A non-voting advisory seat, a written view on one
decision, or a session built for your agenda. Your governance framework
designs the control. This work tests whether the human part of it
operates.
I advise chief executives and boards on AI and human judgement, in person worldwide and online. I have run, grown, bought and advised businesses with AI in them, I founded the skills platform EtonX, later acquired by Eton College, and I led Quizlet’s international growth across more than 60 countries. I sit on boards myself. I sell no software and take no vendor’s money. I wrote SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026).
Board seats at EtonX, TeacherMatic, Whitefox, Channing School
and the Aga Khan Education Board for the UK · BBC World Service, BBC Radio 5 Live,
The Observer, The European Business Review ·
Box of Amazing, weekly since 2017,
25,000 readers
Ask me for a reference and you will get one: a chair or a
chief executive who has had me in front of their board, on the telephone with you,
before you commit to anything. If it is urgent, send your mobile number and I will
call or WhatsApp within the hour in UK working hours.
Twelve questions in four groups, capability, evidence, accountability and the
pipeline, with the one that matters most at the end. Written to be read out in a
meeting and answered in it. Free, published in full, and nobody pays for a place
in it.
Most board conversations about AI are about
adoption: what has been deployed, how fast, and what it saved. Those are
management questions and management is usually answering them well.
“So thought-provoking and so well presented. It set up our board day
perfectly.”
Sam Knights, chief executive, Next 15 Group plc. A session for the board,
ahead of their board day.
Why this autumn. Provision 29 of the UK
Corporate Governance Code applies to accounting periods beginning on or after
1 January 2026. For a 31 December year end, the first declaration about whether
material controls operated effectively appears in the annual report published in
2027, and the work that produces it is happening now.
What a UK board must be able to
show, and, for the committee that has to produce the evidence,
Provision 29 and AI: what an audit committee
needs before year end, with the register template. Regulatory position last
checked September 2026.
Board advisory on AI for chairs, non-executive directors and company secretaries
Some boards start before any of these, with a
facilitated board dinner: three courses,
one question, and the conversation had before the boardroom.
Before any of them, where the board wants it, there is
the Executive Read: a short anonymous
survey of your executive team, so the board starts from its own people’s evidence
rather than from mine. It can be bought on its own, which makes it the cheapest way of
finding out whether there is anything here worth a board’s time.
A client on what that preparation does. “We brought Rahim
in to help our EMEA People Operations leadership team think through AI and human judgement.
He surveyed us beforehand, sixteen of eighteen answered, and he built the session from our
own responses, so the whole morning was about us. I’d recommend him to any leadership
team working out what should stay human.” Karina Govindji, Director, Head of HR UK,
Google. That was a leadership team rather than a board, and the distinction is kept here on
purpose.
All four end in the same four lines: which
decisions the machines may make, who can stop each one, how you would know if one
went wrong, and what management reports next time. That is the four-line
board record. It fits in a minute, it survives a change of chair, and an audit or
risk committee can ask against it a year later.
I have sat on the other side of the table. In the UK, among others: a board
member of EtonX Ltd, the company I founded, and of TeacherMatic Ltd; a non-executive director at Whitefox Ltd;
a governor of Channing School; and today a member of the Aga Khan Education Board for the UK. I have advised
companies from China to the UAE, Europe and the US. I know what the paper looks like the night before, and what
a board can and cannot decide in forty minutes.
The board's question is different and it is rarely on the
paper. Can this board tell, afterwards, that a decision was reasoned?
Who is able to override a system, and have they ever done it? What can this
organisation still do if the tools stop? Those are questions about judgement,
and judgement is what a board is actually for.
Two things make them urgent rather than interesting. Under
the EU AI Act a person given oversight of a high-risk system must be enabled to
interpret its output, to disregard or override it, and to remain aware of the
tendency to over-rely on it, with the two-person rule on biometric
identification naming competence, training and authority together.
Graded entry.
And the human-factors literature is clear that inserting a person at the end of
a process is not, by itself, a safeguard.
Why
human in the loop is not a safeguard.
Boards are being handed oversight duties that assume a
capability nobody has measured. The longer version of this argument was
published by The European Business Review in August
2026.
