Reader

From the Editor

Welcome to the third issue of Signals & Soapboxes. Every week covers a signal shaping our future, a candid opinion, a risk on the horizon and a question you should be asking. Short, sharp and straight to the point.

Kerry Knight Chart.PR

📡 The Signal

It's believed that Lloyds Banking Group has become the first FTSE 100 company to bring an AI agent into its boardroom. Reported by The Sunday Times and confirmed across multiple other outlets this week, the bank is using a specialist "board bot" built by executive advisory firm Board Intelligence to review confidential materials, support meeting preparation and assist with reducing human bias in decisions.

Board Intelligence's agent has been trained by the company's experts to create an AI board adviser that can offer guidance in cybersecurity, sustainability, financial analysis, mergers and acquisitions and more.

Lloyds's corporate governance director, Nicola Putland, described the trial as aimed at enabling "faster analysis, and access to a broader range of perspectives."

For now, the agent is used to prepare executives ahead of meetings. But Board Intelligence's chief executive, Pippa Begg, has mapped out what comes next: the agent present in live board sessions and able to push back on directors in real time.

A legal vote, she noted, would be a dangerous leap.

What's notable here is what Lloyds's decision has done. As a FTSE 100 company, it's signalled board-level AI adoption is viable; others will undoubtedly follow. The governance questions that need answers before making that move are about accountability, liability, what boards are actually delegating.

Source | The Sunday Times: 'All singing, all dancing' robot joins the Lloyds bank boardroom

Thank you to my fellow CIPR Crisis Communications Network Committee Member Rosie Hamilton for sharing the article and bringing it to my attention.

🎙️ The Soapbox

The Sunday Times article states that Pippa Begg, Board Intelligence's chief executive, said:

The agent could help to eliminate "human bias" from board decisions, including on making acquisitions, and analyse executive and employee performance.

That word could is doing a lot of work. An AI system trained on proprietary data, by a commercial vendor, with no published methodology, doesn't eliminate bias. It does, however, replace visible human judgement with assumptions that are harder to see and harder to challenge.

The bias doesn't disappear; it moves into the training data, the design choices and the criteria nobody has made public.

Boards considering AI advisory tools need to ask a more precise question than: "Will this reduce bias?" Among many others, they need to ask: whose assumptions are embedded in this system, and how would we know if they were wrong?

Beyond structural and systemic bias, boards need to fully understand what AI failure modes exist, what they mean, why they matter and the points of impact.

Do you have a soapbox you stand on? Or an opinion worth airing? The soapbox is open to contributors. Get in touch: soapbox@kerrybknight.co.uk

🌍 The Geoeconomic Brief

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026, published in January, named geoeconomic confrontation as the top risk facing organisations globally; its highest ranking to date. The WEF report warned:

The world is balancing on a precipice. The turmoil caused by kinetic wars alongside deployment of economic weapons is continuing to fragment societies.

As if on cue, the Strait of Hormuz has largely been blocked following military escalation in the region since 28 February 2026. The closure has disrupted roughly a quarter of global seaborne oil trade and significant volumes of LNG, fertilisers and agricultural commodities.

Major maritime insurers have suspended or repriced war-risk coverage for ships travelling through the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.

Tariffs, sanctions, export controls and trade bloc fragmentation are no longer exceptional events. Boards are experiencing this now. Named a top global risk in WEF's 2025 report and elevated to number one in 2026, geoeconomic confrontation has been on the horizon for years. The Strait of Hormuz just doorstopped your board. Did they see it coming? More importantly, did they prepare?

Sources:

World Economic Forum: World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2026.
Dun & Bradstreet: Navigating disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz 2026: Oil sector exposure and global supply chain disruptions
World Economic Forum: How war in the Middle East is turning governments into insurers of last resort

🤔 The Question

If your board sees the risk coming and doesn't prepare, why look in the first place?

Signals & Soapbox Editor

Kerry is a Chartered PR Practitioner specialising in crisis preparedness, reputation management and AI governance.

As a strategic communications advisor, her day-to-day work focuses on translating complex or contested subject matter into clear, credible positioning that strengthens decision-making. She has advised on public scrutiny, misinformation, employee disputes and complex reputation challenges, providing the insight leaders need to maintain clear, defensible positions under pressure.