/ 2 min read
Whose job is it to make the board understand the technology?
In deep tech, many strategic decisions are also technical ones - and a board needs someone close enough to the technology to translate it.
I’ve been reading MIT’s research on boards and technology. In 2019 they found that companies with digitally savvy boards did better than their peers. When they ran the numbers again in 2024, the difference was gone. Digital had become something every board was expected to have.
So they updated the definition to include newer technologies like AI and machine learning. Only about a quarter of boards met it, and those companies were clearly ahead.
I don’t read too much into the numbers. But I recognise the problem they describe.
In deep tech, a lot of the big strategic questions are technical underneath. Whether a limitation is temporary or fundamental. Whether a delay is about execution or about something nobody has solved yet.
Most boards are put together for finance, sales and operations, and they should be. But it can leave a gap when the board has to understand the product it is overseeing, what it can do and what it can’t. Questions like these are hard to challenge if you can’t see what’s behind them.
PwC found a version of the same problem around AI this autumn. More than four out of five directors said the information they get on AI, its risks and what it does for the business is fair, poor or missing.
It’s easy to call that the board’s problem, and partly it is. But the answer is rarely more slides. It’s having someone close enough to the technology to translate it, and to notice when something has changed. What it can do, what it can’t do yet, and what nobody knows. That might be the founder, a CTO, or a board member who has built something similar.
A board can only challenge what it can see.
Sources: MIT CISR, Digitally Savvy Boards: AI Update (2025). PwC, 2026 Annual Corporate Directors Survey.