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Webinar: Beyond the Summary - Preparing for board meetings with AI
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Most directors use AI to do one thing before a board meeting: summarise the pack. That is the least valuable use. Helen van Orton and Alexie O'Brien show how to interrogate the pack, sharpen your questions and stay accountable, whatever tool you use.
Plus a live look at BoardPro's new AI Assistant, governance-grade AI built for the boardroom.
This webinar gives you a practical, board-safe way to use AI before your next meeting without handing over your judgement. You will:
- Learn the one shift, from summarising to interrogating, that turns AI from a time-saver into a sharper-judgment tool
- Get a simple rule for using AI safely, whether you have BoardPro, Copilot only, or just public ChatGPT
- See a live demonstration of BoardPro's new AI Assistant, purpose-built, secure AI that works on your board's own record
- Understand what two 2026 court decisions mean for your personal accountability when AI touches board papers
- Take away practical ideas for putting AI to work on your pack, and see why the AI that flatters you is the one to challenge
Welcome everybody. Welcome to our webinar today titled Beyond the Summary Preparing for Board Meetings with AI. Our webinar team today is Helen Van Orten, Alexei O'Brien, and our very own David Renwick. My name is Sean, Sean McDonald, and I shall be very much your moderator in the background for the next 40 odd minutes. Firstly, though, thank you for attending today. We always appreciate the effort you make to be here for our live webinar events. If you have questions as we go, which of course we hope you will do, please try and use the Q ⁇ A button as against chat. It just enables us to keep a track of things as we're going along. And finally, if you stay through till the end, which of course we hope you will do, we have a really short, and I do promise it's a really short one-minute survey at the end of the webinar for you to consider. Your feedback really helps us bring relevant content to you week after week and it enables us to position the wealth of uh expert presenters that we have for you. So please take a moment to consider the survey at the end. Now, for those not too familiar with BoardPro, we are a board software provider, sometimes called a board portal, and we serve about 35,000 users around the world. We're represented in about 34 different countries. Uh we serve about 4,000 boards and would you believe about 8,000 committees. And we enable organizations to prepare for and run their board meetings more efficiently and effectively, with less time, and deliver more impact and value for the organization. And as much as we are a board software provider, part of our wider mission here at Board Pro is to make the fundamentals of governance free and easy to implement for all organizations, but especially those organizations with resource constraints. And one of the many ways we do this is by providing free access to hundreds of governance templates, guides, and resources, which you will find in the resources center of our website and also our community portal. These webinars that we host every week are also a great way of accessing key governance knowledge without necessarily the time, commitment, and cost associated with in-person events. So for the next 45 minutes, just relax and try and add to the discussion if you can by asking as many questions as you would like. We'll go through these questions as we are moving through the webinar. A full recording of the webinar and the slide deck and transcript will be available to you in the community portal, which I'll cover towards the end. So let me hand over to our esteemed guests, Helen and Alexei, to introduce themselves and then I'll hand over to you, David, as well. Let's start with you first, Helen.
SPEAKER_03I'm an experienced uh board director and chair, and I also run an AI training company directly, where we support boards and exec teams in how to lead with confidence in the AI era, offering everything from training, insights, um, and the tools that you need within your organization to help turn this complex technology into strategic advantage. And I'm very happy to have my fabulous colleague Alexei join me today. I'll hand over to her.
SPEAKER_02Hi, I am Alexei O'Brien from Leadership Academy AI. I am also a uh chair and um experienced board director as well, and I run um AI enablement training for businesses, having come from the exec space, you know, working in retail um businesses as well, um, and bring um governance and how to enable um businesses to safely use AI to empower their people to be more effective. Uh over to you, David.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. So my name's David. I'm on the product team here at Board Pro. Been quite close to our AI features as we brought them to market and looking forward to showing you them a little bit towards the end of the call.
SPEAKER_02So today's webinar will be a little bit more on practical use cases of for how boards can actually prep board meetings with AI. We will touch on a broader AI governance really lightly today, but it is important for you to be aware of how to govern AI safely in your organizations. If you are interested in taking a deeper dive on this, we have lots of other webinars on the Board Pro website for you to watch, specifically around risk and governance. So, for today, um, let's anchor the problem that every director feels the moment the board pack drops. So, two words, um overload and time. So, board packs have grown and grown. And it's now common for packs to be running a couple of hundred pages, often landing on a Friday for a Monday meeting. And we've got a few hours to really absorb and take in the whole lot. So, recent research from board intelligence this year found that 57% of directors are saying that actually finding the key messages in their papers is a little bit like looking for a needle in a haystack.
