The share of boards at listed large- and mid-cap companies globally reporting at least one AI expert reached 25% as of June 30, 2025 — up 10 percentage points from three years earlier. Yet just 14% had integrated that expertise effectively, according to an analysis by Harlan Tufford, Jonathan Ponder and Rumi Mahmood for the MSCI Institute.
To map the landscape of AI expertise across 14,500+ corporate directors, the authors detail a framework designed to help companies and investors assess whether a board has integrated its subject-matter experts into the board as a whole.
Framework for assessing integrated expertise
Source: MSCI Sustainability & Climate.
Though grounded in AI, the framework builds on a growing body of research into governance effectiveness and offers a systematic and scalable way to identify directors whose skills, independence, engagement and influence combine to support robust decision-making on complex topics.
Among the findings:
- U.S.-listed companies had the highest share of boards with integrated AI expertise at 25%, followed by their counterparts in Canada (19%) and Spain (14%).
- Companies in the information technology sector had the highest share (27%) of boards with integrated AI expertise — alongside an additional 26% of boards with AI expertise they hadn’t integrated — followed by the financials and health-care sectors, at 17% and 16%, respectively.
- AI experts are rare but well distributed. The analysis, which used an AI large-language model to read the biographies of all directors covered by the study, identified just 2% of individual directors as AI experts, and most serve on only one corporate board.
As detailed in the report, the authors reviewed their analysis and findings with senior stewardship and governance professionals representing institutional investors with trillions of dollars in assets under management. “Our findings suggest that while boards are actively recruiting AI experts, many have failed to deploy that expertise for maximum effect,” the authors write.
