There was a time, not so long ago, when sitting on a corporate board was something you accepted as a quiet honour. A retirement crown. A few meetings a year, a sitting fee, a polite dinner, and a line on the LinkedIn page that read "Independent Director, ABC Limited." That world is gone. In 2026, board compensation is no longer a prestige conversation. It is a governance risk conversation. And the people running that conversation are not the directors themselves — they are th

Let me paint a quick scene. It is a Tuesday morning in March. The annual general meeting of a Nifty 50 company is two weeks away. The board has spent six months on a thoughtful, intentional decision to delay CEO succession by a year — because the company is mid-way through a major acquisition and continuity matters. They have explained the reasoning in earnings calls, investor letters, and the proxy statement. Somewhere in a server in New York, an AI system ingests that proxy