The Equation Boards are Missing to innovate

For years, I sat in the chair where technology decisions meet business consequences. As CIO at one of the world's largest BPO companies, I was responsible for the technology that powered customer interactions for dozens of global brands — millions of conversations, across every channel, every day. When we got a technology decision right, customers barely noticed. When we got it wrong, they noticed immediately. And so did our clients.

That experience taught me something that most technology conversations get fundamentally wrong: technology is not the point. The customer is the point. Technology is how you get there faster, better, and at scale.

This distinction matters enormously right now, because we are living through the most significant wave of technology disruption in a generation. AI, cloud-native architectures, automation, data platforms — the options are multiplying faster than any leadership team can evaluate. And the companies that will win are not the ones that adopt the most technology. They are the ones that connect the right technology to what their customers actually need.

That connection requires a governance mechanism most companies don't have: a Technical and Innovation Advisory Board.

The Problem I Saw from the Inside

In my years leading technology for a company where customer experience was literally the product, I watched a pattern repeat across industries. A board or executive committee would read about a technology trend — conversational AI, cloud migration, robotic process automation — and ask the question every CTO dreads: "Are we doing something with this?"

The question sounds reasonable. But it's backwards.

The right question is: "What are our customers struggling with, and is there a technology that can solve it better than what we're doing today?" One question starts with the technology and hopes to find a use case. The other starts with the customer and selects the technology that serves them. The difference in outcomes is enormous.

I spent years translating between these two worlds — understanding what emerging technologies could actually do (not what vendors claimed they could do) and mapping that capability to real customer pain points. I saw AI transform contact center operations — not because AI was fashionable, but because customers were tired of waiting, repeating themselves, and getting generic answers. I saw cloud infrastructure investments succeed when they were driven by the need for global scalability to serve customers in new markets, and fail when they were driven by a board member who read an article about cloud-first strategies.

When I decided to step to the other side of the table and found Trek to Win, it was because I realized that this translation capability — connecting technology reality to customer outcomes — was exactly what most leadership teams lacked. Not because they were incapable, but because they were isolated from the technical depth needed to make the connection.

The data confirms what I observed from the inside. Russell Reynolds Associates studied 398 public company boards in 2025, mapping more than 3,400 directors. Their finding: only one in four boards have both a former technology functional leader and a leader with technology management experience — the pair needed to interrogate management's technical assumptions and challenge where necessary.

Meanwhile, Protiviti's 2025 Global Board Governance Survey — over 1,800 board members and executives — found that more than 75% of organizations expect their business model to change significantly within 36 months. Only 15% consider themselves disruptive leaders. The confidence gap is stark: 77% of leaders feel prepared for disruption, versus 28% of laggards.

Here's the part that hits hardest: 72% of disruptive leaders view generative AI as providing a significant opportunity to be a disruptor. But more than 40% of organizations at risk of disruption see the same technology as a threat. Same technology, opposite interpretations. The difference isn't the technology — it's whether the organization has people who can evaluate it clearly.

The Hype Machine Makes It Worse

If the expertise gap were the only problem, it would be manageable. But there's a compounding factor: the technology industry produces an extraordinary volume of noise.

Gartner's 2025 Hype Cycle for AI places AI agents at the Peak of Inflated Expectations. CEOs are rushing to build strategies around agentic AI — 29% already working on it, half planning to within two years. Yet MIT Sloan Management Review warns that agents are heading into a trough of disillusionment because they still make too many mistakes for high-stakes processes.

I've lived this cycle before. In the contact center world, I watched "omnichannel" go from buzzword to must-have to disappointment to — eventually — genuinely transformative, but only for companies that implemented it around customer journeys rather than technology architecture. I watched chatbots promised as the end of human customer service, then deliver frustrating experiences that drove customers away, then mature into genuinely useful tools — but only when they were designed from the customer's perspective, not the cost-reduction spreadsheet.

A historical analysis of Gartner's Hype Cycles since 2000 shows that only about one in five technologies actually follows the idealized adoption curve. The rest either disappear or evolve so far from the original narrative that the early hype was misleading. For a board without deep technical advisory, this creates two equally dangerous outcomes:

Chasing hype. Investing in AI because competitors announced it, without understanding whether the technology is mature enough or the customer use case is real.
Missing substance. Dismissing innovations that could genuinely transform the customer experience because the board can't distinguish between what's ready and what's premature.

Both are strategic errors. Both are preventable — if you have the right people advising you.

Why Technology and Customer Orientation Are Inseparable

This is where most conversations about Technical Advisory Boards fall short. They frame the value purely in technology terms: evaluate architectures, assess vendors, review cybersecurity posture. These are important. But they miss the most critical function.

The highest value a Technical Advisory Board delivers is connecting technology capability to customer value.

