Ham is an active long-time member of the Boston entrepreneurial community, a seasoned board members, a prolific author on the subject of boards/governance and the founder of the Launchpad Venture Group, one of the driving forces behind organized angel investing in the United States. In this episode Ham, we discuss many areas of board practice with someone that for many years has helped and written about how to make boards better. We love our listeners! Drop us a line or give us guest suggestions here.   Big Ideas/Thoughts/Quotes: Board questions around AI: What are the strategic objectives of the company, what are the business problems and the opportunities that that company should be going after. Three questions to begin: 1.     What specific business problems or opportunities do you plan to address with AI? And how do you anticipate that AI is going to help the company achieve its strategic objectives? It's all great to have tools like AI, but if they're not fundamentally driving the business in a direction that helps you achieve those strategic objectives, why bother? 2.     How will you manage the ethical and legal implications of using AI, such as bias, discrimination, and compliance with regulations and industry standards? AI tools where they haven't been trained on a wide enough data sets, they haven't had enough experience, nor have the users of it have enough experience to understand whether they're going down a path that might lead to issues down the road. 3.     How will you communicate the use of AI to your stakeholders, and that includes employees, customers, investors, and regulators. And how will you address the concerns about the use of AI?   “There's not time for this in every board meeting, but a board should have at least one or two strategic sessions a year that are focused on technology.”   “When you think about a financial institution, a healthcare institution, they have a lot of data that is extremely sensitive; personal data, healthcare data, financial data. You don't want that escaping out into the world by using one of these tools that you don't necessarily know what it's going to do with that data.”   One of the biggest concerns is that sort of bias and discrimination that can occur with AI tools where they haven't been trained on a wide enough data sets, they haven't had enough experience, nor have the users of it have enough experience to understand whether they're going down a path that might lead to issues down the road.   even if you don't get the full effect, it's important to get it right so that as you go forward, you've identified any issues that might exist, whether it's bias, discrimination, or something else before it's everywhere, which will make it more difficult to control at that point. Whether you need to explain that AI is, for example, reading your medical scan, your MRI or your CT, or whether you need to explain to your customers that an AI is either giving you a thumbs up or a thumbs down on we're giving you a mortgage or whatever. I think that's going to be a more challenging question about how you communicate that-  I don't think there's necessarily a good answer for that today I do want to say one thing about all three of these questions that I've asked, they are questions that you should be asking of the chief technology people in the organization, not just the CTO because the CTO may or may not be the one who is most expert in these particular areas Raza, what do you think about having an AI board member? I think a copilot, an assistive technology, is definitely a very interesting thing for boards. It can make them more effective. It is possible that you have a large set of materials and going through those, you do miss things as a human, but an automated process and AI could definitely come up with more. This is a really great idea for a startup, and I think somebody will do it.   Note: All of the board questions g