SPEAKER_03I can literally feel everyone in this call nodding to themselves at their desks. Um, because we know that it's not just the admin of that, it's actually the impact on the quality of our decisions. We're so buried on in volume, and as a result, we have to fall back on shortcuts. And in the meeting, that might be that we're leaning on whoever's speaking first or the loudest. Um, we may skim one of the papers that actually really matters. Um, and that research that Alexei was just touching on showed that boards spend about a third of their meeting time on strategy, and a lot of directors want that to change. Um, the um BoardPro survey earlier this year put the number on it. So 58% of directors want more time for strategic planning, less presentations, and more discussion. So the question is not how can we read the PACs faster, it's how do we spend that limited time and attention that we've got on judgment, not just trying to decode the PAC.
SPEAKER_02So let's actually reframe what AI is for. So Diligent surveyed over 100 US public directors this year, and they found that 82% are already using AI in their boardwork. But when you ask what they're using it for, it's summarizing the paper, it's redrafting an email and cleaning up their notes. So almost everyone is doing that basic stuff now. Um, but there is so much more that we can do. It's really just the floor, not the ceiling.
SPEAKER_03So I guess what we're trying to challenge you is to say, how do we make that shift from what do the papers say to what we always know we need to be doing as directors, which is asking those wider questions. What should we be challenging? What's missing from the paper? What are assumptions in this paper is doing some heavy lifting, or in my own head is doing some heavy lifting, what's changed since we last discussed it? And that's the interrogation, that's the the so what questions, which is where that real value is. Um, and I'm just gonna just make a point before we go on to the next slides, because I just want you to hold on to this because it runs through everything that we're talking about today, which is AI will tend to agree with you. So when we're talking about AI for the rest of these slides, just have that in the back of your mind. So its value isn't necessarily in what it confirms, but it's in what it challenges. But we'll come back to that.
SPEAKER_02So before we um jump into the more clever uses that we want to inspire you to touch on today, a little bit of that light governance from reminder today. Um it's really important when we're using AI, our large language models, to know our environment, where we're using it. So, what can we safely do with AI really depends on where you're working on AI with. So, in a public tool and the free or personal versions, the rule there really should be quite straightforward. You know, don't just like carte blanche paste our board papers in. We want to look at abstracting the questions, stripping out names, numbers specifics, and really asking a more general version of our question. Use it for external research and general challenge when you're in this free version because there is uh a little bit um less governance or guardrails around. The second tool is maybe behind a little bit more of a firewall, like a Microsoft Copilot or the enterprise or business versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. A little bit more latitude, but it's still really important for us to know the limits so that we're using it safely. Um, also inside of um uh copilot, um, note that you know that's dependent on security and permissions. And over time, people move different departments, permissions can drift. And sometimes with these tools, the or governance audit trail isn't um is limited and almost non-existent. So enterprise tools can actually surface more um than they should potentially. Earlier this year, Microsoft confirmed that there was actually a flaw in Copilot that exposed confidential emails despite data loss prevention controls. So enterprise grade doesn't mean governance grade. So we need to make sure that our governance is taken care of before we're just automatically assuming everything is safe. We also, if we're using um some of our um free personal versions, we want to make sure that training model um for our model is turned off so that our data isn't being pushed out to train the model.
