AI raises the stakes for entry-level work and succession planning
The summit came amid daily swings in AI-related expectations and sentiment and a continuing roller coaster in the stock market. At the WSJ Leadership Institute Board of Directors Summit in Palm Beach, Florida, the Journal reported that AI has moved from a staff or executive issue to something deeply intertwined with the board’s most fundamental discussions.
Jing Ulrich, who serves on the boards of SLB, Adidas, Swarovski and KKR’s Wella Company, said “Technology changes faster than governance.” She described the problem in practical terms: “All of us have seen hundreds of pages of board papers prepared two to three weeks in advance of the actual board meeting, but by the time the board meeting takes place, those materials might have already gone stale.”
Ulrich said the board’s job “needs to transform itself from not just looking at the past, but really much more looking towards the future.” The emphasis was not on predicting a specific technology, but on changing how directors prepare for decisions made in a faster-moving operating environment.
The Journal wrote that the challenge for boards begins with understanding technology, but it doesn’t end there: they need a sound grasp of how technology and AI in particular raise the stakes for risk management, cybersecurity, succession planning and reputational risk. The Journal cited the upheaval at Nvidia as a reminder of those stakes. Technology also forces companies to reassess basic assumptions about corporate processes and the role of people.
April E. Walker, who serves on the boards of Sangoma Technologies and Universal Display Corp., said board members “are going to have to get radically obsessed about technology.” She tied that attention to operating results: “AI is not asking ChatGPT about a recipe. It’s about how you change your workflows to improve your margins and increase your profit. That’s a very different dynamic than where we were before.”
Shellye Archambeau, an operating partner with the ExCo Group, described a similar shift in the boardroom conversation. “When AI first came out, people were all talking about, well, how much can we save? How many heads can we cut?” she said. “But now it’s really about looking at AI and how does it drive your strategy forward.”
The workforce issue centers on entry-level positions that give future managers and leaders subject-matter expertise and lifelong perspectives on teamwork and collaboration. Joe Jimenez, who sits on the boards of General Motors, Procter & Gamble and Quantinuum, asked, “How do we think about the next generation of leaders … if entry-level positions are either eliminated or they’re being radically changed?”
Jimenez said today’s executives learned their businesses by doing the work AI is taking over. Boards, he argued, need to push management to “craft changes to the way that work actually gets done.”
Clara Shih, the former CEO of Salesforce AI and founder of New York Foundation, warned that without hands-on experience early in their careers, young workers cannot develop the judgment needed to critique what AI produces. “So you become sometimes an AI pass-through,” she said.
Dov Seidman, founder and chairman of The HOW Institute for Society and LRN, framed the challenge in terms of human responsibility: “If machines are going to be programmed to do the next thing right, what’s left for a human being to do? The next right thing.”
Outside the governance discussion, CoreWeave’s shares jumped in premarket trading Wednesday after the AI cloud company beat Wall Street’s revenue expectations and raised its sales guidance. The rise eased investor jitters over borrowing costs, which had helped more than halve the company’s stock since August.
CoreWeave leases data centers to technology companies such as Microsoft, making it a bellwether for the AI trade. The company also launched a new program to sell stock, a move The Wall Street Journal said suggested it could not raise debt financing at attractive rates.
In Taiwan, every move by Taipei-born Nvidia chief Jensen Huang was followed by crowds of fans in a phenomenon dubbed “Jensanity,” The Journal reported. Huang has been considered a hero for helping drive the island’s AI boom, but his affair with a technology executive suspected of being a Chinese intelligence source has shaken Taiwan, where many now see the scandal as a possible national-security threat.
Wachtell Lipton will lead an independent investigation into whether Nvidia was the target of a foreign espionage effort. Joon Kim, a former federal prosecutor who joined the firm last month, will lead the investigation.
A push by lawmakers for tighter restrictions on chip exports following the affair threatens to cost Nvidia and other semiconductor companies billions of dollars in revenue, The Journal reported. Top Republicans and Democrats said this week that they hope to include three proposed measures making it more difficult to send AI chips around the world in a stalled defense package.
Taken together, the developments placed AI governance on three fronts: board oversight of strategy and work, corporate financing, and national-security review of the technology. The directors’ common warning was that institutions needed to adapt at least as quickly as the technology they oversee.