Post # 91
July 2, 2025
Claire Bodanis
Claire reports live from the UK Chartered Governance Institute’s Annual Conference, where she was, unsurprisingly, talking about AI and reporting. She did not expect to be announcing this particular news, however!
I’m always delighted to help out our friends at the UK Chartered Governance Institute – I’m forever grateful to them for commissioning me to write a guide for reporting, Trust me, I’m listed – why the annual report matters and how to do it well, which was published in 2020. It gave me the opportunity to find a way of distilling what I and the FW team had learnt about reporting over so many decades into a useful, practical guide for companies, supported by contributions from many across the reporting world. I was particularly pleased because it meant we could get the good message about the value of reporting to far more people than we could ever work with ourselves.
So when the CGI team called me a few days go to ask if I could stand in for someone from the Department for Business and Trade who’d dropped out of this morning’s AI panel, then the answer could only be yes. Although let’s be honest – I love talking about this subject, and am on a mission to ensure that AI is used responsibly in reporting, so I’d probably have done it even if I didn’t feel an eternal debt of gratitude!
(I did wonder whether I could actually pretend to be from the DBT and announce a few spoof policy reforms to liven things up a little – but with so many friends in the audience, I doubted I could pull it off…)
Nonetheless, thanks to a great introduction and some masterful hosting from Tracey Brady from Diligent, we navigated the short notice pretty well and had a fantastic discussion about the research and recommendations we at Falcon Windsor published with Insig AI in May: ‘Your Precocious Intern – How to use generative AI responsibly in corporate reporting’.
With the government minister due to speak yesterday also having had to drop out (bit of a theme here), the morning’s session opened with a stand-in from his team delivering his address. Brilliantly for me, she talked about the reporting consultations going on in government at the moment, which meant I had the perfect opening to launch into an outline of the plan I’m hatching with some splendid folks about how to rethink reporting altogether for the age of AI. And yes, we’ll be proposing that to the government in due course.
But you’ll have to wait for my next blog about that, because today’s hot news comes instead from the morning tea break.
As many of you know – not least the (also splendid) folks from the Asian Corporate Governance Network, who asked me a leading question at their event in May – I am very keen to revise and update TMIL for the age of AI. The heart and soul of the book and its underlying principles will never change, unless reporting loses sight of its own purpose altogether. But the world, and reporting with it, have changed; which means that how we put those principles into practice needs some new thinking. I’ve been talking to our friends at CGI about whether they’d like to continue to support TMIL in its latest incarnation, and I’m absolutely thrilled to say that as of this morning, tea in hand, the answer is yes!
Must dash… watch this space…