We brought governance professionals together to discuss the impact of AI in the Governance industry. Hosted at Citi, Dublin, our second Ireland OpenSpace event drilled into the opportunities and challenges presented by AI, how AI is used within the day-to-day working environment and what the future of AI looks like for the modern governance professional.
Joining moderator and Head of CoSec and Governance for Computershare Ireland, Phil Hayden, was Sean McKeon (Chartered Accountant & MBA managing corporate governance, risk and compliance at Dalata Hotel Group), Christine Quigley (Managing Associate, Corporate and AI Champion at Simmons & Simmons), and Kim Hyun Kyung, Client Director at Computershare.
How are governance teams using AI?
When examining how AI can be applied to your role or task, it’s important first to take a step back and look at the strategic goal and objective of the proposed use of AI. An effective way to do this is through workshops. Our panellists discussed how workshops can be used to identify use cases for a specific task, while also enabling teams to quantify what a measure of success looks like.
Company Secretaries are also embracing using AI to generate minutes. While this isn’t nuanced and requires editing, checking and proofing, there is a place for AI in drafting skeleton minutes or summarising wider discussion points.
How are governance teams safeguarding against AI use?
All panellists raised concerns about safeguarding against AI use and the need to ensure that staff are fully AI literate before being given free reign. They spoke through a series of measures they have taken to improve governance around its use, including:
- Staff training: There is a need for training across governance professionals to ensure AI literacy. Teams should think about how their colleagues interact with AI, and what level of understanding is required before being allowed to use AI resources freely.
- Internal guardrails: Mandatory training courses can be used as internal guardrails around AI use. Christine from Simmons detailed their internal LLM ‘Percy’, and how access to Percy ensures security and effective use.
- AI governance framework: It’s becoming common for teams across businesses to use AI freely, with little communication cross-functionally. Using internal LLMs such as ‘Percy’, can make AI a designated function, with more control, oversight and better governance.
- AI champions: AI champions can be used to promote the use of AI within governance teams. This is an emerging trend within the governance landscape.
Is there value in AI for governance teams?
Safeguarding AI use is one thing to consider, but one burning question our panellists considered was about its value. Does AI make you money? Will tasks get cheaper for the client? Or is AI something that merely facilitates a new way of working.
All of our panellists agreed that AI has not become something that can be directly linked to a revenue stream. While not overhyped, Sean suggested that fears around AI feel similar to the fear that Excel spreadsheets and the internet created around the amount of jobs that will be lost that never actually materialised.
What’s crucial, according to Kim, is that companies are technology-led, and that there is a need to keep pace with industry peers. Simmons have garnered a reputation for embracing AI, which has had a positive impact on their ability to recruit the best talent. Overall, AI has become a necessary part of the governance team structure, and if you don’t embrace it in some format, you’re at risk of getting left behind.
What is the future of AI for governance professionals?
Lastly, our panellists discussed the multimillion-dollar question, what does the future of AI look like for governance professionals? Will AI invade the boardroom and take away all of our jobs, or will the hype die down for it to become another unused tool. The truth, is probably somewhere in the middle:
- AI will be part of our role: In short, AI will become folded in, in some capacity to the day-to-day role of the governance professional.
- Safeguard, train and champion: There is a need for guardrails and controls around how AI is implemented into your team. Designated AI champions who can advocate AI and plan its implementation are essential.
- Keep the human in the loop: A key element our panellists noted was the need to keep the human in the loop and to continue challenging AI. Governance professionals should be critical of the output that AI delivers and avoid unfettered AI use loose within your team.
- Answer the environmental question: When examining the future of AI, one element that was raised from the floor was how the environmental impact of AI is weighed against the use of AI as a governance professional. This is one element that universally our panel agreed is something that needs to be addressed seriously and urgently, but one they didn’t have an answer on.
AI’s permeation into the role of the governance professional seems inevitable, but AI’s wider impact on the world is a question that still needs to be answered.
Our Openspace series has a number of events planned over the coming months so keep in the loop and sign up for our mailing list. If you have any questions around our most recent event and AI, feel free to reach out to Phil in our Irish team who can pick the brains of our wonderful panelists on your behalf.