The Question Every Board Should Ask About AI — But Doesn't

I founded ila Bank — Bahrain's first digital mobile-only bank — not because I wanted to launch another banking product. I founded it because I believed in a new kind of banking. Banking that reflects you. Banking that is about you as a person — your life, your aspirations, your way of doing things — not about pushing products at you. ila was never about a better savings account or a slicker app. It was about reimagining the entire relationship between a bank and a human being.

That philosophy is why AI matters so much to me. Integrating AI with ila was not an afterthought — it was essential to the vision. AI is what allows a bank to actually know its customers, to anticipate what they need, to deliver experiences that feel personal rather than transactional. Without AI, digital banking is just a branch on a screen. With AI, it becomes something fundamentally different.

That conviction has only deepened. AI is not a technology initiative to be delegated to the CTO. It is the most consequential strategic shift in banking since the move to digital. And most boards are governing it badly.

Here is the problem: boards ask 'How are we using AI?' and management responds with a list of operational use cases — chatbots, fraud detection, process automation. The board nods, feels reassured, and moves to the next agenda item. But the strategic question is not how you are using AI today. It is what decisions you are making today that AI will render obsolete tomorrow.

In my experience governing institutions across multiple jurisdictions, the boards that get AI right share one characteristic: they treat it as a governance matter, not a technology matter. They ask questions like — How does AI change our credit risk appetite? What does AI-driven treasury management mean for our liquidity strategy? If our competitors deploy AI faster than we do, what happens to our corporate banking franchise in three years?

These are not questions for the technology committee. They are questions for the full board.

The GCC is particularly interesting here. Sovereign AI strategies across the Gulf are creating infrastructure — data centres, talent pipelines, regulatory sandboxes — that give GCC-based institutions a potential advantage over their international peers. I have watched this unfold from Bahrain, and I believe the institutions that combine Gulf sovereign AI investment with disciplined board governance will define the next chapter of banking in this region.

For investors evaluating banking institutions, AI capability is becoming as important as capital adequacy. An institution that is investing strategically in AI — not just in cost reduction, but in new capabilities that create competitive moats — will generate disproportionate returns. An institution that treats AI as a line item in the IT budget will find itself losing ground to competitors it has not yet heard of.

My advice to boards is simple: stop asking your CTO to present an AI update. Start asking your entire leadership team — including your head of corporate banking, your chief risk officer, and your head of strategy — how AI changes their world. The answers will be uncomfortable. That is the point.

The boards that govern AI with strategic intent will build institutions that thrive. The boards that delegate it to technology will wonder, in five years, what happened.