Executive Edge - The AI Edit
The weekly reality check for C-suite executives who refuse to burn budgets on AI theatre
Every week, watch competitors make predictably expensive AI mistakes while you build real competitive advantage.
Written by Scott Butterworth—practicing CFO of two ASX-listed companies, former BCG partner—who's seen every costly technology cycle from dot-com to mobile to cloud. Now AI.
What you get each week:
Financial frameworks that separate AI opportunity from vendor hype
Case studies of executives who got AI transformation right (and wrong)
Board-ready strategies without consultant theater or governance committees
This week’s issue: “Right Here, Right Now”.
72% of S&P 500 companies now flag AI as a material risk.
Only 26% of boards have the AI fluency to do anything about it.
The MIT data is brutal: that 26% outperforms peers by 10.9 percentage points of ROE. The rest? Underperforming their industry average by 1.8 ppt.
That's not a capability gap. It's a valuation gap.
Yet 44% of Fortune 100 companies have buried AI oversight in the Audit Committee. Quarterly compliance cycles trying to govern 90-day innovation speed.
I call it the Governance Velocity problem. This week's newsletter reviews the common responses (spoiler: the most frequently used ones don’t) and introduces the STAR framework to close the gap.
Where does your board sit: governance velocity or governance theatre?