ESG: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

6 AI IS TESTING THE LIMITS OF CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

by Roberto Tallarita

Few doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to be disruptive for society, and governments are beginning to devise regulatory strategies to control its social cost. In the meantime, however, AI is being developed by private firms, run by executives, supervised by boards of directors, and funded by investors. In other words, what is likely to prove the most important technological innovation of our lifetime is currently overseen by corporate governance—the set of rules, mostly of private creation, that allocate power and manage conflicts within a corporation.

The recent boardroom war at OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, has put a spotlight on the role ...