AI in the Boardroom is written for the people who carry ultimate accountability for AI decisions: chairs, non-executive directors, and the executives who answer to them. It covers strategy, governance, and transformation in the age of AI — not the technology, but the decisions it puts in front of a board: where to invest, what to control, who is accountable, and what to demand from management.
Most writing on AI governance concerns the enterprise — the systems an organisation builds and buys, and how the board oversees them. That is necessary work, and this publication does plenty of it. But it is only half of a board’s responsibility. The other, largely neglected, half is inward-facing: how directors themselves use AI to prepare, to challenge, and to decide. AI in the Boardroom covers both. Each edition takes one question a board will actually face, names the mechanism behind it — the cost, the risk, the accountability, the decision — and sets out what a director should do about it.
Subscribers receive every edition by email, together with the practical instruments that accompany them — question sets, checklists, and guides such as Principles for Responsible AI Use by Directors. Everything is written to be taken into a boardroom rather than filed, and the archive is open.
I’m Karim Harbott — Chartered Director, Fellow of the Institute of Directors, and Fellow of the British Computer Society. I serve as a Senior Independent Director and board adviser, and I teach strategy and governance at multiple institutions, including the Institute of Directors, where I lead Strategy for Directors and Leadership for Directors. I have also designed the AI for Directors programme. I also deliver board development to Public Investment Fund companies in Saudi Arabia through the Center for Governance. Before the board work came two decades leading enterprise transformation: at McKinsey, where I built and led the firm’s scaled-agile practice in Europe; at Barclays, where I led the transformation of a 1,500-person technology organisation with a £450m budget; and at Agile Centre, the consultancy I co-founded and grew to multi-million-pound revenues. I am the author of the best-selling The 6 Enablers of Business Agility (Berrett-Koehler, 2021).
I write this publication because the boards I sit on, advise, and teach are being asked to govern something that moves faster than governance usually does, and because much of the advice they receive is either technical detail they don’t need or reassurance they shouldn’t accept. The aim here is different: to help boards turn AI from a source of anxiety into a source of advantage, one decision at a time.
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