all of your company inputs, and this is where we want to get to is we’ve got your HubSpot, we’ve got your Xero, we’ve got all your accounting systems, your SAP, whatever it is, here’s your draft BoardPAC based on your company objectives. The CEO and management team then go through and add their context, and instead of a 200-page BoardPAC, it’s a targeted 40 pages that you can actually digest at scale.

I think the power of all this stuff is getting you the context in the way that’s meaningful as opposed to just dumping hundreds of pages of information that you have to sift through. I don’t know about you but if I [00:23:00] read a book, I forget the first page by the time I’m on the last. So, even if you’re reading all 200 pages, it’s a challenge to get the right context. 

Joe: Great point, because actually it is all about how do you better prepare, and if the result of this is that BoardPACs become 40 or 50 pages, I think everyone would agree that that is a positive development in the boardroom. There’s just no question about that because increasingly, I think we all know that management puts more and more out there so they can’t be criticized for holding something back from the board, and that’s just not the best way to do it. It’s just not.

Jamie: Well, I was going to say, it’s so ineffective for you because if they put 200 pages in a BoardPAC because they’ve done the work and they want you to see it, that liability now sits on you. So, they’ve put in all this work and shared with you information that probably isn’t relevant and now it’s on you to read it all which just is not effective for anyone [00:24:00] really.

Raza: But Joe, the point that you brought up actually make me think that the implication of all this on the business judgment rule. In the US, like the basic theme is there’s no law against a company dying or not successful at the business level as long. As the directors made a good judgment based on the information that was provided at that time, they are actually not liable based on the business judgment rules.

So, I’m like, “Wow, does this change this where it’s saying, ‘Well, now you become complacent and you don’t read it because you think the AI is telling you, ‘Are you making good judgment?'” I think Jamie’s tool need to add more Socratic method questions to challenge the reader, not just be a passive assistant, but be like, “Whoa, are you thinking about it the right way?” Or actually ask them questions to say the least. I don’t know, but this is like this is fascinating. We’ll see where it goes.

Joe: So, I want to talk a little bit [00:25:00] about the actual user experience. because when we talked the last time, you put on the screen what a user might see, and I wrote down a bunch of it. because I think it’s really telling what you’re going to see. So, inconsistency analysis, get insights, ask questions, company retrospective, board meeting pre-read, so obviously, a summary of the pre-read, make me look smart. That was one of them. And I thought, “Wow, you know what, that’s the one I’m going to first, right?” So, talk about how you tailor it for each individual or how that comes about and how you make it interactive, easy to interact with.

Jamie: Yeah. And I’ll have to show you guys a new demo. There’s been a whole lot of additions since, since the last time we caught up. But if you think about it in three ways, one is, what do you want to see as an individual? The second is, how do you want to engage [00:26:00] with that information? And then the third is, at what level?

So, what do you want to see? We ask all our directors, what are their key interest points? What are the topics that they want to follow? And that then feeds into, like I said at the start, that architecture of how we gather and chunk up information.

So, if you’re a financial director that only wants to see key metrics, how they’re performing, what are the key changes in the train lines, then we’ll index more heavily in that. If you’re a director and more operational and you are looking at like manufacturing plan and that’s your key focus, we’ll index more heavily on that. So, that that first piece tailors the user experience.

And then the second one, how do you engage with it? So, the general flow, and we’re trying not to upset the cart too much in terms of how directors engage, but allow directors to choose their own journey. So, like I said before, most directors get the BoardPAC. They read it to some level, some all the way down to every bullet point, and then some will skim it or quote unquote skim, which is basically, relying on gut. [00:27:00] And then we use that process and allow you to tailor it slightly. So, the first step is you get in, here’s your prepared company dashboard based on your topics of interest of what’s changed since the last meeting, what are key red flags in the financial area, risk area, compliance, what are your competitors doing? Give me a 10-minute scan of what I should be interested in. Okay, cool.

Now, when I get to reading the BoardPAC, I have a lot of context on where I want to focus my time, and also context on the meaning behind some of the things that are being said. So, the next step is then obviously reading your BoardPACs, we align them all to agenda items, and then we have that 24/7 context as you read it. So, you’re reading through a document, here’s a project. We actually put a red flag next to that for you, “Hey, this project’s moved three times in the last three board meetings, which you might not be aware of. The due dates changed by six months and now, it’s at risk of completely missed delivery.” So, as you are reading the packet, you don’t have to go through all documents. It’s all there for you. So, that’s the [00:28:00] second in terms of how you engage.

Then the other one is form factor, and we’re seeing a lot now is the typical ways you read documents, but a lot more is, do you want to actually speak to your documents? I’m going for a walk, I’m sitting in a cab, I’m going to have a conversation about my BoardPACs. And that’s kind of this next value point of AI is having to be able to have a live conversation at depth on topics and across your BoardPACs. So, like we’re having right now, I could just discuss with Tutaki the BoardPAC, ask questions about the last three months and go into a deep conversation about it in a cab, and that’s a new kind of avenue.

And then the third is, at what level do you want to engage on it? And like I said, you can read the whole BoardPAC, you can jump from the dashboard to your run sheet, which goes these are the key questions that you’ve highlighted as important for the meeting and then all of that is tailorable to you, so you can run all of it or some of it. We know that the process for each director is very different.

So, that’s basically the user experience and the button of make me [00:29:00] smarter hopefully is embedded throughout the process. We can’t tap into your brain, but basically, if you think about the core of it, it’s help me ask the right questions on the right stuff with the right context, and that’s what we’re trying to do really.

