Briefing the governing layer

Context

In April 2025, RMIT University convened a full-day strategy session for its most senior governance body: the combined University Executive and Academic Board — the Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor, the Deputy Vice-Chancellors, the Chief Operating Officer, and the Academic Board of a global university with campuses in Melbourne, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and Barcelona.

Artificial intelligence was a central theme: its strategic implications for the university's global mission, its pressure on pedagogical integrity, and the governance decisions the institution needed to make in its forward planning. Three external contributors were invited to brief the room — the director of RMIT's AI research hub, the Chief Information Officer of Arizona State University, and me. Each prepared a pre-reading brief, delivered a short presentation, and took questions.

The challenge

The design problem was register. A governing body is not a practitioner audience, a conference room, or a sympathetic internal group. It is a room of people who run a complex global institution — with limited time, high tolerance for abstraction when it serves strategic clarity, and zero tolerance for performance dressed up as insight.

The brief was to give them what they needed to make better decisions about AI — not to impress them, and not to talk over their heads. That requires knowing what to include, what to leave out, and how to pitch the level of a conversation so it opens strategic thinking rather than closing it down with complexity or false simplicity.

The pre-reading brief

What I produced was a curated intelligence brief designed to function as both preparation and provocation, covering four areas mapped to the questions a governing body should be asking: the key AI technologies with direct implications for teaching, learning, and research; primary-source strategic evidence on the scale and speed of the challenge; the competitive landscape — what Stanford, Melbourne, and NUS Singapore were doing, and what each approach reveals about positioning choices; and what the institution was already building, as evidence it was not starting from zero.

This is intelligence work: scanning a fast-moving frontier and translating it into a format immediately useful to decision-makers who don't have time to do the scanning themselves.

The presentation

The presentation was structured around a single core tension: the conflict between AI's efficiency gains on one side, and critical thinking, pedagogical integrity, and graduate value on the other. Rather than exhausting the room with a comprehensive landscape survey, it made one argument clearly: this is not a technology decision. It is a governance decision about what the university's degrees are for — and what happens to their value if the skills they develop are the same ones AI eliminates the need to practise.

The data was chosen to make that argument unavoidable. The competitive landscape was presented not as a threat to be managed but as a set of strategic choices — each peer institution a different answer to the same question. What is ours?

Reception

The Vice-Chancellor wrote personally to all three contributors the following day, describing the session's impact on the discussion as significant. What followed was more telling: multiple senior executives — at Chief Operating Officer, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and ITS Director level — reached out independently and unsolicited in the days after. The technology division requested a dedicated follow-up briefing on the AI capability and threat landscape, subsequently delivered to a vice-president-level audience across the university's technology leadership.

Senior executives in large institutions do not reach out after events as a courtesy. They reach out when something landed. The original briefing generated its own downstream demand.

What this demonstrates

Briefing a governing body on AI is a specific and undervalued capability. It is not a keynote, a workshop, or a research paper. It requires scanning the frontier, synthesising what matters, calibrating the register for a room that is simultaneously overloaded and under-informed, and making the case for strategic attention without catastrophising or understating.

What the strategy day demonstrated is that this capability travels — across institutions, across governance contexts, and across the gap between where AI is moving and where most governing bodies currently sit.