The myth of irrelevance in AI governance

with Jamie Bykov-Brett and Professor Konstantinos Chalvatzis The myth: “This isn’t an urgent priority for our industry”

AI is not arriving evenly but it is arriving everywhere. The board that waits for its industry to be disrupted before paying attention will already be behind. As with previous transformations in ESG, digitisation, and cybersecurity , boardrooms often dismissed them as “not applicable yet” – only to face steep remediation costs, reputational hits, and lost competitive edge. Artificial intelligence is now the latest victim of this myth of irrelevance.

There is no single, universal way in which AI affects organisations. Its impact depends on sector, geography, scale, and business model. For a consumer bank, immediate risks may include fraud detection and regulatory oversight; for a logistics company, predictive maintenance and supply chain optimisation; for professional services, productivity gains are already being realised through automated research, drafting, and analytics.

Many boards also face urgent short-term pressures: inflationary costs, fragile supply chains, activist investors, workforce disputes. It would be misleading to suggest AI should displace all other priorities. Yet this is not the same as saying AI is irrelevant; quite the opposite.

Across industries, AI is subtly but unmistakably reshaping competitive advantage, operational risk, and stakeholder expectations:

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