If you came here looking for AI governance
A fair question, and the answer is no, so it is worth
settling in the first paragraph rather than the fifth.
I am not a compliance adviser. I do not
write AI risk registers, map controls against the EU AI Act, run conformity
assessments, build governance frameworks or draft audit committee papers.
Firms that do that work properly exist, several of them are very good, and if
that is what you need you should engage one rather than me.
Put in the terms a board already uses: a governance
framework designs the control. This work tests whether the human part of it
operates.
Every audit committee knows that a control can be properly
designed and still fail in operation, and that the way you find out is to test
it. Human oversight is a control. It is designed on paper, it is named in the
framework, and almost never tested. A named overseer who cannot
tell a plausible wrong answer from a right one is a control that exists in
design and not in operation.
So the framework tells you the control is there. This tells
you whether it works, and is usually asked for the first time during an
incident.
Where this sits on a board agenda
Start with what the board is now for. The chief
executive’s job is now accountability for the judgement of the people beneath
them, whether or not they used AI. The board’s job is to know that this is
happening. Neither of those is a new duty. What is new is that the work
arriving on a desk was produced faster than the person putting their name to it
could have produced it, which makes the accountability easier to hold and harder
to feel.
Four items that appear on real board and audit committee
papers, and the question underneath each that the paper does not answer.
AI risk appetite
The paper sets thresholds. The unanswered question is who is empowered
to stop the system when a threshold is crossed, and whether that person has
ever done it. An appetite nobody can act on is a number in a document.
Board oversight and director duties
Under the EU AI Act a person given oversight of a high-risk system must
be enabled to interpret its output and to disregard or override it. The
unanswered question is whether your named overseer can tell a plausible
wrong answer from a right one, which is a question about their practice
rather than their job title.
Audit committee reporting and assurance
Reporting shows what the system did. The unanswered question is whether
the decision could be reconstructed six months later, and by whom. Assurance
over a process is not assurance over a judgement.
Resilience and business continuity
Continuity plans assume the work returns to people if the system stops.
The unanswered question is whether those people can still do it, because
the capability decayed while the system was running.
The measured
decay rates are here.
Where a board wants the four written down as a standing
instrument rather than answered once, that is the
Decision Quality
Protocol: how each class of decision is made with AI in the loop, who owns
it by name, and what quality control looks like.
If your board already has clear answers to those four, you
have the outside view covered and you do not need me. That is rarer than
boards expect and it is worth ten minutes finding out.
Five minutes
Can your board answer these five?
The five decisions a board can answer now, put as questions. Nothing is sent anywhere and no address is asked for. The result appears here, and nobody else sees it.
Could your board produce, today, the list of decisions machines are already making in the company’s name?
A credit limit, a refund, a shortlist, a public reply. Not a list of AI projects.
Do you know who can stop each of those systems, and whether they would stop one mid-quarter with revenue attached?
Being able to stop a system is a technical fact. Being willing to is a leadership one.
Has anyone established what your people must remain able to do if the systems stopped, and whether they still can?
Capability is lost without anyone deciding to lose it.
Is there a written definition, agreed before any incident, of what would count as a serious one?
An incident definition written during an incident is a negotiation.
When management assures the board that oversight is working, do you know what that assurance rests on?
A sampling regime, a disagreement rate, a log of overrides or a rehearsed stop is evidence. An assurance that oversight exists is a claim.
Your answers stay in this page. If you want the result and the five questions as something to put in front of the board, say so here and I will send it. The longer argument is at board oversight of AI.
Written for your board, not for boards in general
The obligation differs and the questions do not. Each of these sets
out what your instrument asks, what it leaves unanswered, and what you can establish
before your next meeting.
Executive team · technology scale-up, about 1,500 people, mid-transformation · a keynote for the whole company, then executive coaching and support for the transformation lead
Executive team · company covering Asia-Pacific and India, running its own AI tools · a survey of fifty staff read back to the team, then a workshop; four or five processes, refined by the team
Leadership · large agency business across Asia, Asia-Pacific, EMEA and North America · research and a keynote; the wording adopted into its strategy, then a three to six month retained advisory role
Key stakeholders and change lead · charity starting from nothing at work · a three-hour workshop, then quarterly review for a year
Clients are not named. Outcomes are as the client described them. The full write-ups are on case studies.
