Executive Summary When people hear AI-driven shareholder activism, they picture a robot hedge fund launching campaigns on its own. That's the wrong thing to worry about. The real shift is quieter and far bigger: artificial intelligence is replacing the referee. In January 2026, JPMorgan's asset-management arm, which oversees more than $7 trillion, dropped its proxy advisors entirely and switched to an in-house AI tool to guide its votes. Here's the part boards aren't ready fo

Executive Summary Here's the uncomfortable truth about founder-led companies: they rarely come undone because the founder is too strong. They come undone because everyone around the founder gets too weak. The board stops being a check and slowly turns into a fan club. That's the real governance risk, and it hides behind the most flattering word in business, "visionary." The same fierce conviction that builds a company from nothing is the exact thing that, left unchecked, blin

Let me start with a boardroom that has nothing to do with rockets. Say it's a mid-sized Indian company. Could be an agritech firm, a logistics player, a telecom operator, even a bank. Somewhere in the last two years it signed a deal for satellite data, or put money into a small satellite, or booked a ride-share launch through a partner. The paperwork went through legal. The finance team approved the spend. The board saw it as one line in a strategy deck. And nobody asked the

Executive Summary Not long ago, buying employee monitoring software was an IT decision, something procurement signed off on without anyone upstairs blinking. That's changed, and pretty fast. Between a patchwork of new state privacy laws, a wave of biometric-data lawsuits, and at least one very public case tying monitoring software directly to worker injuries, what used to be a quiet productivity tool has turned into a genuine governance question. This piece looks at why that

Executive Summary Ten years ago, if you'd told a board that menopause and eldercare belonged on the same agenda as cybersecurity or executive pay, most directors would have laughed you out of the room. Nobody's laughing now. New disclosure rules, evolving employment laws, and a workforce where caregiving responsibilities increasingly overlap with peak leadership years have made menopause and eldercare governance an important part of corporate governance. These issues are movi

Executive Summary Most startups set up their ESOP pool in a hurry. A lawyer drafts a template, the board rubber-stamps a 10 to 15 percent allocation, and everyone moves on to the next fundraising deck. That works fine when the company has thirty employees in one city. It works a lot less well once the company has four hundred employees across three countries, a founder whose own equity is tangled up in the same pool, and an IPO on the horizon that regulators are going to scru

There used to be a fairly easy line a company could reach for: “we didn’t set the price, the software did.” Enforcers have quietly taken that line away. Not understanding what your own pricing tool is actually doing is starting to look less like an excuse and more like the problem itself. This isn’t a story about artificial intelligence getting smarter. It’s a story about governance catching up to a risk that’s been sitting inside ordinary pricing software for a while now, mo

“We have 10,000 employees.” Say that in a board meeting and heads nod. It sounds like information. It isn’t, really. It tells you nothing about whether those 10,000 people are the right people, whether they’re about to leave, whether the ones who matter most are being replaced fast enough, or whether the leadership pipeline underneath the CEO has any depth at all. Headcount is the workforce number every board already has. It’s also the one that predicts the least. That gap —

Here’s a gap that should bother every director more than it currently does. A 2025 ISACA survey found that two-thirds of cyber professionals are worried about quantum computers eventually breaking modern encryption. Only 5 percent of them have actually built a strategy to deal with it. Same 5 percent, by the way, that considers it a high priority at all. That’s not a technology gap. That’s a governance gap. And it’s the kind of gap that tends to look fine right up until it ve

Executive Summary TNFD is a disclosure framework that helps organisations identify, assess, and report how nature — biodiversity, water, land, oceans — affects their financial position, and how their operations affect nature in return. It was finalised in September 2023, and by early 2026 more than 730 organisations representing over $22 trillion in assets under management had committed to it. What makes this urgent for boards right now isn’t just adoption numbers — it’s that

Executive Summary Here's the uncomfortable truth most boards learn too late: fraud almost never starts as a number. It starts as a mood. A quota that quietly stops making sense. A team that used to push back and now just nods. By the time misconduct shows up in the accounts, it has usually been living in the culture for a year or more. That gap is the whole opportunity. This piece argues that corporate culture and fraud prevention are the same conversation, not two different

Executive Summary For a couple of years, "AI governance" at most companies meant one overworked person in legal or compliance quietly adding "and also AI, I guess" to an already full job description. That era is closing out fast. Through 2026, AI oversight has been pulled out of the side-desk pile and turned into a formal executive function, with its own title, its own budget line, and increasingly, its own seat that reports straight to the CEO or the board. I'll be honest ab

Executive Summary Somewhere inside your organization right now, an AI agent is probably doing something nobody explicitly asked it to do in that exact way. Approving a small vendor payment, maybe. Drafting a compliance filing. Or talking to another company's AI agent, with neither human on either side actually watching that exchange happen. Welcome to agentic AI, and to the reason "AI governance" quietly stopped meaning "who fact-checks the chatbot" and started meaning someth

Executive Summary There's a specific kind of governance gap that doesn't show up until someone actually asks the awkward question out loud: not "does your board discuss AI," but "if your AI-powered dashboard flagged something dangerous right now, is there a written policy telling anyone what happens next?" A lot of boards, when they actually sit with that question, don't love their own answer. I covered the AI expertise gap in a companion piece already, the fact that a striki

Executive Summary For about a decade, ESG was mostly a story. A glossy report, a bold net-zero pledge, a warm paragraph in the annual review. It lived in the communications department, and the main question anyone asked was "what did you promise?" That era is ending. The question for 2026 is sharper and far less comfortable: "can you prove it — and will your numbers survive an auditor?" This piece is about that shift, the move from ESG ambition to ESG execution. It's the tran

Introduction: When Governance Breaks, Outside Supervision Begins In many corporate scandals, there comes a stage where authorities feel that internal correction is not enough anymore. At that point, an external corporate monitor is appointed. When internal control systems collapse, outside supervision enters. Corporate monitorships are often seen as punishment or legal penalty. But actually, they function as governance reform mechanisms. An independent monitor is selected to

The announcement that boAt’s founders — Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta — have stepped down from their executive roles just weeks before the company’s planned ₹1,500 crore IPO has sparked a wave of concern across investor and corporate-governance circles. Disclosed in the company’s updated Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP), the move has been viewed by many as more than a routine leadership reshuffle — raising important questions around Private Company Governance and IPO readine

The automotive sector is currently at a critical juncture in its history. For decades, discussions around production efficiency, safety regulations and evolving customer demands shaped the industry. Today, however, a more complex and consequential dialogue has taken centre stage—Responsible Business Conduct in the Automotive Sector. This is not just another sustainability buzzword. Responsible Business Conduct (RBC) is rapidly becoming a gateway to future competitiveness, boa

Indian companies already face huge pressure from investors, regulators, and even regular citizens who want cleaner business actions. Every year new laws, filings, and responsibilities get added, yet problems still appear because information reaches decision makers late. Many directors also depend on compliance officers or accountants for updates instead of checking anything directly. So mistakes travel far before someone even notices. Because of this, the idea of Corporate Go

The Quiet Shift in the Boardroom The decision goes through without anyone objecting. The information is solid. The advisors agree. The minutes show careful consideration. From the outside, everything looks in order. The board has done what it was meant to do. And yet, time passes, and something doesn’t sit right. Weeks later, that feeling is still there. Nothing specific is “wrong,” but the discomfort doesn’t go away. It’s not about process. It’s about what the decision set i