The Board in the Machine

Most chief executives report no revenue gain and no cost saving from AI, while a fifth of organisations capture nearly three quarters of the value. That gap, between spending on AI and choosing well, is the working condition of the modern chief executive. In this episode of The Board in the Machine, Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors — works through what AI...

On 12 June 2026, a single government directive forced a leading AI provider to withdraw two frontier models from every customer overnight, including organisations the order was never aimed at. For anyone who had built a process on those models, the capability did not degrade. It disappeared. In this episode of The Board in the Machine, Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute...

Only a fifth of finance leaders judge their function ready for AI, yet most already treat it as central to how finance will work. That gap, between commitment and readiness, is the working condition of the modern CFO. In this episode of The Board in the Machine, Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors — works through what AI changes about the finance chief's role...

Most organisations have made their data reliable. Far fewer have made it explain itself, and that distinction is becoming the one that separates organisations that can reason with AI from those that can only retrieve with it. In this episode of The Board in the Machine, Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors — argues that the next frontier in creating durable AI...

The information environment directors now use to make decisions is increasingly composed by AI systems whose framing decisions are not transparent. The company secretary is the only person with line of sight to the difference, and increasingly even the secretary cannot fully see it. In this episode of The Board in the Machine, Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Direct...

An AI model is in production somewhere in the organisation, handling a difficult decision: a customer complaint, a redundancy query, a medical underwriter reviewing a claim. The model settles what to refuse, how much candour the moment can bear, where the customer's interest gives way to the policy. It does this the same way each time, because the judgement was made long before the question arrive...

A new AI architecture lands on 5 May. Subquadratic launches SubQ: a 12-million-token context window on a sub-quadratic sparse-attention architecture that reduces attention compute by roughly 1,000 times at full context. The interesting question is not whether AI is about to get cheaper. It is what efficiency news actually says about compute demand. The day after SubQ launched, Anthropic announced...

A short statutory instrument lands on 12 May. It directs the Information Commissioner to prepare a statutory code on AI and automated decision-making. The interesting question is not what the code will say. It is what the law already requires. Since 5 February, UK law has required four safeguards for any significant decision taken solely by automated processing - information, representations, huma...

Chairs remain accountable for the Board's effectiveness. They are no longer fully in control of how decisions are being formed. AI is remaking both the Board's own work and the work the Board governs at the same time. In this episode of The Board in the Machine, Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors — examines how AI has changed the execution of the chair's exi...

Only 31% of CFOs are satisfied with their AI outcomes, yet that figure rises to over 60% among CFOs whose organisations sit at the top of the AI adoption curve. Satisfaction tracks scale, and the gap is not about execution. In this episode of The Board in the Machine, Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors — explains why AI capital outgrows the CFO's conventiona...

Boards have always made decisions under incomplete information. What has changed is not the volume of what reaches the table — it is the quality of what the Board can see before the vote is taken. Most Boards still rely on instruments built for a slower world. This episode of The Board in the Machine, with Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors, introduces a fra...

Only 33% of boards feel equipped to govern AI, yet AI systems are making millions of decisions per second on their behalf. The gap between the volume of information boards must process and the quality of assurance they receive has never been wider. In this episode of The Board in the Machine, Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors — explains what automated reaso...

Two-thirds of boards report limited to no knowledge or experience with AI. Yet most governance guidance stops at naming the gap. This episode defines what closes it. In this episode of The Board in the Machine, Mario Thomas — Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors — sets out what directorial AI literacy actually consists of. Not technical fluency. Not a two-day awareness cours...