The Director’s AI Build
A six-week practical AI education for board directors — published in full
Why this exists
Three quarters of boards admit they’re under-equipped on AI. Almost none have actually wired it into how they work personally. Every director-facing AI course on the market — INSEAD’s four days in Fontainebleau, Oxford’s six-month diploma, Harvard’s certificate ladder — teaches AI strategy. Almost none teach a director to use the tools themselves for 30 minutes a week.
That’s the gap this programme fills. Not another primer on what AI is. Six weeks of read, watch, listen and — the part everyone skips — build. By the end, you have a working personal AI setup: a scheduled public-information brief, a saved skill, a vibe-coded tool, and a sharper set of questions for your own board’s AI oversight.
This will run as six consecutive Monday Morning sections in The Director Brief. It’s republished here as a single programme because readers kept asking to run it with their board colleagues, or send it to a NED just starting out.
A note on data safety — read this before Week 1
Every build in this programme is designed to run safely on a personal AI account. None of them ever require pasting, uploading or connecting a real board pack, financial statement, contract or personnel file. Where a build touches your own information, it’s your calendar’s free/busy time at most — never content, never attachments.
Directors carry personal liability for confidential information. Treat a consumer AI account — Claude, ChatGPT, whichever you use — the same way you’d treat a personal email account: nothing non-public goes in. If you want to point AI at actual company documents, that’s a different, separate decision entirely — one for your organisation’s IT and legal function, using a company-sanctioned enterprise tool under a proper data-processing agreement. This programme deliberately doesn’t go near that line, so you can run every exercise below without needing anyone’s permission first.
Who it’s for, and how it works
Chairs, NEDs, committee chairs, company secretaries, and anyone stepping onto a board who is fluent in governance but has never deliberately used AI as a working tool. No coding background required. No prior AI knowledge assumed.
Six weeks, one theme each. Roughly 15 minutes of reading, watching or listening, plus one hands-on build of 30–90 minutes.
Cumulative. Each week’s build uses what you set up the week before. By Week 6 you have a working personal AI operating system, not six disconnected exercises.
Self-paced or shared. Works solo, or as a six-week track for a board or leadership team — see Running this with your board at the end.
Safe by design. Every exercise runs on public information or your own personal reflections. See the note above.
The six-week arc
Week1 AI in plain English — LLMs, agents, prompting. Your first structured prompt, topic-based, no documents. A working prompting habit
Week 2 Prompting and context engineering. A saved “thinking partner” system prompt, public-information only. A standing Claude Project with a built-in confidentiality guardrail
Week 3 Agents, loops, and Claude CoworkCowork set up, running a public-web research task. A working agent loop, with no personal or company data touched
Week 4 Skills and scheduled automation. Your Daily Director’s Brief, built entirely from public sources. An automated 6:30am briefing, no manual step, no private data
Week 5 Vibe coding. A one-screen personal reflection app, built from a plain-English prompt. Proof you can build software without writing code
Week 6 Governance, risk, and putting it together. A personal AI risk checklist + board questions. A complete, safe personal AI setup, and sharper oversight instincts
WEEK 1 — AI in plain English: what an LLM, an agent and a prompt actually are
Why this week: Every later week assumes you know what these words mean. Twenty minutes now saves confusion for six weeks.
Read: McKinsey — “The AI reckoning: how boards can evolve”. The posture-and-archetypes framing every board conversation eventually reaches for.
Watch: Stanford GSB — “Co-Intelligence: An AI Masterclass with Ethan Mollick”. Wharton’s Mollick on how AI actually changes work — the clearest non-technical primer available.
Listen: Knowledge at Wharton — “AI in 2026: What’s Next?”. 20 minutes, board-relevant framing, no jargon.
Build (30 minutes)
Open Claude (or ChatGPT). Write your first structured prompt — role, context, task, format. No documents involved — just a topic. Most directors have never done this deliberately.
Try this prompt:
“You are a sharp, sceptical non-executive director joining a board that is about to discuss [a topic — e.g. ‘entering a new international market’ or ‘a major AI vendor contract’]. Without any specific company information, give me: (1) the three toughest generic questions a NED should ask about a move like this, (2) one assumption management teams typically get wrong, (3) one blind spot boards commonly miss. Keep your answer to under 150 words.”
Go deeper: DeepLearning.AI — AI For Everyone (Andrew Ng). Free to audit, ~4 weeks self-paced, zero jargon, built for non-technical leaders.
WEEK 2 — Prompting and context: the discipline behind good outputs
Why this week: The gap between a mediocre AI answer and a genuinely useful one is almost never the model — it’s what you told it. This is the highest-leverage skill in the whole series.
Read: Anthropic — “Effective context engineering for AI agents”. The shift from “prompt engineering” to feeding the model the smallest, highest-signal context — written for practitioners, readable by anyone.
Listen: a16z — “Big Ideas 2026: The Agentic Interface”. Why the interface is moving from “typing a prompt” to “giving an outcome” — the idea that makes Weeks 3–4 make sense.
Try: Anthropic’s free Interactive Prompt Engineering Tutorial — a ~45-minute self-marking walkthrough. Skip the code chapters; the technique chapters apply directly to board work.