SPEAKER_03Um, so your third model is your purpose-built governance AI, like BoardPro'AI Assistant, which I was very lucky to be on the beta of before it went live. So I can uh say how cool it is, but I'm not going to because I'm leaving that for David later on. Um but uh this this tool only works with your own board record. So it's got your permissions built in, it's citing the answers, and it's never training anyone's models. So you've got a lot uh more of a secure wrap around that. But as I said, I'm not gonna steal David's thunder. Um but the rule of thumb across all three of them is if you are not gonna forward this to a stranger, don't paste it into a public school. Um just a note, again, going through everything we're talking about in this presentation, pretty much everything we're going to talk to you will work on any tool. Um, so nobody here is locked out. Um, but again, just that reminder before you start using AI, make sure, and particularly in your boardroom, make sure that you've not only got your AI formal use policy within your organization, but that you've thought about what that looks like at board level. So you are using the AI within what your board framework is for AI usage as well. Okay, are we on to the next one? Yes, we are. Beautiful. Um so let's get practical. Um, so we're going to just talk about a few different ways that you can actually brief yourself before you get into the room. And so the first one is research and context. So this is about briefing yourself before you get into the room. So your board is, I don't know, moving into a new market or you've got a big decision coming up. AI is really, really powerful at going at and building that external picture, whether it's the political, the regulatory, and the regulatory environment, emerging risks, what your competitors are doing, etc. Um, and actually, I just did an example from myself with one of my boards recently. We were updating our climate disclosures, and I wanted to understand how our peers in Australia and New Zealand were looking at this. Um, and so actually went out and got AI to do that global search for me and bring back. And in a literally in the space of a few minutes, I got a really useful comparison. So when I went into that board meeting, I was able to ask better informed questions based on what that global benchmark looked like.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. One of my favorite use cases as well is asking it to stimulate how stakeholders or regulators might act before a decision is actually made. So it gives the board richer foresight without actually exposing confidential papers as well. So what we're doing here is we're taking the outside world and we're pulling it in rather than pushing our own data out. We can also leverage this, the same kind of technique scales to our classic strategy frameworks like PESTL, Port is Five Forces, and Seven Powers. So what used to take an analyst um weeks of time uh now can take less than an hour. And the better part is that you can actually refresh it and get up-to-date information on a quarterly basis. So AI can build the scaffolding and do the research now, but really importantly, the board still does the interpretation of why does this matter and what will we actually do about it. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03Um, so the examples that we're looking at on this page are for when you're working within that approved tool or a board portal. And it this is for the people who are building the board pack. So the exec, the company secretary. Um, and what's really powerful about this is that AI gives you a way, two different ways to walk into the meeting on the front foot. So the first one is to actually look at what are the weak assumptions in your pack before you get asked that question in the boardroom. So you can ask AI to stress test your framing on a paper, what assumptions are in there that someone else is going to call out, what option you might not have put on the table, or where a sharper director um might push back on you. Uh and the great thing about that is then you can fix that before you get uh the pack sent through to the board rather than in the room.
SPEAKER_02And the second is to rehearse the hard questions. So ask AI what the board is actually likely to challenge in this paper. So run it as the directors you actually have. So it might be the finance hawk, the risk lead, the one who is always asking what our customer thinks. You might get the tough questions in advance, which means that you can actually prepare real answers rather than being caught out on the day. So it really could be the difference between defending a paper and what's in the paper and owning it, versus having better discussions at the board table, which will actually lead to better decisions.
SPEAKER_03And if we think back to that conversation we started with about strategy and how we want to spend more time on the strategy, if we can actually uh clear these questions in advance and answer them in the pack, that frees up more time around the board table to have the right conversations. So we've just looked there about the exact time of the story, looking at AI to prepare that sharper pack. Um let's now move on to the directors and how they can use the AI to interrogate what they've been sent. So the same tool, just a different side of the table.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Um, so here are four different categories of prompts that you can take away, use before your next board meeting. Screenshot this if you like as well. Um, so the first category we're going to look at is focus, like with so much information, and we've actually got the opportunity to take a look and you know help us hone in to what we should be focused on. So, what are the decisions this pack is actually asking us to make? What actually needs my attention before the meeting and where do I need to dive deeper? Those two alone will save you time because they actually tell you where to spend the time in your read. Doesn't mean that you're not accountable for reading the whole lot, though. It just helps you go deeper in those more important areas.