Boards & leadership teams
Accelerate your business with AI
your board can govern.
We work with boards and senior leadership teams to build a working appreciation of what AI can do, hands-on, because until leaders have seen beyond the chatbot it is hard to see where the true impact can be made. From there we find where AI can accelerate the business strategy, and equip the board to change it with conviction. Then we deliver the plan, building governable AI that meets the expectations APRA and ASIC have set. Inside your governance, not around it.
How to apply AI to make a measurable impact on the P&L.
Copilots, chatbots and summarisation tools make individuals faster but do not materially change business performance. The measurable impact comes from automating business processes with AI, especially the ones that were too complicated to automate before. To start, three things need to be clear.
Once the board understands how to apply AI to make an impact on the P&L, it can formulate a strategy on how to use it to grow revenue, reduce costs, and govern it.
Three ways we deliver.
The Executive Build Day moves leaders beyond the chatbot. Each executive builds something real from scratch and sees it deployed, and comes away understanding how to apply AI to make an impact on the P&L.
We work with the board to formulate the strategy. Where AI grows revenue and reduces costs, which processes to automate first, and how it will be governed. It concludes in a board paper the board can stand behind.
We build to the plan the board has approved. Forward-deployed engineers inside your environment, building the system and the organisational capability to govern it. When your teams can extend it without us, our work is done.
How your board governs AI.
APRA and ASIC have released two open letters with useful context on what a board should focus on. They are aimed at regulated industries, but we take them as the standard all industries should hold themselves to.
Get the strategy right and the compliance falls out of it. In our advisory work on the APRA and ASIC letters, the question directors actually ask is this. In practice, what does this mean we have to do? Six moves, in the order we take boards through them.
Map your AI, including the AI nobody approved
One inventory of every place AI touches a decision, inside your vendors' tools and the public chatbots staff use. A policy is not a control. The control is a governed AI your people are allowed to use.
Test every AI use with four questions
Bring your vendors inside the tent
Your vendors' AI is your AI. Ask them the same four questions you ask yourself, and put the answers in the contract. The right to see how it reaches decisions, evidence that it works, notice when the model changes, and reporting on how it performs. Where you rely on a vendor for a critical operation, CPS 230 already expects this.
Move from assertion to evidence
ASIC's word was evidence, not assert. In practice, an audit trail. What the system did, who reviewed it, who signed off. If you cannot produce that today, it is the first gap to close.
Harden your cyber defences against AI-driven attacks
Evidence what defences are in place, how they are resourced and prioritised, and whether they are adequate. Regular reports on the effectiveness of end-to-end controls. Risk frameworks updated for AI cyber risk.
Commission a board-owned AI strategy
Not a policy the AI team drafts and the board signs off. A strategy grounded in the regulators' principles, owned by the board, with enough technical fluency at the table to challenge it. The piece that cannot be delegated.
Practitioners who advise.
We have been building AI since 2014, when it was still called machine learning. Building AI for a regulated business is not one decision. It is a chain of them. What the system should do, the first lines of code, the shape of a real operational workflow, the pilot, the cutover to production, and then the part most programmes never reach, adoption. Product champions, centres of excellence, governance that holds. Our principals have carried systems through that entire chain, more than once. That experience shapes what we recommend, what we decline to recommend, and how quickly our clients reach a system their people actually use.
Our principals have founded, ASX-listed and exited automation companies, and run global AI innovation labs for a tier-one technology vendor, with AI and ML programmes across top-tier European telcos and two TM Forum Excellence Awards.
Production AI claims automation built and deployed at one of the UK's largest motor insurers, taking processing times from days to minutes, inside the governance of a regulated business.
Currently building process-operating AI platforms for specialty insurance, architected for the scrutiny APRA and ASIC now describe, traceable, auditable, human-approved at every decision.
Talk to us about where AI could accelerate your business.
The starting point is a conversation. Where your board stands on AI, or the process you want automated. From there, a Build Day, the strategy work with the board, or a build engagement, whichever the situation calls for.
Our principals accept a small number of board and advisory positions with regulated firms building AI capability. If your board needs AI fluency at the table rather than in front of it, talk to us.