Diligent brings AI assistance into board preparation and governance

Diligent provides governance, risk and compliance software, with Diligent Boards organizing board materials and meeting work. GovernAI adds assistance for creating draft board books, summarizing material, preparing questions and drafting minutes. Its purpose is to reduce the preparation burden while keeping the work in a governed environment. This blueprint proposes a board-pack evaluation from public sources; it does not claim a product test or a legal assessment of generated material.

01 / ProductAI inside a board-management workflow

The Boards product combines document handling with role-based access, approvals and meeting-related workflows. That surrounding system matters because board preparation is more than document summarization. Different people have access to different committees and materials, documents change near the meeting, and the final record needs an identifiable approval path.

The GovernAI page names Smart Builder, Smart Book Summary, Smart Prep Insights, Smart Minutes and an action tracker. These address distinct stages of the meeting lifecycle. A useful evaluation should choose the stage causing the most work and assess its output directly rather than treating an impressive demonstration of one feature as evidence for all the others.

02 / AudienceFor governance teams with material preparation work

Diligent is relevant to corporate secretaries, governance staff, general counsel and directors who manage substantial board or committee materials. The strongest case is a recurring preparation process with many contributors, sensitive documents and a need to keep the current approved version clear. AI assistance can help with compilation and first-pass reading when those foundations are already defined.

A small team needing only a shared folder and an agenda may find the broader operating model excessive. Another organization may already have a board portal but want to evaluate AI within it. That customer should ask what its existing license and deployment support before assuming a full platform migration is necessary to obtain the feature being demonstrated.

Microsoft is a relevant comparison for organizations considering document assistance inside an existing productivity environment. Workiva offers an adjacent perspective when controlled reporting and connected financial or compliance information lead the workflow. The buying distinction is the system responsible for the final record: board meeting governance, general collaboration and regulated reporting overlap, but they have different operational centers.

03 / WorkflowA proposed board-pack preparation pilot

Start with a completed, approved board pack that can be used in an authorized evaluation. Keep the original source documents and final human-prepared version as a reference. Choose a pack with meaningful variation: financial tables, a risk update, a decision request and an appendix. A polished narrative document alone does not test the difficult parts of a board workflow.

Define the agenda and identify which material belongs to each committee or audience. The preparation owner should settle document versions before invoking AI. A system can summarize conflicting versions fluently without knowing which was approved. Record the version and owner of each input so a reviewer can trace a generated statement to the material that actually informed it.

Use Smart Builder to assess first-draft assembly where that capability is licensed. Evaluate completeness and structure, not just visual finish. Check whether appendices remain attached to the relevant decision, whether tables preserve units and whether a recommendation is clearly distinguished from background information. These proposed checks should use the team’s real preparation standard rather than an invented accuracy score.

Generate a summary and compare it with the original documents. Pay special attention to qualifiers: a forecast is different from actual performance, a proposal is different from an approved action and a management view is different from a confirmed external fact. A brief summary is useful only if it preserves distinctions that affect the board’s interpretation.

Use cited preparation questions as prompts for director review. The April 2026 update describes the GovernAI panel beside the board book, allowing users to inspect AI material alongside the original page. In the proposed pilot, have reviewers open the referenced section and decide whether the question is relevant, redundant or based on a misunderstanding.

For the meeting-record stage, give Smart Minutes an authorized set of notes or a suitable transcript and compare the draft with the agreed record. Verify attendance, resolutions, decisions deferred and action ownership. Preserve uncertainty when notes are incomplete. A well-formed sentence should not turn an unresolved discussion into a decision that nobody made.

Use the action tracker as a proposed bridge into follow-through, but have the responsible person confirm each owner and deadline. Some statements in a meeting are suggestions or dependencies rather than commitments. The same care applies when a previous action has been superseded by a later decision. Keep the approved minutes as the record against which the extracted actions are reviewed.

Measure the total preparation and correction effort across the pilot, including time spent finding errors. Record the kinds of omissions that matter and whether reviewers find them readily. The decision should reflect both effort saved and the quality of the final reviewed pack. A fast first draft that requires extensive verification may still be useful, but it should be evaluated honestly.

04 / PricingCommercial scope follows the product and AI entitlement

Diligent’s pricing page routes buyers to a configured proposal rather than publishing a universal per-director rate. The GovernAI feature page also offers a request-pricing route. Accordingly, the useful commercial comparison is the exact board-management and AI scope, not a guessed price drawn from an unrelated customer’s historical contract.

Ask the proposal to specify the products, board or committee coverage, user roles, AI capabilities and implementation services included. If the immediate need is summarizing board books, establish that feature’s entitlement separately from broader risk, audit or entity-management products. Platform branding does not mean every named module is included in one purchase.

The board AI controls update describes controls for stopping AI generation and restoring the last saved version when regenerating. It also discusses a trial route in its dated release context. Confirm current trial availability and scope directly rather than assuming an older announcement creates an unconditional offer for every new customer or deployment.

05 / DistinctionsWhy the surrounding governance workflow matters

Diligent’s meaningful distinction is placing AI assistance close to the governed material and the people responsible for it. In an ordinary document workflow, somebody may copy a sensitive pack into a separate assistant and later paste an answer into another file. Keeping preparation, inspection and approval connected can reduce that fragmentation, provided the actual permissions and processing route are appropriate.

The company’s AI-for-directors page emphasizes intentional opt-in, identifying generated content and keeping customer data separate. These are vendor-stated design principles. Their practical value in an evaluation is that the team can ask to see where consent, output labeling and data boundaries appear in its own deployment.

A second distinction is the relationship between preparation and follow-through. Summaries and questions help before a meeting, while minutes and actions help afterward. The strongest implementation preserves the transition from proposed discussion to approved decision. Treating those artifacts as separate accountable stages makes it less likely that generated prose will blur their meaning.

06 / QuestionsWhat to verify before relying on the output

Begin with document access and processing arrangements. Diligent’s trust center provides security and assurance information, but the customer still needs to establish the relevant product, hosting arrangement and connected systems. A company-wide assurance statement should not substitute for understanding which feature processes the specific board material under evaluation.

Review generated risk flags as screening assistance. A flagged phrase can help direct professional attention, but absence of a flag is not proof that a document is legally sound or complete. Likewise, an AI summary should not become a substitute for directors reading the underlying material required for their role. The pilot should test whether the assistance helps that review rather than merely shortening it.

Version control is another important boundary. If a source document changes after a summary has been reviewed, decide who regenerates the summary and how reviewers know it changed. Keep the approved pack, the relevant AI draft and the final human edits distinguishable. This provides a practical basis for explaining what the board actually received and avoids confusing a draft with the final meeting record.

07 / DecisionAdopt assistance where review remains clear

Diligent is worth evaluating when recurring board preparation has enough complexity to benefit from a controlled workflow and useful first drafts. Select one meeting stage, obtain the correct AI entitlement and compare the reviewed output with the organization’s established standard. Extend the use case when the team can preserve source traceability and accountability while making preparation measurably easier.