I sit in the meetings your architecture decisions eventually reach. Here are the questions that actually get asked about agents at the board level. These are worth knowing, because sooner or later they roll downhill.
"What happens when it's wrong?" Not if. When. The answer they want is a blast-radius answer: what the agent can reach, what it can't, and what record exists. "We review the prompts" is a career limiting answer.
"Why is the AI line item growing faster than usage?" This is the rework question in disguise. If failures re-run completed work, cost grows with instability, not with customers. Boards notice curves that bend the wrong way.
"Are we locked into a single vendor?" They mean the model, the framework, and the cloud. The honest answer is exit cost: what you would have to rewrite to leave, and whether that reliability layer is portable or welded to one stack.
"Who else runs this?" References beat benchmarks at this level. Public case studies are worth more to your internal pitch than any throughput number.
The board will not ask granular questions about the model. They will, however, check to see if you have a thoughtful answer for blast-radius, vendor lock-in and rising costs.
Build strategically and the board meeting goe smoothly.
To better prep for board meetings, review the economics behind running AI at scale: https://www.diagrid.io/blog/economics-of-running-ai-agents-at-scale
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