Why the boards that close this gap fastest will not be those with the most technical expertise on the skills matrix, but those that have developed the collective intelligence to govern in conditions of genuine uncertainty.
Board oversight of AI has become the governance question of the decade. The data tells us why. More than 88 percent of organisations are actively using artificial intelligence in some form. Only 39 percent of Fortune 100 boards disclose any structured oversight of it. Two thirds of directors globally report limited to no knowledge of the technology. One in three says AI does not reach the board agenda at all.
Two recent reports have brought this gap into sharp focus. A Deloitte memorandum published through the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (Marks, Abrash and Probst, 2025) and a McKinsey report on board readiness for AI (Baig, Dave, Huber and Vuppala, 2025) have, independently, arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion. Boards are governing organisations that have already been transformed by AI, and the board has not yet caught up.
For directors personally, this is material. Fiduciary duties do not pause while a board develops its AI literacy. Regulators, shareholders and litigants will, in due course, ask what the board knew, when it knew it, and what it did about the gap. The Deloitte data is particularly telling here. Seventy-two percent of boards engage their Chief Information Officer on AI matters. Only twelve percent engage their Chief Risk Officer. That asymmetry will be a difficult position to defend in hindsight.
The numbers tell a story that is not primarily about technology. It is about governance maturity.
The Real Diagnosis: A Collective Awareness Problem
The instinct, when confronted with this data, is to treat it as a knowledge deficit. The proposed solutions follow predictably. More training. More expert directors on the skills matrix. More external briefings. More frequent updates to the board.
These are necessary. They are not sufficient.
In work I have developed with boards over a number of years, drawing on coaching to develop practical wisdom (King, Norbury and Rooney, 2022), I describe a four-stage Ascension Ladder of governance maturity. The ladder is a diagnostic tool, designed to help a chair locate where a board currently sits and identify the development pathway from where it is to where it needs to be.
Stage 1: Reactive Governance. The board responds to events as they arrive. There is limited shared sense-making between meetings, and the board's attention is shaped largely by the papers in front of it.
Stage 2: Personal Awareness. Individual directors are doing their own homework on emerging issues. They read widely, attend external briefings, and bring their findings into the room. But there is no coordinated learning, no shared framework, and no collective integration of what each director knows.
Stage 3: Cognitive Alignment. The board has developed shared language, common mental models and integrated risk thinking. Directors can hold a conversation about complex emerging issues without first having to define terms or contest premises.
Stage 4: Collective Wisdom. The board operates as an integrated intelligence. It senses weak signals, holds competing truths, and makes decisions that reflect the full complexity of the moment, including the dimensions that have not been formally tabled.
What the two reports describe is a population of boards stalled between Stage 1 and Stage 2. The 59 percent of directors who have sought AI education on their own initiative, without coordinated board-level training, are a textbook portrait of Stage 2. Everyone is doing their own homework. No one is doing it together.
This matters because AI governance is not an individual sport. The risks it presents, including ethical ambiguity, algorithmic bias, vendor dependency and strategic misdirection, are systemic. They require what I refer to as Group Attunement, the board's collective capacity to sense unspoken dynamics, read the emotional climate of the room, and act as an integrated intelligence rather than a collection of well-informed individuals. This is the practical expression of systemic awareness in governance.
Groupthink by Another Name
The 72 versus 12 finding from the Deloitte report deserves more attention than it has received.
In the governance work I have been involved in, this is a recognisable pattern. It is produced not by ignorance, but by the social pressures that accumulate quietly in any high-performing group. Boards gravitate toward the voices that affirm innovation momentum. The voices that complicate it, including risk, security and ethics, become structurally marginalised.
The pattern compounds. When the Chief Risk Officer is consulted only on isolated matters, the board loses the running risk dialogue that should accompany every major AI decision. When the Chief Information Security Officer is brought in late, the board sees security as a constraint on innovation rather than a condition for it. When ethics is treated as a separate workstream, it becomes detached from the commercial logic that drives the decisions ethics is meant to shape.
The antidote is not more information. It is what I describe as perspective-taking and the search for integration: the paired capacities that allow a board to hold competing truths without collapsing into the comfort of consensus.
This connects directly to intellectual humility, which I understand as recognising the limits of one's own knowledge. In a boardroom saturated with AI optimism and competitive anxiety, intellectual humility is what allows a director to say, plainly and without apology: "I don't fully understand this, and that is material information for this board."
A Diagnostic for Chairs
Free resource: The Board AI Oversight Diagnostic
A short, confidential self-assessment for chairs and directors, designed to surface where your board currently sits on the Ascension Ladder, which voices are over-represented and under-represented in your AI discussions, and which two or three governance behaviours would most shift your board's effectiveness in the next twelve months.