Build (30 minutes)
Create a standing “board-level thinking partner” system prompt — save it as a Claude Project so it’s there every time, not retyped. This project is for questions and public research, never for real company documents.
Try this prompt (paste as your Project’s custom instructions):
“You are my board-level thinking partner. I sit on boards across [sectors]. When I ask about a strategic, risk or governance question: (1) give me the strongest counter-argument first, (2) flag what a board typically misses on this kind of question, (3) end with one question I could raise at the table. Base your answers only on general knowledge and publicly available information. I will never paste confidential company documents into this chat — if I ever do by mistake, stop and flag it rather than answering.”
Go deeper: DeepLearning.AI — Generative AI for Everyone. Builds directly on prompting technique; still zero-code.
WEEK 3 — Agents, loops and setting up Claude Cowork
Why this week: An “agent” isn’t a smarter chatbot — it’s a loop that acts, checks its own result, and decides what to do next. Once that clicks, connectors and skills (Weeks 3–4) stop feeling like magic.
Read: Oracle Developers — “What Is the AI Agent Loop? The Core Architecture Behind Autonomous AI Systems”. Vendor-neutral, plain-English explanation of the act–observe–decide–repeat cycle.
Watch: Claude — “Customize Claude Cowork”. Shows connectors, skills and scheduled tasks in one walkthrough — the three building blocks this series uses.
Course: Anthropic Academy — Introduction to Claude Cowork. Free, self-paced, ~30 minutes.
Build (45 minutes)
Set up Cowork. No inboxes or documents this week — prove the agent loop on public information only, using Cowork’s web search.
Try this prompt:
“Search the web for the three most significant AI-governance, regulatory or sector developments published in the last 7 days that would matter to a board director in [your sector]. For each: one-line summary, why a board should care, and the primary source link. Use only publicly available sources.”
Notice what happened: the agent decided how to search, checked its own results, and only then answered. That loop — act, observe, decide, repeat — is what makes it an agent rather than a chatbot. It’s also the exact loop next week’s automated brief runs on, minus the human prompting it each time.
A note on connectors: Cowork can also connect to your inbox or calendar. Skip that for now. Email and calendar entries routinely contain confidential board material — that’s a decision for your organisation’s IT/legal function, not a personal experiment. This series only ever points AI at public information.
Go deeper: HBS Online — AI Essentials for Business. Harvard’s non-technical foundation course, self-paced.
WEEK 4 — Skills and scheduled automation: your Daily Director’s Brief
Why this week: This is the week the series pays for itself. A skill is a saved, repeatable instruction set. A scheduled task runs it without you. Put them together and you get a briefing that arrives before you wake up — built entirely from public information.
Read: Claude — “Scaling workflows with Claude Cowork at your organization”. How a one-off prompt becomes a repeatable, shareable skill.
Watch: Claude — Get started with Claude Cowork. The setup walkthrough for scheduled tasks specifically.
Build (60 minutes) — the flagship build
Turn last week’s public-research prompt into a saved skill, then schedule it to run every weekday morning.
Step 1 — build the skill. After running a good version of the prompt below, tell Claude: “Package what we just did into a skill called ‘Daily Director’s Brief.’”
Step 2 — the skill prompt:
“Every weekday at 6:30am, produce my Daily Director’s Brief using only publicly available sources: (1) the top 3 AI-governance, regulatory or sector developments from the last 24 hours, each with a one-line summary and source link, (2) one boardroom-relevant question raised by today’s developments, (3) a one-line reminder of the day ahead. Do not access, read or summarise any email, attachment or private document — this brief must only ever draw on public information. Keep the whole brief under 300 words and send it to me.”
Step 3 — schedule it. Type /schedule in Cowork, set it to run weekdays at 6:30am, and point it at the skill you just saved.
Optional, advanced, and only with your company’s approval: some directors later add their calendar’s free/busy times (start times only, never titles, descriptions or attachments) so the brief also flags how much runway they have that morning. Treat that as a separate decision from this series — check with your organisation first.
Go deeper: Harvard DCE — AI Strategy for Business Leaders. A framework for governing AI initiatives at the enterprise level — useful once your own build is running.
WEEK 5 — Vibe coding: build something from nothing
Why this week: You don’t need to write code to build a working tool any more. This week is about proving that to yourself in one sitting.
Read: Lovable — “Vibe Coding Apps: 10 Tools for Beginners in 2026”. Honest, vendor-comparison guide — start with Lovable or Replit if you’ve never coded.
Watch: Sequoia Capital’s Training Data — “Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering” (29 min). The person who coined “vibe coding” on what it’s actually good for — and its limits.
Build (90 minutes)
Vibe-code a one-screen tool you’d actually use. Suggestion: a personal board-question tracker — log the questions you asked at each meeting and whether you got a straight answer. This is your own reflection log, not a record of what was discussed.
Try this prompt (in Lovable, Replit, or similar):
“Build me a simple one-page app called ‘Board Question Tracker’. Fields: board name, meeting date, question asked, answer received (yes/partial/no), follow-up needed (yes/no), notes. Show entries in a sortable table. No login required — this is for my personal use only.”