Joe: Yeah, that’s a good way to think about it. So, one thing we did when we talked before, and this was a great conversation that we had, which is, what does the future look like for AI? And Raza mentioned we have the On Boards AI Board Advisor Maturity Model. So, on this model, here’s what we talked about. Level one is AI is assisting one board member. Two is it’s assisting the board. Third is its AI is in the boardroom. Next, AI is a non-voting board member. Next level is AI is a voting board member. [00:30:00] Next is AI is the dominant voice on the board, meaning there’d be more AI than human in the room. And the highest level, level seven is. AI is the only voice on the board. You get rid of the human element and all the things that people forget and mistake, and you really just clean up the whole thing.

Now, I’m sort of kidding about that, but the reality is, that seems like a logical progression. It seems like there’s so much to say about the advantages as AI develops and as you develop this model, it’s going to get better. It’s going to make fewer mistakes, it’s going to understand better what a board member needs to do. All of the things that you train board members to do, AI will remember and it won’t forget them. So, on this  AI Board Advisor Maturity Model, we’re someplace at [00:31:00] number two, AI assisting the board. I think that’s where Tutaki is. Do you think we’ll get to level seven anytime in our lifetime?

Jamie: It’s funny you asked this. We did a talk and there were about 150 directors there, and a similar question was asked. It was like, “Am I going to be replaced at some point?” The scary thing is this is every nature of our job, right? And I think where it lacks now is there’s a lot of context that sits outside of documentation. You have a conversation between two people over a coffee, and that becomes context for then how you think in a meeting and what questions you ask and how you answer them. If you had an AI tool listening to every conversation you had, every email, every document for the last three years on this board, I guarantee it would be a pretty damn good director and it would be borderline being able to sit on the board.

So, until we solve that information gap, I think it’ll be difficult, but I think it will get there and I think the adoption curve will look a lot steeper in these smaller [00:32:00] organizations. Myself, I would love to have a full board there that I can share my BoardPAC with and go grill me. Give me all the questions that you’ve got so that I can answer them and tailor my material before I get to the actual board meeting. Like the value of that is crazily high. And then for a board meeting, you might see it similar to Wimbledon that’s just had AI line judges. There are a couple of kinks they need to work out, but it might sit in the board meeting and be kind of that devil’s advocate or give an opposition view on certain topics so that you don’t have this groupthink element and can actually discuss things in a different way.

So, I think that’ll be the starting point and then when we get to this step seven of AI, everything, I think we’ll be at the point in time where we’ve got AI boards talking to AI companies, talking to AI consumers, so that’ll be completely a paradigm shift in how we approach that.

Raza: Would there be a non-human voting member? That’s actually a more interesting question. Like even one vote from AI board [00:33:00] member makes it very, very interesting, and that can be foreseeable in maybe less timeframe than the level seven. But it would be fascinating to see whether the law and legal frameworks and all of those catch up to it and say, “Oh, yeah, you are allowed to have one voting AI member.”

Joe: And we talk about independent directors and non-independent directors, the argument would be that this AI is even more independent. Really, it’s not beholden to the CEO or to the board chair. It doesn’t care about compensation. It doesn’t care about being renewed for another term. It doesn’t care about, did it embarrass itself at the last meeting? It’s truly independent, not perfect, but independent. And I could see that first vote, as you said, I agree, that’s the most likely step that we’re going to go. 

Raza: That’s a really great point, Joe. That would be the prediction thing. The independent tie-breaking, [00:34:00] odd number director.

Joe: Jamie didn’t take me out on his yacht last week and try to influence me on my vote. I didn’t go out to dinner at some guy’s castle on a Greek island. It’s just, I looked at the stuff, I read all the emails, I saw every board minute for the last five years, and this is what I think.

Raza: And I have the humanities expert knowledge on this industry on my fingertips, and I’m saying, I will vote this or that.

Joe: Yes. So, I would not be surprised if it happens even in my lifetime, but I’m positive it’ll happen in yours, Jamie.

Raza: And I think the other thing for the future of AI in the boardroom, I think what you mentioned that management has had now to do a lot more disclosure and provide a lot of materials, and I think what you alluded to as, well, even for management, that’s actually quite a bit of work to come up with these materials, [00:35:00] and you could foresee a set of tools that can gather all that primary sources of information, as detailed as it can be in the company down to, as you mentioned, the transactions in the accounting system, but bring it up into a manner for the board that is much more readable and so on. So, hopefully, that also happens soon because we are indeed inundated. 

Joe: I hope that happens right away. That’s something everyone’s going to welcome.

Jamie: Yeah, I mean, I was talking with one of our customers who wants to use it for the exact purpose across their management team’s sub-teams, they spend up to two weeks a month and it’s like a million dollars of people time. Every month they do that, and then by the time the board meeting’s over, they’re starting the next one.

So, from a cost point of view, it’s massive, and these documents are huge. So, when a director gets them, it’s hard to actually digest them. So, you’ve got arguably the most strategic group in the company struggling to [00:36:00] ingest this stuff. And arguably the most useful operators in the company spending half the year creating those documents, which are hard to read, so it’s a massive pain point for the organization to solve.

Joe: Absolutely. Jamie, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you all for listening to On Boards with our guest, Jamie Green.

Raza: Please visit our website at OnBoardsPodcast.com. That’s OnBoardsPodcast.com. We’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, and feedback. If you’re not already a subscriber, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. And remember to leave us a five star review.

Joe: And please tune in for the next episode of On Boards. Thanks.h