Email to Request to Diagnostic
The Quality of Attention Neither Report Measured
Both reports recommend structural interventions. Clearer committee mandates. Updated board composition. AI fluency training. Metric dashboards.
What neither report addresses is the quality of attention directors bring into the room.
In research with Justin Brienza and Vincent Murdoch, I validated the Mindful Board Assessment Survey, an instrument designed to measure two distinct dimensions of attention within the boardroom context (King, Brienza and Murdoch, forthcoming).
The first dimension, Embodied Mindfulness, captures a director's internal present-moment awareness during a meeting. This includes the capacity to notice one's own cognitive shortcuts, regulate one's emotional responses, and maintain focused attention through complex agendas. It is the inner condition for sound judgement.
The second dimension, Group Attunement, captures the board's outward sensitivity to its own collective dynamics. This includes the capacity to read the room, to notice unspoken agendas, to register shifts in tone, and to sense when a decision is being driven by social pressure rather than evidence. It is the condition for genuine collective intelligence.
Our analysis confirmed these as two distinct dimensions. A director can score high on one and low on the other. So can a board. And critically, both dimensions behave like skills rather than fixed traits. Boards that engage in structured development show measurable change.
This is the finding that matters most for chairs. It converts wisdom from an aspiration into a development objective.
What an MBAS Engagement Looks Like in Practice
A board that commissions the Mindful Board Assessment Survey receives four things.
A board-level profile across both dimensions, showing where the collective is strong and where it is thin.
An anonymised view of the spread within the board, which tells the chair whether the board is operating as an integrated intelligence or as a collection of individuals.
A diagnostic of the specific governance behaviours most likely to be affected by the current attention profile, including risk integration, dissent dynamics, and decision quality under time pressure.
A development pathway calibrated to where the board sits on the Ascension Ladder, rather than a generic training program imposed without diagnosis.
The most valuable conversation that follows the assessment is rarely about the scores themselves. It is about the patterns the scores make visible, and the agenda items on which those patterns are most consequential. For most boards in the current moment, AI is that agenda item.
Complete the Mindful Director Diagnostic
From Reactive to Wise: A Practical Pathway
McKinsey offers six governance actions for boards seeking to close the AI oversight gap. All are sensible. All are structural. The Board Mindfulness Development Journey, which I have designed for working directors as part of a Board level evidence-informed coaching practice, offers something complementary and, I would argue, prior. It builds the inner conditions under which structural actions become effective rather than performative.
The journey begins with a pre-session diagnostic, including the MBAS, to establish where the board sits on the Ascension Ladder. It moves into a focused executive briefing on what I call the 3 A's: Attention, Awareness and Acceptance, the inner capacities that underpin wise decision-making. From there, the program works through bias-reduction strategies, psychological safety techniques and practical application to the board's live agenda.
A board that installs an AI committee without first developing the collective capacity to sit with ambiguity, challenge its own assumptions and integrate dissenting views will have a more elaborately governed version of the same problem.
Structure without wisdom becomes bureaucracy. Wisdom without structure remains aspiration.
A Key Point
The governance gap on AI is real, well-documented, and closing slowly.
The boards that close it fastest will not necessarily be those with the most technical expertise on the skills matrix. They will be the boards that have developed the collective intelligence to govern in conditions of genuine uncertainty. To notice what they do not know. To hear from the people they have been inadvertently ignoring. To make decisions that reflect the full complexity of the moment.
That is a wisdom question, not a technology question.
In my work with boards, wisdom is both measurable and developable, provided directors have the capacity to do the work.
Take the Next Step
Where does your board sit on the Ascension Ladder?
If you are a chair or lead director ready to move your board from reactive oversight toward collective wisdom on AI and other complex matters, the Mindful Board Assessment Survey is the place to begin.
Book a confidential conversation → or email elizabeth@drlizking.com.
Related Reading
For further work on the governance themes in this article, the Reel Governance series examines collective decision-making and board behaviour through close readings of contemporary film and television.
References
Baig, A., Dave, A., Huber, C., and Vuppala, H. (2025, December 4). The AI reckoning: How boards can evolve. McKinsey & Company. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-technology/our-insights/the-ai-reckoning-how-boards-can-evolve
King, E., Brienza, J. P., and Murdoch, V. (forthcoming). Measuring mindfulness dimensions in the boardroom.
King, E., Norbury, K., and Rooney, D. (2022). Coaching to develop leadership for healthcare managers: A mixed-methods systematic review protocol. Systematic Reviews.
Marks, A., Abrash, L., and Probst, A. (2025, May 27). Governance of AI: A critical imperative for today's boards. Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. Available at: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/05/27/governance-of-ai-a-critical-imperative-for-todays-boards-2/