What can my board do that AI can't?
The first dispatch from our 2026 field research, with Okta and AWS. Thirty nonprofit CEOs, funders, and board chairs spent an afternoon in San Francisco answering that question, and what they said points somewhere the sector hasn’t been looking.
San Francisco is the first of three working sessions. We’re in New York on September 29 and Chicago on October 15, and in Q4 we’ll publish a full field blueprint with Bridgespan. This dispatch is where that storyline starts.
The field has spent two years treating nonprofit AI adoption as a tools-and-training problem. Our research says otherwise: only 3% of nonprofits wrote AI principles with staff and board together, and those organizations are 12 times more likely to have AI in pilots or at scale. The gap isn’t skills. It’s authorization.
Asked to describe the board this moment demands, the room gave the answers the field has given for 30 years—diverse, agile, engaged, exemplary. Then, unprompted, group after group arrived at the question at the top of this page. Not one of their answers to it was about information or expertise, which is what boards have been recruited for since forever.
Buddy Shah, who chairs Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust, on building a board for a question no board has faced. Charlotte Wylie of Okta, Hilary Noon of AWS, and Michael Lissner of Free Law Project on what they’ve already changed. Leaders from JVS, TechSoup, NTEN, Fast Forward, Tech Matters, Project Evident, Draper Richards Kaplan, Tipping Point, and other sector guides contributed in the room.
What’s inside
- Where four organization types say they need to be by 2030 and what’s at stake if they don’t get there
- How Free Law Project dropped its give requirement and moved its board onto Slack
- The two moves that make a board relevant to a decision about what an organization becomes
- Three of the ten mandates we drafted, each one something an outsider could tell whether you did this year
- Five questions the room couldn’t agree on, published unresolved
- One question to ask your board before your next meeting
You already spend the time—on the meetings, the pre-read, the prep. None of it is optional. What matters is whether any of it comes back to you.
We’re interviewing CEOs and board chairs at organizations in the middle of real decisions about what to become, and the survey opens in September. Schedule an interview, or write to info@board.dev and we’ll send you the survey when it goes live.