Can AI Really Create the Perfect Board of Directors?
Who makes the cut? The perennial question facing leaders in every walk of life. In most cases, the process follows the usual steps: research, head hunting, interviewing, testing, and so on.
When the hiring is geared towards creating an expert board capable of bringing strategic advice and proven skills to steer business success, you would expect an ever higher degree of rigour.
Or, you could just ask AI to solve the problem.
Matt Blumberg, four-time technology CEO and current head of Markup AI – a solution that allows companies to produce content at scale – did.
The result is a fantasy board of famous business leaders past and present, which he uses as a thought partner, sounding board and impartial reviewer of his own performance.
Writing about the experiment on LinkedIn, Matt says: “Instead of looking at AI only as a tool for productivity, I wanted to see how it could help me think differently about strategy and feedback.
“My team and I created AI versions of leaders we admire, loaded them with detailed context and let them act as thought partners before real board meetings.”
How AI builds a fantasy board
Matt is well versed in using and creating AI for specific solutions. Markup AI provides specific ‘Content Guardian Angels’ that act as automated quality control for both human and AI-generated content.
The agents scan, score and rewrite content in real-time in order to ensure quality and brand safety at scale.
Speaking with Business Insider, he says he had the idea to build a fantasy board with another CEO, stating: “We have an actual human board, and it’s fantastic. I get really good advice from them.
“But I wanted to use AI to create a fantasy board because mine is limited by the five people who are on it and the experiences they have in life.”
Matt and his exec team created a wishlist, drafting fantasy teams of famous people largely, but not exclusively, from the world of business.
This included various key titles – CEOs, VCs, thought leaders and more – as well as notable names including Taylor Swift and Oprah Winfrey.
“From here, we had AI build 5,000-word profiles for each person, and we gave the AI a certain template to follow,” he says to Business Insider.
“We wanted the fantasy board members to be able to react to things as real board members would, with actual things they've said about how companies and boards perform.”
To build the agent, Matt and the team combined these executive profiles with mission and vision statements from Markup AI, as well as information real board members have access to including meeting minutes and business decks.
Thought partner, advisor and reviewer
On LinkedIn, Matt says the AI board “has been an incredible supplemental tool when I’m looking to quickly ideate or get feedback”.
He told Business Insider that he uses the fantasy board to bounce ideas off, saying: “I will provide a draft of a board book before sending it to my actual board, and I’ll say: these are materials for an upcoming meeting.
“What do you think of them? Are there topics you would have expected me to cover that I didn't? What questions am I likely to get back from our board? In return, I'll get really useful commentary.”
Other areas the board is applied to include assistance with internal projects and presentations and for performance reviews.
On the subject of his 2025 performance, he says the board “nailed it”.
“The board called out the things that I would have said are my strengths and things that I would have said are problems. I sent the review to my executive team just as an FYI, and they all came back to me and said it was pretty impressive.”
No AI adoption is seamless, however. And just like AI’s limitations impact other areas of the modern enterprise, Matt says his board is only as good as the information he inputs meaning that it lacks important context its real-life counterparts may possess.
“The other limitation is that they’re not real people,” he tells Business Insider.
“If you have a board meeting, people are in a room together. They have body language. They have facial expressions. You can tell when they lean in, when they lean back. You can tell when they roll their eyes because they don't believe something you said. You can call them out on that.”
The trick, says Matt, is to view the prospect of a fantasy AI board as you would any AI solution: augmentation rather than a substitution.