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and we'll come back to the accountability a little bit later on in the presentation. Uh, so then the second one is the challenge questions, that interrogation. So you've got one on the slide, what's the weakest assumption? But what alternatives aren't we considering? What's changed since we last discussed this, which again, with this type of portal that um BoardPro has got is so powerful. And those are actually going to make you a much better director in the room. And then the third one is perspective, and I think this one is so powerful for helping us break that group think that we can sometimes have as directors. So if you think about a dice on a table, if you'll sat around the board table, all of us are seeing a slightly different face of that dice. Um, but nobody's necessarily seeing all six unless you actually pick up the dice and look at the bottom of it. Um, so what you can do with AI is you can actually ask it to give you those different perspectives. Um, it's not you don't need a custom tool, you don't need projects, anything fancy skills. It's just argue the opposite. What would that skeptical director or the regulator think? And it's getting that different lens on the problem than what you've currently got.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Um and the fourth group, uh, continuity questions. So working in that grounded tool like Board Pro, um what did we resolve on this last quarter and how did we actually get to this decision? So one thing to keep in mind across all four of these questions, if we're using that public tool, we want to abstract, strip out the names, uh, ask the general version of the question. But if you're inside a governed platform like the Board Pro assistant, you can ask it these kind of questions directly. So the guardrail slide that we covered earlier is absolutely your guide. Alrighty, so a little bit of um the guardrails for the legal side and your accountability. So everything we've shown you so far absolutely um is useful, but it doesn't change our obligations. So earlier this year, the federal court handed down its decision in ASIC versus Becchia, the SAR entertainment case. Justice Lee said the technology may assist comprehension, but it absolutely cannot displace judgment. Um, that obligation remains personal. ASIC's chair Joe Longo also called it probably the most significant corporate governance case that they've actually had during his time at ASIC. The duty of care findings went against the CEO and the chief legal and risk officer, not against the NEDs, though. So ASIC's case against the seven NEDs wasn't upheld. The standard really was found to be genuine engagement, um, not perfection. Two months later, the Chief Justice of New South Wales also made a related point around safe harbour. So the reliance defense that directors really depend on requires you to make your own independent assessment. So if the AI is the black box you cannot explain, the assessment then becomes really hard to demonstrate. A director who simply adopts AI's recommendation has not made the judgment that the law expects.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, thanks, Alexia. And so, yeah, summarising that, AI can do the prep, it can do the summarizing, it can surface, but you as a director retain that judgment. And that's a really critical rule for you to take away. Uh AI can help you find it. And you know, we talked earlier about helping you focus more on the right areas of PAC. You still have that duty to read everything. You cannot do you cannot delegate that duty of care to a tool, whether you're in Australia or New Zealand. I have to say I've seen people from uh all over the world on here. I'm pretty sure that the US, Canadian, South African law will be similar. Sorry, we don't have case studies from there and I haven't looked into it. Um, but you know, every piece of legal um precedence I've seen, including um some of the US cases, are saying that you need to retain the judgment. Um, and that is ultimately the new governance reality that we are now operating in.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and especially the EU too. There's some uh deeper legislation in the EU as well.
SPEAKER_03Yes, and the fines around the EU AI Act are massive. And again, sometimes we think that in our jurisdictions that doesn't apply to us. But again, if you have uh clients in the EU or you have subsidiaries or you're you know a subsidiary of uh an EU company, you just need to be very across that legislation as well. So this one, it flatters you and it keeps receipts. Uh there's two traps, and they're the reason that um verifying matters so much. Um so the first is that AI flatters you. And there was a peer review study in science earlier this year which looked at 11 of the leading models. So that will be everything that any of you guys are using. Um, and it found that they agreed with a user 49% more than a human advisor would. So we know if we're sitting around the table, you're going to get some people who agree, some people who don't disagree. Your AI is 49% more likely to agree with you, even when you're wrong. Um, and here's the really key thing for that that matters when you're prepping for a board, which is if you are exposed to just one affirming AI response, you will become more convinced that you were right and less willing to consider someone else's perspective. Um, so in that study, they rated the AI as more trustworthy, which is actually the opposite of what a board needs. So that's just a really massive red flag for you when you're interacting with it. Just be aware of that bias, that hallucination, and that zy fancy. It's wanting to agree with you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um, and the second trap is AI keeping the receipts. So another US case, um, Delaware this time. So the chief executive actually asked ChatGPT to help him design a strategy to avoid a large earnout payment. He forwarded the output to his head of strategy, called it Project X, and then followed the playbook. So those ChatGPT exchanges actually became some of the most damaging evidence in the case. So here's a lesson had he actually picked up the phone and called his lawyer, that conversation would have been privileged. So the chatbot conversation was fully discoverable. So every prompt you're typing into those documents can be read aloud in court.
