When AI Gets a Board Seat

Harvard Business Review (March 2025) by Christian Stadler and Martin Reeves presents a case-driven experiment at Giesswein, an $85-million-revenue Austrian wool-sneaker company, where researchers joined executive-team meetings to test three AI integrations: feeding the agenda to AI in advance to generate discussion points, prompting AI in real time for alternative ideas, and using AI after the meeting for follow-up and option exploration. The finding: AI prompted deeper thinking, surfaced new perspectives and enabled faster follow-up, but only when a critical-thinker human — not necessarily an industry expert — operated the tool. Pragmatic for SEA mid-market boards piloting AI in executive deliberation.