The Director Who Reads the Summary

On the Subject of Leadership · Oct 19, 2026 · 10m

In 2007 the directors of Centro approved accounts that classified some $1.5 billion of short-term liabilities as non-current. They had a chief financial officer, a finance team, and PricewaterhouseCoopers as auditors, yet the Federal Court found that they had failed in their duty of care, because the reading was the one task the law would not let them hand to anyone else. A survey by OnBoard, a vendor of board software, now reports that 92 per cent of directors use AI for board work, and the obvious use—having a model digest the pack—hands that reading to a machine. In this essay, released in…