What your instrument says
Large private companies report against the Wates Principles, which are principles rather than provisions and ask the board to explain its approach rather than to declare an outcome. Many private boards use the Corporate Governance Code voluntarily as a reference point. Neither names AI.
The practical position is that nobody will ask. That is usually described as an advantage and it is the opposite: a listed board has a deadline that forces the work, and a private board has to decide to do it.
What it does not answer
What the company would still be able to do if the systems stopped. In a business whose value is a capability rather than an asset, that is the valuation question, and drift rather than decision is currently answering it.
And who is being trained. The junior work that AI absorbs first is the work people used to learn on, so a company that automates it has not only saved cost; it has removed the route by which its next senior people were made. The missing rungs is the argument, and in a family business it arrives a generation early.
What you can establish before your next meeting
Which decisions machines are already making in the company’s name. Who can stop each one. How you would know if one went wrong. And what the company could still do unaided, which is the question an owner asks and a code does not.
If you are heading towards a sale or an external investor, one more: what would a buyer’s diligence find about the capability sitting behind the numbers? It is a cheaper question to answer now than in a data room.
Where this is the wrong call
I do not write AI risk registers, map controls against the EU AI Act, run conformity assessments, build governance frameworks or draft committee papers. Firms that do that work properly exist and several of them are very good. This is the question those exercises leave open: whether the people named in your framework could actually detect a wrong answer, whether anyone has ever overridden a system, and what the organisation could still do if it stopped.
Regulatory position last checked: September 2026. If you are reading this much later, check the dates before you rely on them.
