Institute of Corporate Directors Malaysia: Responsible AI Board Training

Boards used to plan for a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. When it comes to AI, as one director put it, BANI is the better lens: brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible.

That framing opened the Institute of Corporate Directors Malaysia's (ICDM) first Responsible AI Board training, developed and delivered by APAC Advisors' Steven Okun, Megan Willis and Noemie Viterale.

In Malaysia, the risks are already visible. Data centres use more than 9% of the country's electricity, Johor has paused new water-cooled capacity, and deepfake scams have cost Malaysians around US$500 million. Any one of these could become a board-level crisis overnight.

Over the session, directors worked through real cases, stress-tested their AI assumptions against three possible futures, and finished by mapping AI risk onto the governance frameworks they already use.

Our thanks to Jackie Mah, Latha Thangaraja, Zadil Hanief Mohamad Zaidi and the ICDM team for trusting us with this, and to the directors who joined us.