These two Harvard Business Review articles—"When AI Gets a Board Seat" (March 2025) by Stadler & Reeves and "How Pioneering Boards Are Using AI" (July–August 2025) by Shekshnia & Yakubovich—cover similar terrain but take distinctly different angles. As a frequent HBR reader, you’ll notice both shared themes and complementary contrasts in structure, tone, and implications.
🔍 Framing and Approach
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Stadler & Reeves present a case-study-driven narrative, centered on Giesswein, a mid-sized Austrian company. It’s an embedded, qualitative ethnography that explores AI as a boardroom collaborator through experimental interventions.
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Shekshnia & Yakubovich, by contrast, adopt a broad, analytical survey approach, synthesizing insights from over 50 focus groups with global board leaders across multinationals (e.g., Shell, Nestlé). Their tone is that of governance consultants making a pragmatic, step-by-step case for adoption.
🤖 Concept of AI in the Boardroom
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Stadler & Reeves treat AI as a “sparring partner” for strategic decision-making. Their thesis: Generative AI is most valuable not for perfect answers, but for disrupting predictable human groupthink. It’s more about cognitive augmentation than automation.
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Shekshnia & Yakubovich take it further: They chart a progression from personal productivity assistant to full board participant. They imagine boards in which AI (like IHC’s “Aiden Insight”) actively monitors, prompts, simulates, and contributes—a much more systemic integration.
🧪 How AI Is Used
| Use Case | Stadler & Reeves | Shekshnia & Yakubovich |
|---|---|---|
| Agenda planning | ChatGPT suggests questions per agenda | Directors prep by running board books through LLMs |
| Real-time intervention | Prompts created during discussion | Claude and ChatGPT simulate strategic scenarios |
| Post-meeting reflection | AI explored missed angles | RLHF learning to improve AI’s coaching and feedback |
| AI participation level | Observational (AI as a tool) | Progressively participatory (AI as board observer) |
⚠️ Risks and Pitfalls
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Stadler & Reeves note the “completeness illusion”—the risk that AI’s breadth creates misplaced confidence, leading users to overlook key issues (e.g., legal implications missed in a press strategy). They also emphasize how human guidance is essential to avoid generic or cliché responses.
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Shekshnia & Yakubovich offer a fuller taxonomy: data security, sample bias, and temporal anchoring (e.g., AI overfitting to the past). They go further in prescribing mitigations: private LLM training, scenario simulation, bias testing, and director education.
🔁 Cultural and Process Change
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Stadler & Reeves show how AI disrupts “comfortable” but ossified team dynamics. Their striking insight: AI’s “ungainly” pacing actually improves decision-making by forcing reflection.
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Shekshnia & Yakubovich treat adoption as a multi-phase change management project: start with digital literacy and engagement, evolve to experimentation, then institutionalize with performance evaluation and feedback loops.
🎯 Audience Implications
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Stadler & Reeves speak most directly to strategists, innovation officers, and mid-cap executives curious about AI as a thinking partner.
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Shekshnia & Yakubovich aim at board chairs, governance professionals, and institutional investors, proposing a long-term roadmap for governing with AI—not just experimenting with it.
🧩 Complementary Insight
As an HBR regular, you might find the articles function like zoom lenses at different focal lengths:
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“When AI Gets a Board Seat” is intimate, ethnographic, concrete.
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“How Pioneering Boards Are Using AI” is panoramic, procedural, systemic.
Together, they form a two-part reflection on the evolving social contract between human leadership and machine cognition—from AI as agenda assistant to AI as fellow fiduciary.
Would you like a 1-slide visual summary for a team meeting or board briefing?
