Audit and finance skills are heavily in demand for corporate board members, according to a recent survey.
"It was tied actually with cybersecurity as a skill set, and then just behind technology implementation and industry specialization, as well as corporate strategy," said Amy Rojik, national managing principal for corporate governance of BDO USA. "I think this reflects several things that are important to public companies, in particular the heightened focus of stakeholders, especially regulators and investors, on the need for high-quality and reliable financial information and disclosures to aid in investment decisions. We all know that regulators are heavily pushing for transparency and disclosures across the board, and in particular with respect to financial accounting and reporting disclosures, along with important oversight responsibilities, particularly in increasing risk areas like cybersecurity where breaches can really have a material impact on a company's financial condition."
The survey asked the board members what they believe are the greatest near-team opportunities for generative AI, and 11% cited finance and accounting.
"Anecdotally, the top three board education continuing education topics that we get asked to provide to the board are generative AI, cybersecurity and enterprise risk management," said Rojik. "Those by far are the most requested things that, especially with the audit committee, we're seeing as a topic of conversation that they want to dive deeper into. I find that very encouraging because it's across the board."
Some 17% of the survey respondents indicated that advancing the use of emerging technology is a top strategic priority, while lagging implementation of emerging technology (27%) is a top-cited risk. At the same time, a slight majority of directors (51%) indicated they plan to increase investment in emerging technology, while 41% intend to increase investment in cybersecurity, data privacy and governance over the next year.
Generative AI has become a governance focus, with directors pursuing use cases and working to mitigate a wide array of risks. Approximately one third of directors (31%) selected customer experience (16%) or product/service development (15%) as the greatest opportunity for generative AI.
Rojik pointed to a recent
"It's probably more at the forefront, where we're probably on the audit side preparing more administrative documents or initial drafts of memos and presentations and researching internal accounting and auditing guidance," she said. "Preparers may be doing something similar, maybe summarizing accounting standards and interpretations, and benchmarking company information. And then some are even using generative AI to assist in the performance of less complex and repetitive processes, such as preparing account recs or identifying reconciling items. I think the potential investments that companies are looking forward to are summarizing accounting policy and legal documents, evaluating completeness of audit documentation against relevant documentation requirements, performing risk assessment procedures and scoping the audit."
But data privacy and security remain important factors, she added. Firms need to be careful about client information being loaded into a generative AI-enabled tool, who is allowed to use those types of tools on the audit, what level of staff, and where the supervision is in those models.
"There's still, fortunately for all of us, a very high human element of supervision and review to make sure this is all making sense and that we understand what's going into these models that we're exploring and what's coming out has integrity," said Rojik. "We have a long way to go on both sides of that, from an audit perspective and from a financial reporting perspective. I would say with confidence every audit firm is looking at how to do that, but they're also looking at it from a lens of how the regulators are going to monitor, enforce and regulate that. There's more to come in that space certainly, but that's a huge area to keep an eye on for boards."
The survey also included data on committee allocation for audit, and found 57% of the public company board respondents have an audit committee and serve on it, while 43% have an audit committee and do not serve on it, and 0% do not have an audit committee.
The audit committee and others are confronting risks from technology and the economy.
"Organizations are really considering where they should be allocating risks, especially emerging risks, and so we're taking a look at their traditional board structures in terms of the committee allocations," said Rojik. "Is the audit committee the right committee to put all these emerging risks in? Should there be special committees of the board, or should there be separate committees? Several of our clients have recently instituted separate technology committees, or technology innovation committees. Some, especially financial institutions of a certain size, are required to have risk committees. The most important thing boards can be doing, though, is looking at how they're putting together that allocation through their charters and other documents that hold them accountable, and then looking at how regulators are viewing the required disclosures."
