The Boardroom AI Literacy Gap

Boards have spent a century learning to interrogate money. They can read a balance sheet under pressure, sense when a forecast is being flattered, and ask the one question that unravels a rehearsed answer. Very few can do the same to a model. That asymmetry has now crossed from awkward to fiduciary: directors are accountable for systems whose failure modes they cannot articulate, briefed by executives who are themselves relaying vendor language. Closing the gap does not require directors to become engineers. It requires a small, durable vocabulary — provenance, drift, human oversight, contestability — and the confidence to keep asking until the answer stops being a slogan. The boards that acquire this literacy will not merely avoid scandal; they will approve better technology faster, because they will finally understand what they are approving.