SPEAKER_03So again, just another piece to be wary about is particularly if you are using um a tool that is not um within any form of guidelines. So, you know, the the there's so many traps here, and we're just trying to make sure that you're aware of them before you go wild. I've noticed that there's a couple of questions. We'll come back to those at the end if you don't mind, Sean. Um so, board takeaway from all of this is simple. If AI shaped your analysis, you need to be able to show, back to that safe harbor comment that Alexei was talking about, you need to be able to show where your human judgment entered, where it was challenged, and who owned it. Um and you also need to make sure that your, if it's something that you think needs to be legally privileged, that you are talking to your lawyers and not just having all of this just chatted into your AI.
SPEAKER_02So um let's pull all of these guardrails into four different habits. So um number one, as we mentioned with the certainly with the legal case. You know, like you're the human. You actually stay accountable as directors. We um our judgment is what we're there for. So we stay accountable. AI assists our preparation, but it doesn't replace our read of the papers. Uh, number two, um, it will give you um sources. It will sound hallucination is a confident lie. It's just it's made it up. It will sound though that it's really true. It'll even give you URLs. So make sure you're checking and clicking on those links to check the sources. Garbage in, garbage out still applies um and verify its output against our sources before we're just relying on what it's giving you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And if you've never actually had an AI convincingly lie to you, just ask it something you're a real expert in and challenge it and you'll very quickly discover that it does make stuff up and it will send you links and you'll click through them and you're like, that's saying the complete opposite to what you're saying. So actually go and test it because once you've done that yourself, you suddenly go, oh, actually these things aren't quite as infallible as they would have you believe. Um so the third one is this is protecting confidentiality. And I think this answers one of the questions that we um have in the QA, which is never ever, ever put sensitive board material into a public tool and know what your settings are. So make sure that obviously within the AI board pro, sorry, the board pro AI portal, you have got that protection of um that. I'll actually let David talk to it, but you've got that protection because this is where it's meant to sit. Um but if you're uploading your papers into a Chat GPT or a co-pilot, just don't do it. Um, you can anonymise your questions. So you can say, you know, this is an organization in this led, you know, in this field, about this size, we're thinking about a high-level something and get it to put on those different um lenses and perspectives, but um always anonymise your data if you're putting anything into a public tool. Um, there's uh again a lot about that in some of our other webinars, but do not just blindly put your board papers into a public tool. Um and then finally build your own AI fluency and treat it as continuous professional development. Um, you know, just in saying like all directors need to be T-shaped, um, and actually part of that T now needs to be that AI literacy and that capability is part of your ongoing duties now. Um so those four habits are going to keep you safe on a day-to-day basis. Um, but as I said in the previous slide, what sits underneath everything is making sure that your own judgment is still always surfaced. Um when you are using AI as a guide, make sure that you show where you've questioned it, what the board decided. And that can just be a line in the minutes, but that's the record that is showing that the thinking was yours and it's exactly what that safe harbor piece we talked about earlier asks you to demonstrate. So the one thing to do before your next meeting, pick one agenda item. Um, again, if it's in a public tool, anonymise it and just ask AI to draft five challenges, uh, five challenge questions to it. Um, that's all you need to do. And then just try and notice whether you're walking in sharper. Um, because ultimately your uh your pack is going to keep growing, as Alexei said at the beginning, and they're going to keep getting bigger, but that accountability stays where it is with you. Um and really, I guess that just means are you going to go in sharper or are you just going to go in more tired because you were staying up so late coming up with your questions?
SPEAKER_02And if you would like to go deeper, um, Helen and I have written just about to refresh the AI-enabled board white paper, covers all of this in much more depth. So there are a couple of other uh resources on the screen, which we will also share as well as the this recording. I know there's a couple of questions in the chat about getting the recording as well. Um so better still, ask your board to try these techniques for a few meetings and debrief together because that's really how it becomes a shared capability across your entire board, um, which will uplift um the quality and of your judgments and your decisions. Um it's not a solo experiment, it's not just up to you. All right, I am going to hand over now to David.
