AI is outpacing the very governance models meant to guide it
We’ve had a front-row seat to how Indian Boards have evolved through liberalisation, the IT boom, a wave of governance that shaped the rule book and the emergence of India’s new-age economy. Across five decades, one pattern has held: the Boards that led through each inflection point weren’t necessarily the largest or the best-resourced. They were the ones that saw the shift coming and recalibrated before the pressure arrived.
What’s different today is the pace and the simultaneity of change. AI isn’t arriving the way digitalisation did, with a five-year runway to experiment. It’s already inside the P&L, reshaping vendor negotiations, customer acquisition and operational efficiency. Cybersecurity has moved from the IT department to the boardroom agenda. Regulatory complexity is compounding. And unlike previous transitions, no single Director profile carries fluency across all of it.
What we’re observing among the Promoters and Boards we work with today mirrors what we saw in the early 2000s, when governance came under scrutiny and Boards had to rapidly reconsider composition. The instinct then was to add. The wisdom, which came later, was to calibrate. The same is true now.
The Boards getting this right aren’t waiting for the perfect candidate. They’re upskilling existing Directors with intent, not informally. Bringing in domain advisors who brief without occupying a permanent seat. And making deliberate composition choices driven by where the business is going.
The best Boards we’ve worked with never asked “are we good enough?” They asked “are we good enough for what’s coming?”
That question, asked honestly in 2026, leads somewhere worth going.