Keep the “notes” field to your own reflections — how sharp the answer was, whether you’d ask it differently next time — not board minutes, figures, or anything commercially sensitive. This tool lives on a personal app-builder account; treat it like a personal notebook, not a company record.
Go deeper: London Business School — The Business of AI: Strategies for Leaders. Online, strategy-first, useful once you’ve felt the tools work.
WEEK 6 — Governance, risk, and putting it together
Why this week: Everything you’ve built in Weeks 1–5 is personal productivity. This week turns it into board-level judgement — what good AI governance looks like, and what you personally shouldn’t do with these tools.
Read: Deloitte Center for Board Effectiveness — AI Board Governance Roadmap; INSEAD Knowledge — “A Revolution in Governance: How AI Will Make Boards More Effective”.
Watch: IoD Finance & FinTech Group — Artificial Intelligence masterclass. On-demand, covers the EU AI Act mechanics every board is now asked about.
Listen: Diligent Institute — “What Directors Think 2026: AI, M&A and the next era of board oversight”. This year’s director survey, in podcast form.
Build (60 minutes) — the capstone
Assemble your personal AI operating system and a one-page risk checklist.
Step 1.
“Confirm you now have: one Claude Project for public research and thinking-partner questions (Week 2); one agent that can search the public web on your behalf (Week 3); one scheduled Daily Director’s Brief, built entirely from public sources (Week 4); one vibe-coded personal reflection tool (Week 5). Notice what’s absent from that list: no real board papers, no inbox, no company documents. That’s by design, not an oversight.”
Step 2 — try this prompt:
“Write me a one-page personal-use AI risk checklist for a board director. Lead with: what should never be pasted, uploaded or connected to a personal AI account — board papers, financials, contracts, personnel data, anything non-public. Then cover: hallucination risk, how to sanity-check an AI-generated summary before relying on it in a meeting, and the difference between a personal AI account and a company-sanctioned enterprise tool with a proper data-processing agreement.”
Step 3.
“Write down three questions this series has changed for you — to raise with your own board’s AI oversight this quarter. One should be: what AI tools, if any, has this board approved for use with real company information — and under what terms?”
Go deeper: INSEAD — AI for Boards (4-day, in-person, Fontainebleau, €11,600); Stanford Law — Directors’ College 2026. The two most credible in-person options if this series has earned the next step.
Further study — the credible next step
This programme is deliberately practical, not academic. For readers who want to go deeper into AI strategy and governance at board level, these are the programmes and primers worth the time and, in some cases, the fee.
Business schools — in-depth board and strategy courses
INSEAD — AI for Boards — four days, in-person, Fontainebleau. €11,600. The most board-specific programme on the market; run through the INSEAD Corporate Governance Centre.
Stanford Law School — Directors’ College 2026 — the longest-running US director-education conference, AI now a standing agenda item.
Harvard DCE — AI Strategy for Business Leaders — enterprise AI governance framework, several 2026 cohort dates.
HBS Online — AI Essentials for Business — self-paced, non-technical, Harvard Business School faculty.
London Business School — The Business of AI: Strategies for Leaders — online, strategy-first; LBS also runs an AI Masterclass with the Financial Times.
Consulting and governance-body primers — free, board-facing
KPMG and INSEAD — Global AI Board Governance Principles (2026) — the closest thing to a joint academic/Big Four standard for board AI oversight.
Deloitte Center for Board Effectiveness — AI Board Governance Roadmap and AI Governance: Board Oversight of Emerging Tech.
McKinsey — “The AI reckoning: how boards can evolve” — the posture-and-archetypes framework referenced in Week 1.
Diligent Institute — What Directors Think 2026 — the annual director survey, in podcast form.
IoD — Artificial Intelligence masterclass — free, on-demand, EU AI Act mechanics.
Practical / commentator courses — where this programme’s method comes from
DeepLearning.AI (Andrew Ng) — AI For Everyone and Generative AI for Everyone — the standard non-technical on-ramp, free to audit.
Ethan Mollick (Wharton) — Co-Intelligence: An AI Masterclass — the clearest single explanation of what these tools change about how you work.
Anthropic Academy — Introduction to Claude Cowork and the free Interactive Prompt Engineering Tutorial — the two courses this programme’s builds are drawn from directly.
Running this with your board
Several readers running the weekly instalments asked whether this could be done as a group rather than solo. It can. Suggested version for a board or leadership team:
Circulate one week’s read/watch/listen ahead of a scheduled 30-minute call.
Each person does the week’s build independently beforehand — this only works if people actually try it, not discuss it in the abstract.
Use the call to compare builds, not re-teach the material: what worked, what broke, what you’d change.
Week 6 becomes a live discussion of your own board’s AI governance posture, using the risk checklist as the agenda.
Keep it that way in a group setting too: no one should bring a real board paper to compare notes. The exercises are designed to work entirely on hypothetical topics and public information — that’s what makes them safe to run with colleagues who don’t share your NDA obligations.
If you’d like a facilitated version of this for your board — a structured session with the six builds compressed into a single half-day workshop — reply to this email.