Your board needs some AI scar tissue

Cream typographic poster reading Like sex advice from a monk.

Your board needs some AI scar tissue. Before deciding how agents should work across the company, executives should have delegated something meaningful to one themselves.

There is a particular kind of learning that comes from seeing an AI system produce excellent work in seconds and then confidently produce nonsense. You discover which context matters, where controls belong and when human review changes the outcome.

Put executive judgment into the experiment

My experience includes discussing agentic enterprise automation with executives and building the Grow.Studio diagnostic application and website with AI development tools. Working directly with these tools creates questions that are difficult to appreciate from a presentation alone.

When a result looks convincing, what would make you trust it? When an agent encounters an obstacle, what authority should it have to continue? Which decisions can be checked afterwards, and which require intervention before an action takes place?

Those questions belong in an executive discussion about deployment. Hands-on experience gives them substance.

Use work the executive can judge

Choose a task with a real purpose and a result the executive can assess. Challenge a strategy document. Investigate a market choice. Develop an implementation plan. Ask the system to explain its assumptions and examine the evidence behind the answer.

At OMV Petrom, I designed digitalisation masterclasses for general management and executives, combining my own teaching with specialist contributions. Today, the Executive AI Program includes deliberate hands-on work so leaders can develop practical fluency for strategic, investment and governance decisions.

A useful session should expose both capability and failure. Give people enough room to discover where their instructions were weak and where the system needs a stronger boundary.

Watching a specialist demonstrate AI leaves the difficult judgment with the specialist. Put the task in the executive’s hands and the questions change.