SPEAKER_01Thanks very much. Thank you both. So keep that prompt in mind, which was on screen before, because I'm going to show you that in AI assistant in just a moment. Um but first, you know, like translating the concepts that Helen and Alexei have discussed into real governance grade tools, as they mentioned, requires some deliberate choices. And what I'm going to do now, just for five minutes, is really show you how those have been brought to life inside Board Pro. So it was important for us with our AI offering that we based it around a key principle, and that's augmentation, not automation. So at its core, this means we want to make directors more expert, not replace their judgment. So this means fiduciary duty stays with the board, you know, you can delegate tasks, but not accountability. And our AI tools, not just assistant, but all of our AI products are built around that fact. Um, we've seen, you know, in the past year or so, we've seen many competitors leaning quite um strongly into autonomous AI, and we're intentionally kind of putting a line in the sand and choosing to do the opposite. So our assistant is not a substitute for director judgment. It's not going to make decisions for you. But what it will help you do is Helen and Alexei so astutely put it, is help you prepare. And it'll it's also grounded in your data. So you're kind of walking into the meeting as the expert armed with that uh additional knowledge. And before I show it to you, it's brought to life across three key principles. That is, um, you know, you verify and the AI accelerates. So, you know, you're accountable for what goes to the board. The AI will just get you there faster. This is really a deliberate choice on our part. You know, governance work has real consequences and trust matters more than speed. And grounded in your data is the next one, and potentially the most key. Um, unlike generic AI tools, our AI draws on your board's own documents, you know, your moments, your papers, your decisions that are already in board pro, and every answer goes back to a source that you can click. And I'll I'll show you that in just a second. And lastly, they're um invisible, not invasive. So we don't want you really thinking about prompt engineering. We want you to kind of stay within that board pro environment and trust that you're getting the uh the insights drawn from that one tool. So AI will surface to where you want it. And if you don't want it, you know, you can turn off WordPro's AI completely and fully. Okay, I'll just bring up my screen. So bear with me for one moment. Okay, hello, I'm excited to know if you can see my screen. Right. Thank you. So I'm just in my Board Product here, and I'm gonna hop into my specific test environment, which is the Riverside Community Trust. And we can see here up in the top right, we've got our AI system. So I'm just trying to enter the prompt that we had on screen before, which was to um prepare me five challenge questions for September or meeting. Just give that a moment to come back. Oh, working fast this afternoon. So one key thing to call out here with assistant is that it's um it's given us a format which is you can kind of see a pattern a bit as you start to use the tool. So it's obviously answered our query, but then it's kind of giving us that ability to um follow up and give it to us in a different format too. So, for example, I've got those challenge questions now. I may actually want to um turn those into speaking notes. So I'm just going to say please turn these into speaking notes for the meeting. And here we go. Just a better or almost an alternative way to um take those challenge questions into our next meeting, again, helping us to prepare. Um so this is really where Assistant Excel, it's about it can help you um draft comms, policies, documents, those sort of things. It's really again and rooted in the in the board pro environment. So I'm just going to clear the context here and try another one. So obviously I've got a fair number of demo meetings loaded in here, some in the future, some in the past. I'm gonna ask to summarize the July 2026 board meeting. And I'm gonna add an additional part to the prompt here and say, what do I need to know before the next meeting? Just give that a moment to come back. Here we go. And something really to call out here, which Alan and Alexa both touched on, is sourcing. So WordPro's AI, you know, like all LLMs, has a uh a general knowledge layer so it can obviously speak English to you or speak in the language that you're you're typing into it. But it's actually not gonna go out into the internet and find information just uh off the cuff. It's actually will route everything back in your board's own knowledge here. And you can see that coming to life with the source. So if we click the source, we're taken back to that July board meeting, where all the documents are loaded, where those decisions were made, where the minutes are, and we can see where all that all just come from. And again, as I touched on before, uh, you can see that the format that assistant tends to um prefer as well, which is giving us an executive summary of that meeting, um, the you know, the key facts, decisions made, actions outstanding, any risks and issues, and again some recommended next steps. So let's just ask are there any open actions assigned to me? So I've got several open actions, obviously quite busy. Um, one of them here being to confirm the hub donor pledge and writing. And again, I'm just going to ask um assistant for some help here. So I'll say, can you please draft me an email to obtain donor pledge or information? And again, obviously, this is probably the way many of you are familiar with using kind of off-the-shelf AI tools, but we are you know leveraging as you are open AI within Board Pro, it's locked down to your environment. You can kind of trust that those responses aren't again going out to the open web and they're just consulting your specific material. So here we have an email draft that we can use if we want to. And again, assistant just trying to be helpful in the way that um AI models are, will uh offer to spin that in a variety of different ways for us. So that's me again. So just a reminder that when we talk about AI assistant, we sort of want you to think of it as a conversation. Um, use it to help develop ideas, fill in some of those gaps. Um, and really just a good way to start it is to start with a question that's top of mind for you and kind of pick your own adventure from there. So asking questions or um for more information as the thinking develops. Um you can use each conversation or thread to tie context together and from many different documents and time frames within your board pro account. And lastly, again, as we've mentioned several times by now, always follow the sources and develop that information. We've made a really deliberate attempt with our AI assistant to make that very clear and available for you. So once you click those sources, you're taken back every time to where that information has come from. Um assistant will help you build context, surface information, develop thinking, and fill the gaps. And really just, again, as we say, even on our website, just make you more expert. Um so the final review and say always stays with you.
