The siblings walk into a bar.
By closing time, the Performative Director has produced a 60-page paper explaining why a drink should be considered.
The Lazy Director has used AI to generate ten insightful-sounding questions about the paper before requesting three variations for each of the 10 cocktails on the beverage list & the tasting notes & flavour profiles of the 12 craft beers on tap.
Neither notices the bar ran out of beer four hours earlier.
The shareholders, however, do.
Introduction
For the past few years, governance advisors, consultants, regulators & commentators have been falling over themselves to discuss Artificial Intelligence. Does this sound familiar?
Every conference programme features an AI session, every governance publication has an AI article, nearly every board agenda appears to have an AI item.
AI governance has become the governance topic of the decade. Yet amid all of the noise, wringing of hands & whispered ‘risk conversations’, one question has remained largely unasked:
How are directors using AI to perform their duties?
If it could, the silence would tell its own story. The governance profession has devoted extraordinary effort to discussing the risks of AI inside organisations while largely ignoring how AI is changing the behaviour of directors themselves.
This omission matters because the greatest governance risk associated with AI may not be artificial intelligence at all. It may be the emergence of a new type of director – the AI-Lazy Director.
The Director Who Outsources Judgement
The AI-Lazy Director doesn’t necessarily use AI badly. In fact, they often use it exceptionally well. They arrive at meetings armed with beautifully structured questions, elegantly summarised reports & impressively worded observations. They sound informed, strategic, thoughtful.
The problem is that they are often none of these things. They have simply outsourced the hardest part of governance.
Thinking.
Not information gathering. Not report summarisation.
Thinking.
The distinction is important.
Governance has never been about reading board papers. It is about wrestling with uncertainty, weighing competing risks, opportunities & resources, recognising weak or faint signals & exercising independent judgement.
AI can summarise information. It cannot replace judgement, read the room or deliver real-time decision-making.
With thinking reduced or gone, judgement quickly follows.
The danger emerges when these directors begin confusing the appearance of insight with, well, actual insight. They lack a deep, clear & intuitive understanding of a complex situation. The boardroom is becoming populated with individuals who can generate sophisticated commentary but cannot generate original thought.
They possess information abundance but judgement scarcity.
The Process Addicts Have Discovered AI
For decades, organisations have tolerated a particular governance archetype. The Process Director. You know the type.
Every discussion eventually returns to policy.
Every challenge requires another framework.
Every problem needs another review.
Every question needs a workshop.
Every workshop needs an independent facilitator – outsourced thinking again
Every opportunity requires another piece of assurance.
Every proposal needs another layer of process.
Process is not inherently bad. Indeed, effective governance requires it. But process is a means only & ultimately if allowed at the expense of progress, becomes a dense weight that suppresses the executive, distracts from delivering shareholder value & drives people away from organisations.
It is not an outcome.
The process director often mistakes governance activity for governance effectiveness – AI has been the supercharger. Today, a director can generate governance frameworks, policy structures, assurance models, reporting templates, strategic questions & committee terms of reference in seconds.
The result?
The AI-Lazy Process Director leaves a residue. The boardroom becomes flooded with sticky process residue, your executive wade through the quagmire of meeting-request-after-request from those who pursue governance theatre, who are most interested in their personal & brand reputations at the expense of delivering customer & shareholder value.
The organisation becomes busier but less effective. The board produces more documentation while registering less progress. The executive team spends more time servicing governance and less time serving customers. Everyone appears busy, even with a hazy hint of productivity, but theres no progress. And the shareholder notices. The others around the table become guilty by association.
They are popping up everywhere & there are plenty of them. It’s not that difficult to spot them in the wild either. If you have not encountered one yet, you will soon, very soon. The signs are surprisingly easy to identify.
The first indicator is linguistic inflation – almost every word acquires the prefix “strategic.”
Strategic conversation – Strategic governance – Strategic capability – Strategic alignment – Strategic oversight – Strategic framework – Strategic roadmap – Strategic assurance – Strategic transformation.
At some point, the adjective ceases to add meaning. These directors however believe that in saying it to be true, it becomes so. They also believe that if they ask for something that is ‘process-pure’ & that if they ask for it often enough, that it should be given to them – grow up you’re not a 4 year old. ‘But I insist!’. Too bad.
The second indicator is process dependency – see above, but with the addition of:
They consistently default to asking: “What’s the process?” Rather than: “What outcome are we trying to achieve?” Or “What decision needs to be made?”
The third indicator is a real cracker – performative contribution.
The individual speaks frequently, adds little, creates no momentum, provides no clarity & yet somehow dominates the discussion. This is pure governance theatre. The air that flows over their vocal cords provides nothing of real value.
The final indicator is what executives & their fellow directors increasingly describe privately as the “shit-donut.”
Praise-Process-Praise.
The AI-Performative director begins by acknowledging effort. They then invoke additional process, assurance, reviews, controls, workshops or governance requirements.
Finally, they thank everyone again for their contribution.
Nothing changes, no decision is made, no risk is reduced, no opportunity is pursued. But everyone leaves feeling vaguely exhausted. So they head off to the bar, again.
The AI-Performative Director and an AI-Lazy Director walk back into the bar.
The bartender says “Welcome back, what can I get you?”
The AI-Performative Director says, “Before we answer, I’d like to establish a Beverage Governance Framework, create a Drink Oversight Committee, commission an independent review of industry-leading hydration practices at three workshops over the next quarter and develop a three-year beverage roadmap.”
The AI-Lazy Director says, “I’ll have whatever ChatGPT recommends but make sure LangGraph & CrewAI check it first.”
Two hours later, neither has ordered a drink.
The bartender asks, “So what have you actually achieved?”
The AI-Performative Director proudly replies, “We’ve completed 147 pages of governance documentation.”
The AI-Lazy Director nods & says, “And I’ve fully aligned myself with best practice.”
“Have either of you had a drink?”
“No.”
“Do either of you know what’s on tap?”
“No.”
“Then why are you here?”
The pair glance at each other.
“To provide oversight.”
Note –NO AI-Performative Directors or AI-Lazy Directors were harmed in the writing of this opinion piece. Those Directors may or may not be real – I’ll let you decide…. The names & locations of any AI-Performative &/or AI-Lazy Directors have purposefully been removed to protect the exhausted innocent (who decided to not go to the bar!!).
Psssst……. they really are out there – I’ve seen them.
