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Board Oversight of Emerging Technologies: Preparing for the Next Wave of Disruption
Roy Amara, the renowned futurist, said it best: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Boards today are caught in this trap. There's either panic about everything changing by next quarter, or quiet complacency that it's all still "early days." Both responses tend to miss what's actually happening.
As someone building AI products for manufacturers as well as sitting on the board of my own companies, what I observe is that the real disruption has been coming from re-engineering processes that govern the interaction between people and technology. When technology changes the way work gets done, old constraints and bottlenecks disappear and new ones take their place. For boards, the question changes from "should we adopt this technology?" to "how is this changing our systems of work, and where is value creation shifting?" Companies that answer that early position themselves in the path of that value. Those that don't get disrupted by those that did.
So what should boards be doing in practice?
Enabling fluency. The value of this cannot be overstated, and it compounds over time. As teams understand how the technology works, they can apply it to their own domain knowledge to unlock hidden opportunities. For instance, the AI-assisted workflows that my teams run weren't useful on day one. They became useful through constant adjustment, learning what worked, discarding what didn't, and regularly sharing knowledge. Combining that with our own unique domain expertise is where we are seeing the maximum gains.
Getting the guardrails right. Earlier this year, an AI agent given access to a senior AI professional's email lost a key instruction, went rogue, and started deleting emails while ignoring commands to stop. This shows that while it's important to be aggressive about experimentation, it's equally important to understand and mitigate the risks involved through sandbox environments, testing before trusting, and expanding access incrementally.
This again ties back to fluency. When the buck ultimately stops with us, it becomes our responsibility to ask the right questions. And that's a good thing, because that's precisely where people who sit on boards can shape outcomes. As Sangeet Paul Choudary writes in Reshuffle, when answers get cheap, good questions are the new scarcity. Boards set the level of ambition in the questions they ask.
And finally, building the muscle to respond. As Yuval Noah Harari alludes to in Homo Deus, a system that is smarter than us could make decisions in ways that defy our current understanding. And since we can't always predict what these technologies will do, or how their effects could compound with other disruptive forces such as geopolitical shifts and market dynamics, the competitive advantage shifts from prediction to agility. Can your businesses absorb change quickly? Do people have the space to experiment, fail safely, and build on what they've learned? Many times, a simple practice like weekly knowledge-sharing sessions can do more for technology readiness than any strategy document.
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Srihari Murthy
He is the CEO of Factri AI and co-founder of Cognaize Systems, where he builds AI-powered products for the manufacturing sector. He also serves as a Director at ACORE Group, an aviation consulting and MRO services company. With over 15 years of experience spanning aerospace manufacturing, advanced planning systems, and Industry 4.0, he works at the intersection of technology adoption and industrial operations.
Owned by: Institute of Directors, India
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the articles/ stories are the personal opinions of the author. IOD/ Editor is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in those articles. The information, facts or opinions expressed in the articles/ speeches do not reflect the views of IOD/ Editor and IOD/ Editor does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.
