Using AI for enhanced decision-making: 9 innovative ways to boost board efficiency and effectiveness
After grappling with artificial intelligence from a governance perspective, have you thought about using this transformative technology in your own daily activities — automation to streamline administrative tasks, AI to facilitate better decision-making and so forth?
It’s a timely question for busy board members, administrators and corporate secretaries, particularly in today’s high-stakes environment.
“ChatGPT, how can I use tools like you to work both faster and smarter, and make informed decisions with confidence?”
We’ve put our human intelligence to work to make a few suggestions about how you can us AI to enhance your decision making.
Making better business decisions with the help of AI: 9 tips
For board administrators
1. Smarter agendas
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when AI can automatically generate placeholders for recurring topics, highlight places requiring updates and tag areas where specific board members can lend their expertise.
2. Faster minutes
AI brings together your shorthand notes, your board’s archives and best governance practices — so you can disclose important decisions and the discussions behind them with greater speed and accuracy.
3. Insight-packed board books
Say goodbye to all of the manual work of assembling board books — not to mention the fear of errors or dread of new developments after the final printing and binding.
Harnessed in tools like ChatGPT, AI gathers the data you need, in real time, across multiple resources and at lightning-fast speeds. Then they summarize the key points in crisp, automatically generated summaries, customizable by audience with cross-references built in.
With such automation, efficiency and attention to detail at their disposal, your time-strapped team will thank you.
For board members
4. Discussion points and priorities at your fingertips
AI tools like ChatGPT make for happy board members as well. They summarize vast amounts of data (like your board books and research reports) like the world’s fastest, most accurate speed-reader. Whether using AI for business decision-making or board meeting prep, you’ll soon find it an invaluable tool.
5. Answers when you need them
These are the virtual assistants like chatbots, providing first-line support for troubleshooting — no more waiting on hold or for an email response for hours on end. AI-powered searches also speed up the assistance process by accelerating access to timely information.
6. See how your organization’s ESG performance stacks up
Are your GHG emissions on track compared to your peers and industry benchmarks? Are disclosures in areas like supply chain transparency keeping pace with emerging standards and stakeholder expectations?
With AI, you’ll have insights at your fingertips — without administrators sifting through myriad reports and assembling presentations by hand. AI searches through reams of data for you, to gather what you need.
Equipped with visualization tools, it brings the salient points and overall context to life, so board members are no longer scrambling for answers when pressing questions or time-sensitive decisions arise.
7. Strengthen preparation and discussions with the right questions
AI can prompt board members on what to ask as well. Remember those AI-assembled board books in step 3 and ChatGPT-aided meeting prep in step 4?
Picture these steps augmented with bulleted lists of recommended questions, categorized by subject and automatically cross-referenced. It’s instant and intelligent note-taking on demand, drawing the most salient points from your board deck content with algorithms that just get smarter with time.
For everyone
8. Track risk as it evolves
As you’re all too aware, risk oversight has reached a tipping point. Workloads can no longer keep up with the growing array of rules, requirements and responsibilities. Meanwhile, the need to analyze vast amounts of data, across multiple systems, has exceeded the capabilities of spreadsheets and traditional tools.
AI not only supercharges data collection, it exponentially accelerates the task of sifting through all of this information. In the area of risk, this means faster analysis and categorization of key points from industry reports, with automated prioritization and benchmarking against industry standards.
For boards overseeing strategy and risk management, AI for decision-making lets you see around the corners and plan accordingly.
9. Accelerate your competitive edge
Finally, AI can perform deep dives into data and research at superhuman speed: all of those 10-K and 10Q reports for peer analyses, all of those internal performance metrics to see how well your company is keeping up, even DEF 14A disclosures to make sure you never miss a proxy meeting or vote.
You’ll have the intel you need on news, trends, the competition and more, for strategic decisions in a fraction of the time, and with the fraction of the effort.
And in the long-term, this AI-powered decision-making will help you and your board maintain its edge and grow successfully and sustainably into the future.
Introducing Diligent AI to aid decision-making, efficiency and more
Developed with the needs of boards, administrators and governance professionals in mind, Diligent AI supports all of the activities above and more, offering:
- Automated workflows that accelerate and consolidate manual tasks, while minimizing human error
- Tailor-made summaries that swiftly surface key takeaways for more timely decision-making
- Pre-trained models that delve into risk across 26 categories, from GHG to supply chain management
- Machine learning that apples prescriptive and predictive analysis across data sources
- Customizable, ready-to-use dashboards that deliver real-time visibility into key metrics
Your all-in-one solution to enhance organizational decision-making
Check out the platform that brings it all together — data, analysis, insights and action — for your board and your organization: Diligent AI. You get AI to facilitate decision-making, time-saving automation, analytics and more, so start exploring Diligent AI today.
