Boards and AI: Balancing Risks and Opportunities for Long-term Value Creation | Sonita Lontoh

Board oversight of artificial intelligence requires a framework that balances fiduciary caution with strategic ambition, and most companies have not yet built one. Sonita Lontoh of Alpha and Glenn Tyranski of 1BusinessWorld examine how boards should structure AI oversight across three dimensions, value creation, organizational readiness, and risk mitigation with ethical alignment, and why treating AI as a siloed technology initiative is the single most common cause of failed initiatives. The session covers committee structure, with data showing that only 12 percent of S&P 500 companies have a dedicated innovation and technology committee, the five critical governance dimensions that connect threads across the EU AI Act, the US national AI framework, and state-level regulations, and the organizational design choices, including reporting lines and compensation alignment, that distinguish companies where AI is a strategic imperative from those where it remains a technology experiment.