Consider what's happening in AI right now. EY's analysis of the technology landscape for 2026 describes executives moving from "should we use AI?" to "how do we operationalize AI-native strategies?" But operationalize for what purpose? The companies getting the best returns from AI are those deploying it where customers feel the difference: faster resolution, more personalized service, proactive problem-solving, seamless experiences across channels.

Deloitte's 2025 Family Enterprise survey found that 42% of family enterprises named AI as their top strategic priority, with 66% adding or planning to add board members with technology expertise. But the leading barrier? Finding suitable candidates — 46% cite this as the main challenge. Companies know they need this capability. They struggle to source it.

In my experience, the candidates they should be seeking are not pure technologists. They are people who have deployed technology in customer-facing contexts — who understand that a technically elegant AI model is worthless if it makes the customer experience worse, and that a simple automation can be transformative if it removes a friction point that drives customers away.

IMD Business School argues that innovation governance is becoming a management imperative. I agree — but I'd sharpen the point. Innovation governance without customer orientation is just technology tourism. You visit the latest trends, take some photos, and go home without changing anything that matters.

What a Technical and Innovation Advisory Board Should Actually Do

Based on twenty years of seeing technology decisions succeed and fail — and on the frameworks documented by the Advisory Board Centre, Russell Reynolds, and IMD — I believe a well-designed Technical Advisory Board serves three functions.

1. Filter the Noise: What's Real, What's Premature, What's Irrelevant

When the CEO reads that agentic AI will transform the enterprise, the advisory board provides nuance: which use cases are production-ready, which need 18 more months, and which are vendor marketing. Not in the abstract — for this company, with these customers, in this market.

This filtering function requires people who have built and deployed technologies, not just analyzed them. When I led the evaluation of generative AI for customer management, the vendor presentations were impressive. The pilot results were mixed. The difference between success and failure came down to understanding which customer interactions benefited from AI augmentation and which ones customers wanted handled by humans. That judgment doesn't come from a technology assessment framework. It comes from operational experience.

2. Translate: From Technology Capability to Customer and Business Impact

The second function is bridging the language gap between the CTO's architecture diagrams and the board's margin targets. But crucially, the bridge must pass through the customer.

A proposed investment in AI-driven personalization looks different when evaluated purely on cost savings versus when evaluated on customer lifetime value. A cloud migration makes a different case when framed as infrastructure modernization versus when framed as the foundation for entering new markets faster than competitors. The advisory board should be able to evaluate both the technical feasibility and the customer impact — because technologies that work technically but miss the customer don't generate returns.

3. Envision: How Emerging Technologies Will Reshape Customer Expectations

The third function is the most valuable. Not "what technology should we adopt?" but "how will emerging technologies change what our customers expect from us in three to five years?"

This is the question I find most leadership teams struggle with. They can evaluate current technology decisions. But anticipating how AI, automation, and data platforms will shift customer expectations — that requires people who have lived through previous technology-driven shifts in customer behavior and understand the patterns.

A 2024 Harvard Law School Forum article puts it directly: organizations that thrive embrace change, yet boards underestimate their role in fostering these adaptations. I would add: the adaptations that matter most are those that customers notice.

How to Build One That Works

Five principles, drawn from practice:

Start with customer and business questions, not technology domains. What are the three biggest customer challenges or market opportunities you face? Select advisors who understand the technologies that address those challenges — not generalists who cover everything superficially.
Recruit operators, not theorists. Four to six members who have built, deployed, and lived with the consequences of technology decisions in customer-facing contexts. People who know the gap between the vendor demo and the production deployment.
Create rhythm plus flexibility. Quarterly meetings for strategic review. But the real value often comes between meetings — a call before a technology acquisition, a working session to evaluate a vendor's AI claims, a rapid assessment when a competitor launches something unexpected.
Connect it to governance and to the customer voice. Designate a board director as the anchor. Ensure the advisory board has access to customer data, NPS/CES trends, and service metrics — not just technology roadmaps. Their recommendations should be grounded in customer reality.
Review and rotate annually. Technology evolves. Customer expectations evolve faster. Your advisory board composition should evolve with both.

The Formula

Everything in this article reduces to a single equation:

Customer Pain +
Technical Enablement +
Operational Governance = Strategic Advantage

Miss any term and the equation breaks. Invest in technology that doesn't address a real customer pain — you get expensive infrastructure nobody asked for. Address customer pain without the right technical enablement — you get failed pilots and eroded trust. Nail both but lack governance to scale it — you get brilliant experiments that never leave the lab.

A Technical and Innovation Advisory Board exists to ensure all three terms are present in every strategic technology decision. It brings the customer voice into the technology conversation, the technical depth to enable what's actually viable, and the governance experience to embed it in the organization.

Every business exists to solve a customer's pain — regardless of industry. Start there. Then use technology and rigorous governance to turn that understanding into lasting advantage.

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