AIR

Report Executive Summary

In an era of information overload and rapid market shifts, business leaders, from corporate boards to family office principals, face an executive intelligence gap. They are inundated with data yet often starved of actionable insight, leading to decision fatigue and missed signals. 

Studies confirm the strain: a majority of senior leaders report increased decision stress in recent years, with information overload impairing judgment. 

Meanwhile, critical ground truths can be lost in organisational silos, a phenomenon dubbed the “iceberg of ignorance”. This gap between data and decisive insight has opened the door for artificial intelligence (AI) to step in as a force multiplier for executive decision-making.

AI as a Strategic Facilitator offers to augment, not replace, human judgment.

Early adopters in finance illustrate the potential: for example, Morgan Stanley’s wealth management arm integrated a GPT-4 based assistant into its research workflow, achieving over 98% advisor adoption and dramatically accelerating information retrieval. Such cases show AI amplifying executive cognition, speeding up due diligence, enriching discussions with data-driven insights, and even acting as a virtual advisor in meetings.

At the same time, we must also view AI in this role through a contrarian lens to temper hype. Seasoned executives and academics caution that AI’s benefits come with strategic and organisational pitfalls.

Moreover, AI’s impressive outputs can mask serious risks: over-reliance on opaque “black-box” models can erode human judgment and accountability. Leaders might develop false confidence in recommendations they don’t fully understand, leading to blind spots and errors (“the computer said so” is not a defense in the boardroom). 

Biases in data, lack of context, security vulnerabilities, and legal/fiduciary issues all threaten to complicate the executive’s adoption of AI.

This report, therefore, provides a balanced narrative of AI in high-stakes decision-making. It integrates perspectives from business strategy, organisational theory, behavioral economics, systems thinking, and cybernetics to explore how AI can enhance and reshape executive intelligence and where it might undermine it. The discussion is structured around six themes: 

1. The Intelligence Gap at the executive level, 
2. AI as Strategic Facilitator (capabilities and opportunities), 
3. Case Studies and Signals from early implementations, 
4. Risks and Blind Spots to mitigate, 
5. Strategic Recommendations for responsible integration, and 
6. A Foresight Horizon scanning the next 1–5 years of executive AI adoption. 

Throughout, we emphasise that AI’s role is a Facilitator: a powerful analytic partner that must remain under informed human command. The goal is to guide board-level stakeholders in harnessing AI’s strategic value while preserving human judgment, ethics, and competitive differentiation. In short, AI can elevate executive decision-making to new heights of insight and foresight, but only if executives lead with principled strategy and clear-eyed governance.