Board oversight of AI trends
Board Practices Quarterly, April 2025
The potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize businesses is immense. For example, it can help improve customer experiences, supply chain optimization, innovation, and decision-making. It can also increase financial, reputational, data privacy and security, and bias risks, and it can yield misinformation. The implications of how AI is changing the business landscape reinforce the need for robust governance practices and board oversight.
This Board Practices Quarterly builds upon our 2023 issue, which was also focused on AI. Based on a survey of public company members of the Society for Corporate Governance, it covers company and board AI practices, including functional areas of AI responsibility and implementation; board oversight responsibilities and agendas; and employee utilization of AI tools.
Noteworthy findings
Respondents, primarily corporate secretaries, in-house counsel, and other in-house governance professionals, represent 80 public companies of varying sizes and industries1, and the findings pertain to these companies. The actual number of responses for each question is provided. Some survey results may not sum to 100% as questions may have allowed respondents to select multiple answers.
Describe the frequency of AI-related topics on the meeting agenda for the full board or board committee(s). Select all that apply. (56 responses)
Among market caps, notable differences include:
- Ad hoc or as-needed basis: 70% large-caps, 48% mid-caps
- Every regular board meeting: 0% large-caps, 13% mid-caps
- Quarterly: 7% large-caps, 17% mid-caps
Notable differences from our 2023 Board Practices Quarterly findings include:
- Annually: 14 percentage point increase
- Ad hoc or as-needed basis: 22 percentage point increase
- To date, AI-related topics have not been on our full board or a committee meeting agenda: 35 percentage point decrease
Note: In 2023, the n value was 73. In both 2025 and 2023, no respondent answered "Don’t know/Not applicable”.
Which of the following information does the board and/or any of its committees regularly receive related to company use of AI? Select all that apply.
Among market caps, a notable difference is that 22% of large-caps reported “the current ‘inventory’ of machine learning AI and Generative AI being used in the company” compared to 10% of mid-caps.
Endnotes
1 Public company respondent market capitalization as of December 2024: 54% large-cap (which includes mega- and large-cap) (> $10 billion); 41% mid-cap ($2 billion to $10 billion); and 4% small-cap (which includes small-, micro-, and nano-cap) (< $2 billion). Respondent industry breakdown: 34% financial services; 27% consumer; 19% energy, resources, and industrials; 11% life sciences and health care; and 9% technology, media, and telecommunications.
Small-cap and private company findings have been omitted from this report due to limited respondent population. Private company findings are available in the accompanying demographics report.
Maureen Bujno
Krista Parsons
