Efficient and clear board meetings are essential for decision making and governance. Managing these meetings can be challenging, from the preparation to post-meeting organization. That’s where AI-powered tools step in.
In this article, we will explore how an AI-enhanced board portal solution can help optimize boards and benefit the entire organization.
The Legacy of Traditional Board Meetings
Traditional and manual methods to manage board meetings are time-consuming and prone to human error. Both general counsel and board members are facing pressures to improve efficiency as the volume of data and documentation increases, and compliance with regulatory demands must be ensured.
Some key challenges include:
- Time-consuming document management: for board secretaries, gathering and preparing documents ahead of meetings takes a long time, especially when documentation is scattered and not centralized. Board members face similar issues as they need this documentation to prepare their meetings.
- Keeping up with regulations and compliance: ensuring compliance requires secure communication. If messages aren’t centralized, there is not only an increased risk of miscommunication and mistakes, but the use of several communication channels can also lead to data breaches and related non-compliance issues.
- Tracking board decisions: Manually keeping track of decisions can result in misinterpretation, belated follow-ups, missing signatures and missed deadlines.
- Poor communication: ineffective communication between board members, management, and shareholders can create misunderstandings, delay strategy execution, and reduce decision-making efficiency.
How AI helps overcome board meeting challenges
By automating routine tasks and providing intelligent insights, AI helps boards focus on strategic decision-making. AI-powered tools can improve communication, ensure regulatory compliance, and streamline processes at all stages of board meetings: before, during, and after meetings.
But is AI Safe for managing sensitive corporate data?
Public vs. private AI
A common concern with AI is the security of sensitive corporate data. Public AI systems rely on data from different sources – including yours – thus significantly increasing the risk of security breaches. Private AI, on the other hand, is tailored to ensure security and comply with the strictest regulations. This type of AI has been trained with specific, private data and doesn’t rely on external sources or providers. It is designed to meet the needs of an organization wanting to keep total control over their data.
Why private AI is paramount
As legal professionals, you deal with highly sensitive data and documentation. In times of digital transformation and an ever-growing volume of data available in an electronic format, private AI is the best means to keep proprietary information from being compromised, while getting on top of its sheer volume. This makes private AI an ideal choice for board management, where confidentiality is simply non-negotiable.
Practical Use Cases of AI in Board Meetings
Let’s explore how AI enhances board meeting efficiency through real-world use cases. While there are many more, these examples will provide a good idea of what AI can bring to the table.
1. Before the meeting: streamline preparation with AI-powered document summaries
Board members need to review extensive documents before meetings. With AI-driven tools it’s possible to automatically generate document summaries using extractive AI. This technology identifies and extracts the key information contained in one or even several documents and generates a concise summary, saving busy board members hours of reading it all.
Key benefits:
- Extractive AI identifies key data points and presents them in an easy-to-read format.
- Supports multiple document formats, thanks to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology.
- Helps speed up meeting preparation and more informed decision-making.
2. During the meeting: leverage a multilingual AI-powered legal assistant
Board meetings in multinational organizations have an additional layer of complexity. The documents that are discussed can be written in different languages. To improve collaboration on this type of data and increase board room efficiency, you can leverage AI-powered tools such as Dilichat. Let’s say a document in Spanish is discussed. Dilichat offers much more than a simple translation. It allows the board member to ask a question in their language, and receive not only the answer, but also the reference within the Spanish document within seconds, without interrupting the flow of the meeting.
Key benefits:
- Gen AI answers questions within seconds.
- Supports multiple languages, for documents and requests.
- Data security ensured at all times.
3. Post-meeting: simplify follow-up with real-time meeting minutes
Following up on action items after board meetings is important. It requires precise meeting minutes, to ensure that the strategic decisions that the board takes during the meeting can be executed in a timely manner. AI-enhanced meeting minutes help create accurate and consistent minutes within seconds.
With this real-time minute generation, board administrators can share all relevant information right after the meeting. They can even complete the minutes by audio files and their AI-powered transcripts, giving administrators detailed information on the progress of discussions.
Key benefits:
- Meeting minutes in seconds.
- Easy tracking of action items and follow-up.
- Supporting written documents and audio files.
Time to leverage AI for your board meetings!
Board meetings are too important to continue to use traditional methods and risk a loss of efficiency and accuracy. With secure solutions using private, secure AI, you reap the benefits all while eliminating the issue of data integrity and security.
If you want to find out more about how AI can enhance your board meetings, watch our webinar replay “Smart Governance: 3 Practical and Safe Ways to Boost Board Meeting Efficiency with AI”