SPEAKER_00Helen, would you like to take the first question from Gary? So Gary's asked earlier you were talking about the value of asking questions in ways that avoid the risk of uploading the detailed packs. Now you seem to be talking about interrogations that require the whole board pack to be visible to the AI. Is this a regular AI product, like a non-free version with basic settings in place safe for that, David?
SPEAKER_03No, so I think I did um move on to that um a little bit later. Uh so I think I tried to refer to Gary's question as I was going through. So no, 100%, never load your board papers into a public um GPT. Again, to that quest, the slide we had earlier about if you're in an enterprise environment, it's behind your firewall, that's where your board, you know. For example, if you've got Microsoft Copilot and that's where your board papers are, then obviously you can interrogate them within your environment. Or if you're in the board pro environment, then you can. But no, never load your papers into a public tool. David, you probably have got a bit more to say on that as well.
SPEAKER_01I think just to really add to it, um, there's probably like not much more you want to say beyond adding things into a public tool. Um, always, you know, whether it's board pro or something else, make sure that you understand the security frameworks around whatever tool you're using uh and that you understand the implications of loading in that uh sensitive information. So we've got a quite a bit of material on our website. I think Sean we can send it out at the end of this tool, kind of covering our security posture with regards to AI.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we'll do that for sure. I have a question from Ainsley. Uh, is there potential for crossover of data between different boards if the same board portal is used for more than one board that I'm on? So that's quite common. There's a you know, a number of directors use board pro for a lot of their directorships. So, David, you want to answer that question?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for sure. So uh if you remember when I started presenting, I was in the main BoardPro dashboard and then clicked into my specific uh Riverside Community Trust account. That's the point assistant appeared, and that kind of models our uh again, our framework with AI. So there's no um what we call tenant crossover. Everything is locked down to that one specific um organization or committee. So you never have that risk of asking a prompt in one account and getting information bleeding through from another. And that's a very deliberate design decision on our part.
SPEAKER_00And one here from Julie Garland McClellan. Hi, Julie, a regular on our webinar programs. Good to see you. Uh in the UK, a recent guidance report has suggested that directors could be found liable for failing to use AI in circumstances where a reasonable director would be expected to. Do you have any insights about how that might impact behavior in Australia and New Zealand? Who wants to tackle that one? Helen, I'm gonna pick on you.
SPEAKER_03Oh, well, I can see Alexei is actually talking, but she's on mute.
