3 levels, held by directorsand held by the board itself.
Competence in a boardroom is a property of the group, not only of its members. The standard grades both, and they are allowed to differ. A published standard, a diagnostic and a certification for board competence in artificial intelligence.
The director, and the machinery around them.
A board with 2 brilliant AI directors and no AI in its committee charters is not an AI board. It is a board with 2 brilliant directors.
Depth: the director
How far an individual understanding goes: comprehension, then judgment, then instinct.
Locus: the board's machinery
Charters, calendar, reporting, risk register, strategy papers, the CEO scorecard, succession and the board's own use of AI.
The director
Follows, questions and interprets any AI discussion without translation. Knows what the technology does and does not do, where the risk concentrates, and which questions are worth asking.
The board
Has assigned AI oversight to a named committee in writing, receives AI information on a regular cadence, and holds discussions in which every director takes part. Below this, a board is not discharging its oversight duty.
What an AI Fluent director can do
- VocabularyUses model, token, RAG, agent, hallucination, open-weight and inference cost correctly
- MechanicsExplains why a language model is probabilistic and fails the way it does
- RiskNames the risk categories that apply to this company
- RegulationKnows which rules bind the company: EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001
- InquiryAsks management 10 or more substantive questions
- Personal useHas used a frontier AI system enough to hold a view
5 things no other director program does.
Certifies the board as a body
Boards decide collectively, so competence is certified collectively.
Diagnoses the company
Training is calibrated to where this company sits on the AI curve.
Value with the rigor of risk
Agentic ROI, unit economics, token cost, physical AI, build or buy.
Connects training to composition
Training for the gaps that can close. A director or advisor for the gaps that cannot.
Publishes a standard
Named, versioned and auditable. Adoptable by resolution and disclosable in a proxy.
Governed from day 1
A founding council of 6 signs off the standard and hears appeals: a public company chair, a former regulator, a governance lawyer, a CISO, an applied AI leader and an academic.
Independent at scale
From about 50 certified boards, an independent council takes over, with a published methodology, a conflicts firewall, and the failure rate published every year.
The standard is a placement, then a credential.
Before anything is taught, the board finds out where it stands. Certification follows against the requirements of our published standard.