The four formats, in full
A briefing
Ninety minutes inside a scheduled board meeting, on your agenda rather than
beside it. Papers read in advance, one argument, and the four lines at the end.
It is the cheapest way to find out whether the rest of this is worth doing.
How the sessions are built and
chaired.
An advisory seat
A non-voting seat held over a defined period, usually four to six meetings
across a year. I am in the room for the decisions, I read what you read, and
I say the thing the room is circling. No vote and no fiduciary duty, which is
what keeps the view independent and the accountability where it belongs.
A view on one question
One decision, one engagement. A short fact-find, conversations across the
business, then a written view and a discussion. Most often used before a
significant commitment, or after one that is not going the way it was
supposed to. No ongoing commitment on either side.
A session or away day
Half a day or a full day for the board or the top team, built to make people
think rather than watch slides. It opens with an argument and a set of
provocations, then moves into structured discussion designed to surface where
the board actually disagrees. Built for your agenda, not delivered off a shelf.
The five shapes it takes, the
preparation, and the anonymous survey of your executive beforehand.
If what the room needs is a talk rather than a decision, that
is a keynote, and there is a version built for boards and leadership offsites.
AI
keynote for boards and leadership offsites.
What this looked like once
A FTSE 250 company, growing fast, describing itself as
human-centric and wanting to know what that commits it to now that AI sits
inside the work. The brief was to think about it in a concerted way across the
group.
It started at the board. A presentation, then two hours of
discussion, and most of the value sat in the second half. The disagreements
that surfaced were about what the company is for, and they had been waiting
some time for an occasion.
Then one division, taken from beginning to end. A new way of
working out which skills there are human-augmented and which belong to a
machine on its own, built with the people who do the work.
That division became the exemplar. Other operating units
picked it up, I supported the next one through, and the rollout carried on
after that until the company hired a team to run it. It is still going.
The ending is the part worth reading. The engagement stopped
when the capability existed inside the company. Detail here is deliberately
thin, because it is their programme rather than mine.
Where this is the wrong choice
If what you need is a roadmap, an integration partner or
somebody to run the build, that is AI consulting and I am not the person for
it. I am not going to build your tech stack, and a good implementation partner
will do it better and cheaper than a board advisor pretending to.
If you want somebody permanently, with a vote and a duty, you
want a non-executive director. That is a different appointment with different
obligations and it should be recruited as one.
And if your board already gets a straight answer to what AI
has changed about its decisions, who can override a system and what capability
the organisation has lost, you do not need an outside view. Find that out
before you spend anything, here or anywhere.
Where “drift versus design” comes from: five
generations of my family, Gujarat to East Africa to Britain, and four crossings
that were somebody’s decision rather than somebody’s luck.
The longer version.
What board-level readers said about the book
“The business leaders who successfully scale their organisations invest
in people, not just technology. This book shows you exactly how to do that in the
age of AI.”
Sherry Coutu CBE, entrepreneur and non-executive director
“Even in an age of rapid technological advancement, the human role
remains irreplaceable. This book shows how we can embrace change without fear and
shape the future rather than have it happen to us.”
David Gareth Thomas,
formerly Chief People Officer, HSBC Asia Pacific
“A survival guide for human ingenuity.”
Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School
The five named instruments this work uses, in the order they are
used, are set out together at the
instruments. All five are published in full and none needs me to run it.
On air. Rahim Hirji has discussed AI in work, society and where human judgement belongs on BBC radio 11 times in three months in 2026, across BBC Radio 5 Live, the BBC World Service and regional BBC radio. Broadcast audio expires, so the record is the schedule rather than a link.
Advisory assignments are scoped one at a time, and most are five-figure. A retainer is a different arrangement and is priced differently: monthly, starting in four figures, and I take on no more than a handful at once.
Speaking clients can be named, and several are. Advisory clients mostly cannot:
most of this work sits under an agreement. Asking me for a reference is how you
check it.
Questions boards ask
Who is a good independent AI adviser for a UK board?