SPEAKER_02Very useful. I I'll I'll jump in first and Helen, if you want to add anything, uh, go ahead. I think um, I mean, who knows what the legal um framework will will become. Uh, but I definitely think that um our more immediate expectation is not, you know, adopt AI or be liable. It is, you know, as directors, our duty of care is to make sure that we're looking at, you know, what the under the opportunity is, what the risks are, um, challenge our thinking, really look at, you know, where are we actually looking at opportunity? Um, and particularly where uh competitors or um others can demonstrate uh credible value um cases, um, have we been using tools that will allow us to exercise sufficient care? Um and you know, the other flip side of the point is well, if we're just adopting AI without controls, we actually could be facing more immediate risk. So if we're adopting AI to really help expand our thinking to consider um all of the different use cases, um, but then we're actually layering in our um duty of care, our judgment and decision making with governance uh skills, then I think that we will be fulfilling our obligations. Um, Helen, do you have anything you want to add?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, 100% agree with what you said. The only thing I would add to it is um, again, based on a lot of conversations I've had with different directors, some boards are very intentionally saying we don't want to use AI. And I think as long as it is an intentional decision and you have evidenced it, and you know you've said we've had this conversation and we've made this conscious decision that we don't think it's the right thing to do, I think that you are good. Um, but you know, the world is moving very fast. Um, Sean, I just want to point out that there's a whole heap of questions in the chat as well as in the QA, which you may not have seen.
SPEAKER_00Ah, okay. We may not have time for them. Let's see how we go.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um Right, another question. If every director asks those questions of board pro, will we be asking the same questions, David? It's assuming everybody's gonna ask exactly the same question, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, might be more one for Helena or Alexa there, but I would say generally, like it's oh, sorry, go on.
SPEAKER_02I I can jump in, David. I think there's a very similar question in the um just the regular chat as well from uh G. Thomas Gribble. How do we know that if every director is using AI to prepare, that we're not ending up with a new type of group thing? So it's the same kind of thing. So um AI, it's generative. So I could ask the same question now and in five minutes, and I would probably get a different answer. Um, but I think the opportunity is in as directors that we're asking these questions from our perspective or from a different perspective with our thought about the issue at hand. So because it is generative, the nature of AI is it's going to create uh based on what it predicts the next words are. So by the nature of us asking slightly different questions from different perspectives, we will get different um challenges. There might be some crossover, some overlap, absolutely. Um, but there might be those couple of you know unique perspectives that we might get to ask, especially when you ask a question like, what's a non-obvious consequence or a non-obvious answer that I haven't thought of here as well?
SPEAKER_00And finally, one from Linda. Uh can I I'm assuming she's referring to the Board Pro AI tool. Uh, can the AI also suggest improvements to the layout of content or things that should be included in a board pack? David, do you want to answer that one? Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_01And absolutely, you can um, whether you're opening a pack and it's loaded into board pro and asking um a question around the improvement of that content, you can do that within board within board pro. Or you can even um you've got the ability to, I think, shortly upload documents in there as well. But absolutely you can you can ask away interrogator, different questions around improving your content.
SPEAKER_00Brilliant. Let me check my watch. We're almost out of time, so we won't have time to jump into chat. So let's move on. So feel free to connect with uh our presenters today on LinkedIn. I'm sure they'll look forward to your connection. Helen, David, or Alexei, their details are on screen. Um, we have something special for you. We have an exciting roadshow coming to you in October, November for our Kiwi and Aussie viewers, that is. So introducing the Governance with Impact Roadshow. It's a full day exploring what good governance looks like in the new AI world with keynotes from really great leading subject matter experts in governance and AI, uh, TEDx style QA so that really won't hold back, it won't pull the punches, and plenty of great conversations throughout the day and an after dinner function to close things out. And we'd love to see you there and put a face to the name, of course. Earlybird tickets are on sale now. Uh you can save 35% off the ticket price if you just use the code uh earlybird at checkout to lock those in. The URL is uh on screen there, and it's also on the homepage of our website. Uh finally, if you're looking to hone your skills on past webinars, you'll find these in the library of webinars in our community portal now. So that's where they are all posted now. You'll receive an invitation to join the portal a little bit later on, and it's free to join. And only here will you find the slide deck, the transcripts, and the resources from the uh from the webinar. So you'll receive an email from me, it'll be tomorrow now, which will include uh a recording of the session today and the presentation slides. And as I said, they'll be hosted in the community portal as well, uh, probably later on today. If you're considering board management software for your organization, then of course we would love to hear from you. Better still, why not try our free 30-day trial? It's really simple and straightforward, uh, doesn't require any credit cards to get started. So thank you again, everybody, for your attendance. I hope you enjoyed the session today. I know I did. Thank you, Alexei, Helen, and David for the great insights. I look forward to seeing you at our next webinar, everybody. Uh, don't forget the short uh survey as you exit the webinar. Have a great day, everybody. See you next time.