It was a leadership team, stretched thin, with a strategy day looming and no appetite to run it. Then someone had the idea: let’s get AI to do it!
Brilliant. Twenty minutes later there was a document. And what a document. Crisp headings, confident verbs, and a mission statement with just the right amount of soul. It had pillars, synergy, and it used the word “cadence” correctly, twice. Everyone read it, nodded and felt the warm glow of a hard thing made easy.
Then Monday came and nothing happened. Not because the document was wrong. The document was, if anything, too right – smoother than anything the team would ever have produced in a room together, arguing over a whiteboard with a marker running dry. The problem was, it belonged to no one. No one had fought for a line in it. No one had given something up to get it. It had arrived fully formed, like a January gym membership: full of promise, used twice, quietly cancelled by March.
The clever part was never the point
Here's why. We tend to assume the valuable bit of a meeting is the output – the plan, the deck, the neat list of priorities. So when a machine can generate that output in seconds, it feels like the meeting itself is now optional. Why gather five busy people in a room to produce a worse version of what the AI does instantly?
But – and I’m sure I’ll get some disagreement here – the output was always a by-product. The actual work was the collaboration. The “hang on, say that again.” The moment one person pushes back and the plan quietly gets better because of it. The slow, slightly awkward process by which four people who disagreed walk out of a room genuinely committed to the same three things – not because they were told to be, but because they were there when it was decided.
AI CAN write the plan. But it CANNOT make you care about it.
It CAN summarise the discussion. But it CANNOT have the discussion.
And it can give you alignment on paper, which is a very convincing imitation of the real thing right up until the moment you need people to act.
All of which means that the valuable human skill in an AI world isn't producing a perfect document, faster. The machine will win that, forever. It’s getting real people into a room to think together – to disagree well, build on each other, and leave owning something they helped shape. And that skill is getting rarer precisely as it gets more valuable. A generation of work has quietly moved into chat threads and shared documents, and a lot of teams cannot remember the last time they had an idea in the same room at the same time. They have never been more connected and never collaborated less.
Which gets to the point of what we do
Our boards are physical, in-person, and gloriously analogue. You put one on the wall, you get the team around it, and you run a real decision through it – stakeholders, risk, strategy, whatever's stuck – from “everyone has an opinion” to “three priorities, owned” in about an hour.
No one spends the session watching a screen. Our boards are, on purpose, the opposite of that. People write, move, point, debate, cross things out, and end up with one shared thing they built together – which, it turns out, is the only version anyone ever actually believes in.
So use AI for the draft. Use it for the summary, the first 80%, and the tidy-up. It's wonderful at all of that. But the deciding, the committing, and the caring? Those still tend to happen in a room, among humans, with a marker that's running dry.