How boards can get smart about A.I.

How boards can get smart about A.I.

As a board member, Joanne Chen knows artificial intelligence better than many of her peers. Chen is a general partner with Foundation Capital, a venture-backed firm largely focused on seed-stage investing, with an emphasis on fintech and enterprise. “I invest in the enterprise space with a slant of applying A.I. to the enterprise,” says San Francisco–based Chen, who studied computer science at University of California, Berkeley.

About 75% of Foundation’s enterprise portfolio uses A.I., whether it’s machine learning, computer vision, or the buzzed-about large language models, she explains. Among those businesses are Jasper, an A.I. copywriting assistant; and infrastructure players like Anyscale, whose clients include OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, the popular generative A.I. chatbot.

“There’s a lot of opportunity but also a lot of downsides,” Chen says, singling out fake content and security problems. “That’s why we invest in both the applications of A.I. as well as data security, things that are counterbalancing the downsides of that technology.”

Chen sits on more than 10 portfolio company boards. Asked how directors can grasp what role A.I. should play in their organization, along with its potential risks, she emphasizes governance. “The board is really the forum to ask questions, not to have, necessarily, the answers.”

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