The Seven Questions A Board Will Ask About Your AI, And How to Answer Them
Boards increasingly expect communications teams to explain how AI is governed, monitored and controlled.
By Gabriel Tan | June 2026
A communications head at a Singapore-listed company gets a short message from the company secretary. The audit committee wants ten minutes at the next meeting on how the comms team uses AI. Ten minutes sounds generous until you are standing in front of seven directors who ask follow-up questions for a living. “We are careful with it” survives about one of those questions.
The language those directors will reach for is not invented. It comes from the trustworthy-AI principles that now run through every serious framework, from the EU AI Act to Singapore's own guidance. You do not need to teach the board those principles. You need answers shaped by them, ready before the meeting, not assembled in the room.
Seven questions, and the shape of a good answer
A board does not want a lecture on AI. It wants to know the team has thought about the things that could embarrass the company. Seven questions cover almost all of it.
Can you explain how it reached the output? The answer shows you understand the tool is not a black box you trust blindly. You can describe, in plain terms, how a draft gets made and checked.
Can you show it performs consistently? The answer points to your track record and your checks, not to the vendor's marketing.
What stops it leaking confidential information? The answer names your rule on client data and where it does and does not go.
How do you check for bias? The answer describes who reviews output for skew before it reaches a client or the public.
Who is accountable when it errs? The answer is a named role, not “the team” and not “the tool.”
What is logged? The answer shows you can reconstruct what happened if something goes wrong.
How is it reviewed over time? The answer is a date and an owner, because a control nobody revisits is not a control.
Give each answer in three sentences. A board hears three sentences. It does not hear three paragraphs, and it distrusts the person who needs them.
The questions are a mirror
Notice what the seven questions also do. They tell you where your own practice is thin. If you cannot answer “what is logged” without inventing something on the spot, you have a logging gap, not a presentation problem. The board's question and your weak point are the same fact seen from two sides.
That is the quiet value of preparing for the meeting properly. You do not just get through the ten minutes. You find the holes in your own setup while the stakes are still a slide, not an incident.
What to do this week
Do not draft all seven. Draft the three that scare you.
Pick the three questions you would least want asked. Five minutes, and be honest about it.
Write your firm's answer to each in three sentences. Forty-five minutes.
Read them aloud to one colleague who will tell you if they sound like an answer or like a dodge. Fifteen minutes.
The ones that come out as a dodge are the ones pointing at real gaps. Fix the gap, then the answer writes itself.
The team that walks into that room with the seven answers ready is calm, and calm is most of what a board is reading. The team that improvises hands the committee a reason to keep asking, meeting after meeting, until someone decides the comms function cannot be trusted with the tool. Ten minutes of preparation buys you out of that spiral. Do it before the message from the company secretary, not after.
Gabriel Tan is the founder of Mekong Bridge Advisory. He builds structured execution systems for PR and communications firms.