The test is independence and evidence. Ask whether the adviser sells software, takes a vendor’s money, or has a delivery arm that benefits from what they recommend, and ask what they will publish rather than what they will assert. I sell nothing, take nothing from vendors and build nothing, and the argument I would put to your board is already on this site with every source graded and what it does not support stated alongside what it does.
Ask for a reference as well. A chair or a chief executive who has had the person in front of their board, on the telephone with you, is worth more than any page.
Who can brief our board on AI without selling us software?
Somebody with no product and no implementation revenue. That rules out most of the market, including several firms who are genuinely good at what they do and are being paid by the outcome of their own advice.
The format is a ninety-minute briefing inside a scheduled board meeting, or a session or away day if the board needs to reach decisions rather than hear an argument. Either way it ends in writing.
What should a UK board be able to show about AI under Provision 29?
Provision 29 asks the board to declare whether its material controls operated effectively. It is a declaration about effectiveness rather than a warranty, there is no external assurance requirement attached, and the FRC declines to define what a material control is.
So the practical answer is: which of your material controls have AI inside them, whether the person named as the human overseer of each one could tell a plausible wrong answer from a right one, and what you would put in the annual report if one of them had not operated. The five decisions a board can answer now are set out on the board oversight page, and the first declarations for a 31 December year end appear in the 2027 annual report.
Do we need an AI expert on the board?
Usually not, and appointing one is the most common way a board converts a governance problem into a recruitment one. A single technical director tends to become the person the rest of the board defers to, which is the opposite of collective oversight.
What a board does need is enough fluency across the whole board to read what management brings it and to know which questions are unanswered. That is a capability question rather than a vacancy.
Is this AI governance, compliance or risk advisory?
None of the three. I do not write AI risk registers, map controls to the EU AI Act, run conformity assessments or draft audit committee papers, and specialist firms do that work properly.
This is the question those exercises leave open: whether the people named in your governance framework could actually detect a wrong answer, whether anyone has ever overridden the system, and what the organisation could still do if it stopped.
What is the difference between this and an AI consultant?
Most AI consulting is roadmap and execution: tooling, integration, the build. That work matters and I am not the person for it.
This is the other question. Whether the board can tell that a decision was reasoned, who is accountable when the system is wrong, and what the organisation will still be able to do without the tools. Judgement and oversight rather than delivery.
Do you take a formal board seat?
Not a voting one. I sit as an advisor, which means I am in the room for the decisions and I carry no fiduciary duty and no vote. That keeps the independence useful and it keeps the accountability where it belongs, with the directors.
How long does a board advisory arrangement run?
Usually a defined period rather than an open commitment: often four to six meetings across a year, sometimes a single cycle around one decision. If you want somebody permanently, you want a non-executive director, and that is a different appointment.
Can you just come in once?
Yes, and for a lot of boards that is the right amount. One question, one engagement, a view delivered in writing and in the room, and no ongoing commitment on either side.
We have already deployed and it is not going well. Is it too late?
No, and this is a common reason boards call. The work is different after deployment: it starts from what has actually happened rather than from a plan, and the first task is usually establishing what the organisation can still do unaided.
When should we not do this?
If your board already gets a straight answer to what AI has changed about your decisions, who can override a system and what capability you have lost, you do not need an outside view. Establish that before you spend money, because few boards can and the ones that can should not be buying this.
Start here
Tell me what the board is deciding.
A 30-minute conversation about the decision in front of your board. If I am the right person, we go from there. If not, you will still leave with something useful.
Or send me your AI strategy for an independent second opinion. I sell no software, take no vendor’s money and will not build anything, so nothing in the read depends on what you decide. Two working days later I will tell you where you are not in control: which decisions machines are already making in your name, who can stop them, and how you would find out if one went wrong. A fixed fee, agreed before you send anything. Private, and it ends with a list rather than a proposal. Send it to rahim@thesuperskills.com.
If it is urgent, send me your mobile number and how soon you need a reply: within the hour, within six hours, or today.rahim@thesuperskills.com, subject line “Please call me”. I will call or WhatsApp you in UK working hours.
This is selective work. I take on a limited number of private clients at a time, so the attention stays real.
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