The myth of irrelevance in AI governance

with Jamie Bykov-Brett and Professor Konstantinos Chalvatzis

AI is not arriving evenly but it is arriving everywhere. The board that waits for its industry to be disrupted before paying attention will already be behind. As with previous transformations in ESG, digitisation, and cybersecurity , boardrooms often dismissed them as “not applicable yet” – only to face steep remediation costs, reputational hits, and lost competitive edge. Artificial intelligence is now the latest victim of this myth of irrelevance.

There is no single, universal way in which AI affects organisations. Its impact depends on sector, geography, scale, and business model. For a consumer bank, immediate risks may include fraud detection and regulatory oversight; for a logistics company, predictive maintenance and supply chain optimisation; for professional services, productivity gains are already being realised through automated research, drafting, and analytics.

Many boards also face urgent short-term pressures: inflationary costs, fragile supply chains, activist investors, workforce disputes. It would be misleading to suggest AI should displace all other priorities. Yet this is not the same as saying AI is irrelevant; quite the opposite.

Across industries, AI is subtly but unmistakably reshaping competitive advantage, operational risk, and stakeholder expectations:

• Competitive risk: Retailers using AI for personalised marketing are pulling ahead of peers relying on traditional segmentation. Insurers deploying AI-driven pricing models are reshaping market dynamics. Manufacturers using generative design are compressing product development cycles.
• Opportunity: Early adopters are opening new revenue streams – from drug discovery platforms in pharmaceuticals to AI-enabled advisory services in law.
• Stakeholder trust: Regulators, investors, and employees are increasingly alert to bias, misuse, and opacity. Boards that fail to set guardrails risk reputational damage long before regulators intervene.

Even if AI is not the centrepiece of your strategy, it is already influencing the ecosystem in which your company operates.

Importantly, governance is not just about stopping risk. Done well, it provides traction – accelerating the right initiatives while constraining the wrong ones. In the context of AI, this means creating the conditions for safe experimentation, ensuring alignment with corporate strategy, and avoiding costly missteps. Far from being a brake, effective governance is how boards give their organisations the confidence to move forward. 

And because governance ultimately flows from the top, this is why boards themselves must lead – setting the tone, establishing clear guardrails, and ensuring AI adoption serves long-term value rather than short-term hype.

History offers a stark warning. Boards urged to treat cybersecurity as a strategic issue have learned the hard way through breaches. In 2025 alone, several high-profile UK companies suffered incidents that disrupted operations, drove lost sales, and eroded trust.

AI complacency carries its own toll. Lapses in governance have led to privacy breaches, biased credit decisions, and operational chaos, triggering legal challenges and public scrutiny. The lesson remains: doing nothing costs more than preparing.

By treating AI as irrelevant, boards cede competitive advantage to rivals. Ignoring AI governance isn’t prudence – it’s betting that your business model will stay untouched in an accelerating technological tide.

The pressure is already here:

• Investors: PwC’s 2024 Global Investor Survey found over 60 percent expect generative AI to deliver productivity and profitability gains within a year. Seventy-four percent urge companies to invest in workforce upskilling, making clear that responsible AI is as much about people as it is about technology.
• Employees: According to a recent Gallup survey, managers are using AI tools at nearly twice the rate of their staff, highlighting both the speed of adoption and the expectation that boards provide leadership on responsible use.

Boards that wait for the “right moment” need to recognise that stakeholders are already moving.

Boards sometimes assume their sector is insulated. But AI is not just another tool; it is reshaping the assumptions underpinning entire business models. Even if today the impact seems minimal, tomorrow it may not be. Strategic complacency is not neutral; it is itself a risk position.

The task is not to turn every meeting into an AI workshop but to avoid the trap of exceptionalism. AI is not a niche concern. It is and will continue to be a systemic shift whose ripples are already reaching every corner of the economy. 

That is why board leadership is critical: only boards can set the direction, insist on accountability, and ensure that AI adoption is guided by strategy and values rather than drift.

If the first myth is that AI is irrelevant, the second and more insidious is that it is just another IT project. In the next article, we will explore why treating AI as a “technology initiative” misunderstands the governance challenge, and why boards that misframe the issue risk compounding their complacency.

Paul Johnston – Researcher, Centre for AI in Board Effectiveness and Associate Director, One Advisory

Jamie Bykov-Brett – AI Consultant & Co-Founder of the Executive AI Institute

Professor Konstantinos Chalvatzis – Associate Pro-Vice Chancellor for Business Engagement and Innovation, University of Exeter