The Board Approved An AI Strategy: Do They Know What It Requires?

Nacho De Marco is Chairman and Co-Founder of BairesDev, a leading software development partner, and co-founder of VC firm BDev Ventures.

​As CEO of a company built around tech talent and embedded alongside delivery teams across more than 500 clients, the conversation surrounding AI skills is one I follow closely. It almost always focuses on the people doing the work, how engineers, managers and teams adapt as tools reshape their roles. That conversation matters, but there’s a version of it that should happen at the level where it matters first.

Where AI is stalling, the root cause is rarely the model, the tooling or the team. It’s a decision that didn’t get made, or a question that didn’t get asked, several levels above where the work lives. The knowledge required to make those calls well is neither purely technical nor purely organizational. It’s both, and most leadership teams haven’t had to develop it until now.

AI literacy in its conventional sense, understanding how the technology works, is paramount. At the leadership level, the literacy gap I keep seeing is different. It begins with recognizing that every strategic decision about AI is also a decision about the organization required to support it. This article is about what happens when that understanding is missing, what it costs in practice and what the current landscape demands of leaders navigating AI with assumptions built for a past era.

AI Strategy Is Outpacing AI Understanding

In 2025, 83% of S&P 500 companies disclosed AI as a material risk, while fewer than 3% of board directors disclosed AI expertise. Organizations are recognizing the stakes. The boards governing them are not yet equipped to match them.

That challenge plays out at three levels simultaneously.

1. Accountability Structures

I see this across client organizations constantly. No one sets out to leave accountability undefined. It just never gets named, and by the time anyone notices, the team closest to the work has already absorbed it.