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Board-Level AI Literacy

5 min read

Eng Manager

You might present to a board one day. Learn from Elena: metrics, risk, and business impact. Leave the jargon in the appendix.

Tech Lead

Board materials need exec summary. Your technical details become Elena's backup slides. Know your audience.

Vp Engineering

You're often the technical voice in the room. Practice: what would you say in 3 minutes to a non-technical board?

Board-Level AI Literacy

TL;DR

  • Boards don't need to understand neural networks. They need: risk, opportunity, investment, and timeline. Give them that.
  • Avoid jargon. "LLM" and "prompt engineering" mean nothing to most directors. "AI that writes code and docs" does.
  • Elena's job: make the board comfortable enough to support the strategy. That's a comms skill, not a tech skill.

The board asked "what's our AI strategy?" Elena gave a technical answer. Half the room glazed over. She needs to try again — in their language.

What Boards Care About

  • Risk: Are we falling behind? Are we over-investing? What's the downside of doing nothing?
  • Opportunity: Can we ship faster? Reduce costs? Improve quality? What's the upside?
  • Investment: How much are we spending? On what? What's the ROI?
  • Timeline: When will we see results? What are the milestones?

Answer those. Skip the rest unless they ask.

The Elevator Pitch

"We're adopting AI tools that help our engineers write code and docs faster. We're running pilots to measure impact. We expect 10-20% productivity gains. We're not replacing people — we're enabling them to do more. Timeline: 6 months to full rollout. Investment: [X]. Risk of doing nothing: we fall behind competitors who are already doing this."

That's 60 seconds. That's enough.

Anticipate Questions

  • "Will AI replace our engineers?" "No. It changes the work. We need people to direct, review, and own outcomes. We're investing in our team."
  • "Is this secure?" "We're using approved tools with guardrails. No customer data in external models. We've assessed the risk."
  • "What about our competitors?" "Many are ahead. We're catching up. Here's our plan."

Have the answers ready. Rehearse.

Quick Check

Elena gave a technical AI answer to the board. Half the room glazed over. What do boards actually NEED?

You present. 'We're using LLMs with RAG for our codebase. Fine-tuning isn't in scope...' Half the board checks their phone. You lose them.

Click "Board-ready" to see the difference →

Do This Next

  1. Write your 60-second board pitch. Problem, approach, investment, timeline. Read it out loud. If it's over 90 seconds, cut it.
  2. Prepare for 3 hard questions. Replace engineers? Security? Competitors? Have crisp answers. Practice them.