The Importance of having Tech Leaders in the Boardroom

In today’s environment, technology is strategy. The pace of digital transformation, cybersecurity threats, data-driven decision-making, and emerging technologies such as AI, automation, and cloud computing means that every business — regardless of sector — is now also a technology business.

Having technology leadership represented in the boardroom is therefore essential.

If you do not have a senior IT executive in your team, or preferably on your board, then reading ‘The Coming Wave – AI, Power and our Future’ by Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI (and co-founder of DeepMind), may be the wake-up call that is needed.

It is my firm belief – especially having worked in the IT space from the late 1980s to 2013 – that it is now essential to have at least one person in the boardroom of any company, who deeply understands what technologies are impacting the business now and who has a sense of what the impact might be of early-stage technologies that are moving into the mainstream.

The Wake-Up Call we Need

Every publication that one opens, or news media that one subscribes to, has articles, headline stories, or opinions on the potential impact of AI. There are also plenty of other non-AI related technologies that are fast becoming ubiquitous that we should be talking about at board level. The following quote is from The Coming Wave:

“AI has been climbing the ladder of cognitive abilities for decades, and it now looks set to reach human-level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years.”

Written in 2023, this means that we are soon arriving. 2026 is the year.

Innovation in Motion

IT and innovation go hand in hand. It is a constantly evolving industry that we are becoming increasingly reliant on.

An example of ubiquitous technology that has still not been universally adopted by businesses is renewable energy. Utility-supplied electricity costs in South Africa and other parts of the world have reached the point where there are viable renewable alternative electricity sources for any business of any size that can help to reduce costs and the risks of downtime. However, while less than half of all South African businesses currently use renewables directly, corporate adoption is accelerating rapidly, led by mining and heavy industry, and driven by electricity insecurity, high grid tariffs, and net-zero commitments.

While Quantum Computing on the other hand may not be readily available yet, it has the potential to make any of the current encryption protocols easily breakable because of the shear brute-force speed that decryption computers will be able to operate at – something that everyone with a connected device could be affected by. The exponential increase in computing power and storage in cloud services and the further lowering of costs will also benefit businesses in many other ways and should therefore be on the strategic agenda of any company that uses technology. This paragraph in The Coming Wave puts it into context very well:

“In 2019, Google announced that it had reached “quantum supremacy.” Researchers had built a quantum computer, one using the peculiar properties of the subatomic world. Chilled to a temperature colder than the coldest parts of outer space, Google’s machine used an understanding of quantum mechanics to complete a calculation in seconds that would, it said, have taken a conventional computer ten thousand years. It had just fifty-three “qubits,” or quantum bits, the core units of quantum computing. To store equivalent information on a classical computer, you would need seventy-two billion gigabytes of memory. This was a key moment for quantum computers. From theoretical underpinnings dating to the 1980s, quantum computing has gone from hypothetical to working prototype in four decades.”

Biotechnology is also moving forward with astonishing speed and DNA could potentially also be used to store data. DNA is the most efficient data storage mechanism that we know of and, theoretically, the entirety of the world’s data could be stored in one kilogram of DNA. In other words, computers could be grown rather than made!

The Boardroom Context

“This is all very overwhelming, so what can I do about it?” you might ask.

A strong board today blends financial, legal, and human capital expertise with digital fluency.

Technology leadership in the boardroom ensures that:

• Strategy integrates digital opportunities and considers digital threats. A board without technological literacy risks becoming reactive. Directors need to continuously develop foresight, combined with oversight and hindsight. Digital innovation must align with long-term strategic goals rather than be used for short-term fixes.
• Risk management and compliance oversight includes cyber resilience, not just security. A director with technology expertise strengthens the board’s ability to oversee cybersecurity frameworks, data protection, and digital continuity plans.
• Decisions are data-driven and evidence-based. Dashboards are now more important than ever, helping the board to differentiate between data and insight.
• The organisation’s culture stays adaptive and future-fit. Technology leaders also help boards to influence culture. They understand that transformation isn’t purely technical but also behavioural. 

In short: Technology competence at board level is now a fiduciary imperative.

Image: © ismagilov from Getty Images via Canva.com