By Steve Urban
There is a quiet argument going on in a lot of boardrooms right now, and most employees never see it.
Boston Consulting Group surveyed 625 CEOs and board members for a study it published in May, and 61 percent of the CEOs said their boards are rushing AI transformation. BCG also found that about three quarters of board members rate their own AI understanding as sufficient or better, a self-assessment many CEOs dispute. And the directors who were least sure of their own AI knowledge were the most likely to say the pace was too slow.
I have sat on both sides of that table. I have been the operator being pushed to move faster, and I have been in board and chairman seats wanting to know why things were taking so long. Both seats come with blind spots. So before I take a side, I want to give each one a fair hearing.
The board’s impatience is not irrational. Directors see across companies and industries. They watch competitors announce results, and they know that falling behind on a major technology shift is one of the few things that can sink a good business quickly.
They also know something many CEOs do not like to admit. “We need to be careful” is sometimes a real judgment, and sometimes it is cover for an organization that does not want to change. I have watched plenty of leadership teams use readiness as a reason to do nothing for another year.
A board that pushes is doing its job. Waiting until everything is ready is how companies end up ready for a market that already moved.
The CEO’s caution is not irrational either. The CEO sees what the board does not: the state of the data, the systems nobody has touched in a decade, the managers already stretched thin, the processes that live in someone’s head.
AI does not land on a clean surface. It lands on whatever your business actually is. If the workflow is broken, AI speeds up the broken workflow. If nobody owns the outcome, AI adds output that nobody checks. Pushing faster than the operation can absorb does not create value. It creates expensive pilots and a tired team.
BCG found that more than a third of CEOs believe their boards overestimate how much human capability AI can replace. That matches what I see. The demo is always cleaner than the floor.
My view is that both sides are arguing about the wrong variable. They are arguing about speed. The real question is sequence.
Speed without sequence is how you get twenty tools and no results. Sequence without urgency is how you get a strategy deck and no change. What works is picking the right first targets, moving on them hard, and earning the right to go wider.
Here is how I would run it.
Agree on three outcomes, not thirty initiatives. Board and CEO should agree on a small number of business results AI should move in the next twelve months. Cycle time, cost to serve, revenue per rep, whatever matters most in your business. Not a list of tools.
Put an operator's name on each one. Not the IT team, not a committee. The leader who owns that part of the business owns the result.
Report it like any other operating number. If AI is supposed to move a metric, it shows up in the same board packet as everything else, with the same scrutiny.
Bring the board closer to the work. If directors are pushing without seeing what is underneath, the CEO should show them. Walk them through the messy workflow, not just the polished pilot. BCG’s own guidance to CEOs points the same way: close the understanding gap instead of just resisting the pressure.
Kill things on schedule. A pilot that has not shown results in ninety days gets fixed or stopped. That discipline is what gives a board confidence that speed is not being wasted.
Most businesses I work with do not have a formal board pushing on AI. But the same tension shows up between owners and operators, or between a founder who just saw a great demo and a team that has to make it work on Monday morning.
At Riderflex, Robo Reliance, and MPS, the pattern I trust is the same: pick a workflow that matters, put one person on it, measure it, then move to the next one. That pace feels slower in the first month. It is faster by the end of the year.
If your board thinks you are too slow and you think they are too fast, you are probably both partly right. Stop arguing about speed. Agree on what you are trying to move, who owns it, and how you will know it is working. Then go fast on that.
Connect with Steve: linkedin.com/in/stevepurban
Photo: Benjamin Child on Unsplash