2025 Survey: Boardroom Lens on Generative AI

The KPMG Board Leadership Center surveyed nearly 100 US directors to better understand from a board oversight perspective what they view as key challenges and opportunities related to generative AI.

Among the key takeaways:

• It’s mostly about efficiency (for most companies)
  Most directors continue to cite productivity and cost-savings as the top benefit of adopting/leveraging GenAI.
• Starting to scale
  Few companies have integrated GenAI into their strategy, but an increasing number are starting to scale, have enterprise-wide GenAI training, and have adopted responsible GenAI usage guidelines.
• Hurdles and hesitation: Talent and culture, data quality and security, compliance
  Companies continue to face significant disruptions, obstacles, and risks in the deployment of GenAI—including talent, culture, data quality and security, and compliance.
• Use of recognized risk and governance frameworks is lagging
  Of the various AI/GenAI governance tools and approaches being used or developed, “responsible-use policies” are most common, with recognized AI risk and governance frameworks in distant second. 
• Agentic AI in view and gaining traction
  Many companies are adopting, or exploring adoption of, emerging forms of AI—including agentic AI—to automate and re-engineer workflows. 
• On the rise: Tech/AI skills in the boardroom
  Most respondents said that their boards include directors with general technology/data skills, but fewer reported having board-level GenAI expertise.