Last week Fraser Simpson from Wellcome Trust and I ran a session on how AI is changing charity governance.
This came about after I’d posted on LinkedIn about how I’d come across trustees using AI as part of how they reviewed board papers, strategised and worked through challenging situations on their boards. Fraser and I got talking and we both decided to step outside of our day jobs and run this pro bono, because we think there is a real need for this conversation in the sector.
Why this matters
Before I get into what we learned, here is why I think this shift in how trustees work is significant. AI is changing trustees’ ways of working, in the same way that we are seeing across the wider workforce.
We know from the Charity Digital Skills Report that year on year trustees have low digital skills. 1 in 4 (28%) of charities say that their boards have poor digital skills, with 44% stating that their boards have poor AI skills.
There are two issues here: recruitment and tooling. Much has already been written about the need to get more digitally skilled trustees onto boards. But trustees do not always have the opportunity to use digital in their roles. I’ve sat on boards where you don’t get an organisational email address, let alone access to AI tools. That’s a real worry when trustees may be turning to free tools or tools outside your charity’s ecosystem to review board papers.
What we learned from the session
A huge thank you to the fantastic group of charity governance professionals and advisors who came along. Here are five things I took away.
1. Boards are already using AI, and some of it is happening by stealth
This really struck me. Some trustees are already using AI to review papers and inform their decision-making. That feels transformational, given that only a few years ago, pre-pandemic, many of the charities I spoke to were struggling to wean their trustees off hard copy board papers.
But the worst thing that could happen is for this transformation to take place in the shadows. Over the last few months I’ve come across charities where trustees are, with the best will in the world, putting sensitive board documents into free AI tools or tools that sit outside their charity’s tech ecosystem. Nobody is doing this with bad intentions. They’re trying to do a better job. But it speaks to how much trustees need training and support to use AI safely. We need to get this out in the open and help boards build their skills and confidence before things go wrong.
2. AI is a chance to look at how your board collaborates
It struck me during the conversation that introducing AI into a board isn’t really a technology question. It’s a question about how your board works. If you’re a charity where the executive and the board have a healthy, honest relationship, where challenge is welcome and learning is valued, then AI is probably going to be a useful addition. If those things aren’t in place, AI is just going to amplify the problems you’ve already got.
I’ve been a trustee of various organisations for 18 years. The charities where I’ve seen digital change work well are the ones where the board and the executive have already done the hard work on culture and trust. AI isn’t a shiny thing you layer on top of something that isn’t working. That’s a recipe for dysfunction on steroids. And what you really don’t want is your board and your charity working in fundamentally different ways, with different tools, different speeds, different assumptions, effectively operating across a digital divide.
3. Upskilling is the issue, but attitude to learning matters more than the training itself
We heard this repeatedly throughout the session, and it came through alongside a real sense of nervousness. People talked about feeling caught in the headlights. Aware that AI is moving fast but unsure what it means in practice for governance. Some even worried about whether using AI might be perceived as cheating. That anxiety is understandable, but it’s also a barrier. If people don’t feel confident enough to experiment, no amount of training is going to land.
Skills is something we’ve talked about in the Charity Digital Skills Report for years, along with many others across the sector. But a good place to begin is to ask what your board’s attitude to learning actually is.
Many years ago I was involved in interviewing candidates who were joining a board I was sitting on. We worked with a recruitment firm who found us some impressive people who had done high profile work across the private, public and charity sectors. As the long day of interviews wore on, I realised our panel had very different attitudes. Some put candidates on a pedestal, acting as if they would be doing us a favour by joining. I was more interested in what people had learned from their experiences and how hungry they were to make our charity a success.
I do wonder if we treat trustees with too much reverence in our sector. They are here to learn and contribute.
There are many things you can do to upskill your boards, from skills audits to training to briefings about emerging tech. But none of it will stick if you don’t have trustees who are motivated to learn. That requires checking egos at the door and having a chair who sets expectations around learning and collaborative ways of exercising governance.
4. How you advise charities is changing too
If AI is changing governance, that has implications for everyone around the table: governance professionals, lawyers and ultimately regulators. This is an area where we’re all going to need to adapt, and keep adapting. Charities might need to ask their advisors to take on different roles, such as acting as provocateurs or sense-checking the advice they’ve gained from AI tools.
5. AI can lighten the admin load, but it could also be a thinking partner for trustees
Of course AI can help with the bread and butter of governance, like drafting minutes, pulling together terms of reference and summarising long documents. That’s useful and it’s where many boards will start.
But what I found most interesting was the conversation about AI as something more than an administrative tool. Some people are already using it to prepare for board meetings, to brainstorm, to do horizon scanning and to stress test strategic options. There were even examples of people using AI to get a different perspective on how their board is functioning. I think this is where it gets really interesting, and where trustees are going to need support to use these tools well, with all the usual caveats about hallucinations and quality assurance.
What this all comes back to
Charity governance is ultimately relational. It’s not just about audit trails or process. I’ve sat on boards where governance majored in showing our workings rather than helping people make better decisions.
What I took away from this session is that AI has the potential to support trustees in thinking more broadly, challenging more constructively and learning from different perspectives. But to get there, boards are going to have to confront some of the same issues that staff teams are already wrestling with: building skills, changing habits and working out where the human touch matters most. And that could make governance really exciting. It could become something that drives change, creates impact and energises boards and charities. Governance is not a dry discipline. It’s about making decisions and ensuring things happen in the right way.
Fraser and I are planning to bring the group back together to hear how people have been testing AI in their governance work. If you’re interested in joining us for the next session, drop me a line at zoe@zoeamar.com and I’ll add you to the list.