Can a Board Member's Job Be Automated?

The role of a Non-Executive Director (NED) is to represent and safeguard the long-term interests of shareholders and broader stakeholders, including employees, customers, society, and environment. However, continued advances in artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), and distributed ledger technology like blockchain could bring about a completely new way for the Board to exercise its responsibilities. Ensuring data veracity could be instantaneous and decentralized, allowing for processes such as reviewing company accounts, financial reporting, and auditing to be real-time and immutable, requiring minimal effort on the part of NEDs. Against this backdrop of change, we applied the methodology in our book Reinventing Jobs to reinvent the role of the NED. First we identified all the key activities performed by NEDs.