What Boards Are Starting to Ask About AI Governance: Directors Say They Need the Skills to Answer

Directors say AI is the skill their boards most need to build, and the gap underneath that isn’t a technology problem. It’s a training gap, and it sits at the very top of the organization. 

PwC’s 2026 Annual Corporate Directors Survey found that 71% of directors name AI as the single skill their board most needs to strengthen, more than double the share who said the same about general technology and digital transformation, the next-highest answer. That puts it at the top of the list of gaps among the people ultimately accountable for enterprise risk, not a fringe concern anymore. 

The structures meant to close that gap haven’t caught up. Protiviti and BoardProspects’ 2026 Global Board Governance Survey, based on responses from 772 directors and C-suite executives, found that only 26% of boards discuss AI at every meeting. What’s more telling is the split between companies that actually see returns from AI and those that don’t: 63% of boards at high-AI-ROI organizations put AI on the agenda at every meeting, compared with 13% at low-ROI organizations. Board attention and AI payoff appear to move together. 

Nasdaq’s third annual Global Governance Pulse survey found that nearly 20% of respondents report AI is not being discussed at the board level at all. 

Writing the framework, staffing the committee, and disclosing it in the proxy statement are necessary, but they don’t build the skill directors say they lack. When 71% of directors name AI as the skill their boards most need to strengthen, a better-written policy doesn’t fix it. What fixes it is a board that can ask a sharp question when management presents an AI initiative, people who understand enough about model risk, data provenance, and agentic decision-making to know which follow-up actually matters. 

That’s a training gap, not a documentation gap. Board education and workforce AI training shouldn’t stay separate. In Protiviti’s data, boards at high-ROI organizations are far more likely to put AI on every agenda. Putting AI on the agenda only helps if directors are informed enough to hold management to something more specific than “we have a framework.” 

AI governance training that stops at the compliance team and the IT security review is solving half the problem. The other half, the one PwC’s data shows directors themselves rank as their top skill gap, sits several floors up. 

If your board is starting to ask these questions and the answers aren’t coming easily, I’d welcome a conversation. Reach out, and we can talk through what AI education for directors and senior leaders could look like at your organization. 

About the Author

Scott Higginson

VP of Sales Ops & Partnerships at Judge Learning Solutions. Expert in lead gen, operational efficiency, and deploying large-scale implementation teams