AI for Boards: A New Era of Decision-Making or an Unintended Game of AI vs AI?

Last night, I attended an event focused on AI tools for boards. As someone deeply immersed in AI’s evolving role in business, I was keen to explore how AI is being positioned to support strategic decision-making at the highest level.

The Problem to Solve

Boards exist to make key strategic decisions that guide a company’s future. Their role is to act in the best interest of shareholders, ensuring that businesses grow, navigate risk, and remain competitive. Board members are often highly compensated, and their time is valuable—meaning they need to make high-quality, well-informed decisions efficiently.

The challenge?

• Information overload

• Limited time to digest complex insights

• Increasing complexity in markets, regulation, and technology

  
  

If AI can help boards make better decisions in less time, that’s a strong case for adoption. But what does that actually look like in practice?

Three Approaches to Boards Supported by AI

The event featured three companies with distinct approaches to solving this problem.

1. Ask Astro by Astronort – AI-Powered Board Intelligence

Ask Astro by Astronort, providing real time data and information to decision makers

Website: https://www.askastro.ai/

Pricing: $350 per company (5 seats per month) 

Diana Minnée the founder of Astronort, focused on dissecting information to help board members make better decisions. Her core belief? Boards should accelerate companies, not slow them down. Diana has been on many boards herself as a COO and this has really shaped the company's focus in assisting boards as a whole to move faster.

Core Focus Areas:

• Reducing the time and effort required to create board papers

• Ensuring board members can access real-time, relevant insights

• Connecting to key company systems (CRMs, dashboards, accounting software, marketing tools)

  
  

👉 AI acts as an assistant for decision-making, ensuring directors focus on high-value insights rather than drowning in reports.

2. Tutaki – AI as a Thought Partner for Directors

Tutaki- Director focused board assistance

Website: https://www.tutaki.com/

Pricing: $49 per director per month – Tutaki

James, the CEO of Tutaki, showed how Tutaki takes a slightly different angle—expanding the skill set of individual directors. Many directors oversee multiple companies, meaning they need to process diverse business contexts quickly.

Core Focus Areas:

• AI as a thought partner, helping directors explore issues from different perspectives

• Using AI personas (e.g., "You are a CFO—what would you ask the company today?") to simulate different viewpoints

• Helping directors prepare for board meetings with broader strategic insights

  
  

👉 Rather than just surfacing data, this approach encourages directors to actively engage with AI to refine their strategic thinking.

3. Arcanum – Numa – AI Assistants for Board Tasks

Arcanum - Using a variety of assistants to fulfill roles to allow companies and board members to focus on business drivers.

Website: https://www.arcanum.ai/

Arcanum took a slightly different approach, using AI assistants to augment a companies capabilities, not just at the board level. Scott from Arcanum spoke about building specific AI assistants for various board tasks. This approach was particularly relevant for small-to-medium businesses and specialized board functions.

Core Focus Areas:

• Providing AI assistants tailored for specific company responsibilities (e.g., policy creation for school boards)

• Supporting directors who lack expertise in certain areas, filling skill gaps

• Automating operational tasks so board members can focus on strategy

  
  

👉 This approach envisions a world where fewer people are needed at the top, with AI filling the gaps. Could we see a future where a solo CEO, surrounded by AI assistants, runs a company?

Head Spins: Questions I Still Have

At its core, the problem these tools aim to solve is clear: enabling better decisions. But as AI plays a bigger role in boardrooms, I have a few pressing questions:

1️⃣ Do board members fully understand AI prompting?If AI answers depend on how questions are framed, will bias creep in through poorly structured prompts? Even if AI surfaces different perspectives, the underlying ruleset still influences the direction of responses.

2️⃣ What happens when all boards use AI?If every boardroom is powered by AI, does corporate strategy become AI vs AI? Instead of human decision-making, do we enter a new phase of game theory at scale, where AI-driven strategies compete in a closed-loop system?

3️⃣ Does UX and design matter more than raw AI capability? In AI product development, success isn’t just about features—it’s about delivering solutions in a beautifully designed and interactive way. If boards increasingly rely on AI, will their decisions favor well-designed tools over purely intelligent ones?

The Problem Isn’t Solved... Yet

Boards have operated in a specific way for a long time, and adoption of AI won’t happen overnight. The tools presented are promising, but they won’t replace the fundamental role of board members in guiding companies—at least not yet.

Having worked on the side of providing insights to boards, from predictive modeling to dashboards and everything in between, I know firsthand how data can be shaped to tell different stories depending on how it’s framed. AI and software can cut through some of this, making insights clearer and more accessible.

But here’s the catch: board members still need to know what questions to ask. Often, the real art in preparing board papers is not just surfacing information, but structuring the right questions to drive critical thinking.

A strong executive or leadership team should challenge themselves—and their board—to ask the hard questions and search for solutions beyond what AI alone can provide. Even if AI assists in surfacing insights, companies will still need human context, experience, and judgment to interpret anomalies and unstructured factors that numbers alone don’t explain.

Could meeting notes and contextual data help AI models get better at providing guidance? Possibly. But for now, I still believe there’s a strong case for human assistance in framing the questions AI is trying to answer.

AI will reshape boardrooms—but the transition will be just as much about culture and process as it is about the technology itself.