Operate the technology yourself so you can say no early

Jesper E. Thomsen · 5 October 2026

At board level, secondhand understanding of a fast-moving technology can become a governance gap. The most valuable judgment from hands-on use is often negative, seeing early which technologies will not scale or do not fit the problem. That judgment needs an understanding of both the technology and the industry.

Most boards treat technology the way they treat audit. It is a specialist area, delegated to someone who understands it and reported up in summary. For most of what a company runs on, that works. It becomes a governance gap when the technology is reshaping the business faster than the summary can be written. The gap was visible with the PC, the internet and the smartphone. AI makes it harder to excuse, because first-hand contact is now so cheap.

My argument is that at least one director should operate such a technology on real work. The most valuable thing that contact produces is an early no, a judgement that a technology will not scale or does not fit the business. That judgement takes two things held together. One is an understanding of what the technology needs. The other is an understanding of whether the industry can supply it.

Why a briefing does not work

You cannot ask a qualified question about something you have only had summarised, any more than you could have understood the internet from a briefing. The summary carries the conclusions. The feel for what the thing does easily and where it breaks, which is where the question comes from, stays with whoever used it.

Twenty minutes with a terminal gives no expertise, but it removes the excuse for having no first-hand contact at all. A board two years behind on the fastest-moving technology in the business is not governing it.

The no

Operating the technology is easy to mistake for a route to enthusiasm. Its highest use is the no. Everything is interesting at the start. The hard, valuable judgement is seeing which technologies will not scale, or do not fit the actual problem, before the organisation spends two years and its credibility finding out. Close up, you can see what the technology needs to deliver its value and ask whether the business, or the industry, can provide it.

That is two pieces of understanding held at the same time, what the technology requires and what the industry's trust structure can supply. By trust structure I mean who in the industry is willing to depend on whom and share what, which decides whether a shared technology gets adopted. Hands-on use gives you the first only. On its own it produces the enthusiast, who has used the thing and holds half the judgement.

TradeLens

The nearest example is TradeLens, the blockchain shipping platform Maersk built with IBM, launched in 2018 and wound down by early 2023. A blockchain network of this kind delivers its value through broad, neutral, shared adoption. A network co-owned by Maersk, then the largest container carrier, struggled to look neutral to the carriers it competed with. Several large carriers joined after a governance change in 2019. Maersk's stated reason for closing TradeLens in November 2022 was that full industry collaboration had not been achieved. The governance change did not close the gap between what the technology required and what the industry's trust structure could provide.

The people who built TradeLens had the technology side, from years of operating it on real work. Their yes is the evidence that hands-on use is half the judgement. The industry side was available at a distance to anyone in container shipping. The judgement that saves the most money is the two held together, before the spend.

The board standard

On any technology fast and material to the business, my view is that at least one person at the table should have operated it on real work rather than a demo, and know the industry well enough to hold the other half. Whether one is enough is the board's call. If the capability costs twenty minutes, the case for stopping at one is weak, and one director who has used it is still, for the rest of the table, a description. On AI-native boards I apply it to myself. If I do not understand this, I have no role there.

None of this makes the director the expert. The technical questions belong to people who know more than you. Whether the business or the industry can supply what the technology needs is the director's question, and someone proud to say "I am not an IT expert" cannot ask it.

The limit

Not every technology is fast, material and yours to govern, and not every director must code. The rule asks that you operate the specific technologies reshaping your specific business well enough to ask a qualified question, see the link to the business, and tell the ones that will scale from the ones that will not.

It also does not hold where the industry is not yours. Contact with a technology in an industry whose trust structure you do not know buys a qualified question and no more.