The Board Question That Rarely Gets Asked
“What decisions will be better because of this?”
Boards routinely approve significant investment in data, analytics, and AI. Platforms, programs, and capability build-outs are intended to “future-proof” the organization. The scrutiny applied is familiar and necessary, including cost, risk exposure, delivery timelines, and sometimes competitive parity.
What is far less consistent is the precision with which boards interrogate the decision impact of these investments. Specifically, which decisions are expected to improve as a result, by how much, and how the board will know whether that improvement has occurred.
When this question is not explicitly addressed, value becomes incidental rather than intentional. The issue is not technological capability, but governance focus.
At the heart of strategy, risk, and performance lies decision quality. By this I mean: who decides, with what information, at what speed, and under what accountability. This decision architecture is the mechanism through which strategy is executed and capital is either compounded or consumed.
Yet data and AI investments are frequently governed as infrastructure; necessary, important, but largely passive. When governed this way, they remain detached from the board’s core oversight responsibility and struggle to exert real leverage on enterprise outcomes.
Without a clear line of sight between investment and decision improvement, boards lose the ability to distinguish poor outcomes driven by inadequate information from those driven by poor judgement. When that distinction cannot be made, learning slows, risk accumulates, and future capital is allocated with increasing uncertainty.
This creates a strategic asymmetry many boards underestimate. Competitors face the same challenge, which means the first organization to materially improve its highest-leverage decisions i.e. capital allocation, pricing, risk exposure, resource prioritization will compound advantage while others remain focused on activity rather than impact.
This is not a question of data maturity or AI sophistication. It is a question of governance maturity.
So the challenge for boards is both simple and uncomfortable: can you clearly articulate which few decisions most determine enterprise value, demonstrate that they are improving year on year, and show how your data and AI investments are directly accountable for that improvement?
