How To Talk To Your Board About AI

Jaime Meritt is Chief Product Officer at Verint, overseeing product management for the company’s market-leading CX Automation solutions.

​CX and technology leaders face a clear AI mandate today: Move quickly without sacrificing discipline. But the gap between AI activity and business outcomes shows a problem that many leaders aren’t acknowledging. From what I’ve seen in the industry, it may be easy to see productivity gains from AI, but it’s much harder to see how that translates into revenue gains.

Technology executives must be candid arbiters of AI, even when that means tempering boardroom enthusiasm. Their role is to provide the guidance and rigor needed to ensure AI materially contributes to enterprise value.

According to industry analyst Mark Smith, the fear of missing out that many leaders face in relation to AI needs to be refactored into AI discipline. In a recent LinkedIn post, he notes, “AI is advancing quickly across enterprise applications, technology platforms, data infrastructure and productivity tools, and the potential economic impact is significant. But urgency does not eliminate the need for discipline. In fact, the faster AI evolves, the more important it becomes for an organization to determine when to act, where to focus, who should be accountable and why an investment deserves priority.”

What most boards don’t have is a clear, grounded view of:

• Where and how AI will actually create value in their business

• What AI initiatives will really cost (beyond the demo)

• How to manage governance

• How to separate hype from sustainable advantage

When I brief my own board, I focus on the key considerations required to generate a return from AI investments. The discussion often centers on outcomes, cost controls, governance and commercial safeguards.

A Focus On Outcomes, Not Algorithms

It’s essential to enact a stop-and-redirect discipline here, too. This means pilots that don’t show value should be either shut down or reshaped quickly.