The “digital trustee” era is over

I’ve spent most of my career working in the digital sector. I’m also Chair of two charities, one of which is Charity Digital. You might assume, then, that I’m a strong candidate for that familiar board role: the "digital trustee".

 

But I’m writing this to argue the opposite. The era of the "digital trustee" is over. In fact, relying on a single tech-savvy board member should now be treated as a governance risk.

 

According to the ’Charity Digital Skills Report 2025’, 76% of charities are now using artificial intelligence (AI), up from 61% just a year ago. At the same time, 28% of charities report that their board has poor digital skills, a figure that has actually worsened since 2024.

 

That gap between operational adoption and board-level understanding should worry us all. When three-quarters of the sector are deploying powerful, increasingly autonomous tools, oversight cannot be delegated to "the IT person" at the end of the table.

 

 

If you can read a balance sheet, you can interrogate AI

 

We don’t appoint a "finance trustee" and assume the rest of the board can ignore the accounts. We don’t have a "safeguarding trustee" and let everyone else skip the training. Yet digital is often treated as optional, or specialist, or someone else’s problem.

 

The risks we face today – from deepfakes and algorithmic bias to cyber resilience – are not primarily technical issues. They are ethical, reputational, and organisational ones.

 

I saw this first-hand at a charity where I sit on the board. We adopted an AI tool to support minute-taking. It was efficient, yes. But it was our Vice Chair, not a technologist, who noticed that the system was consistently categorising questions from female trustees as "digressions".

 

That wasn’t a coding fault. It was bias. And it took human judgement, not technical expertise, to spot and challenge it.

 

 

The digital stakes are rising

 

The pace of change can feel unsettling. Recent controversies around tools like Grok, and the use of AI to create non-consensual deepfakes, are not abstract headlines. They form the backdrop against which our beneficiaries live and our staff work.

 

At the same time, cyberattacks on charities are increasing. The ’UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025’ confirms that 30% of charities experienced a cyber breach or attack in the past year. This equates to approximately 61,000 UK charities facing digital disruption annually. Phishing remains the primary entry point, but it is now being fuelled by sophisticated AI-powered impersonation.

 

If your board is waiting for a "digital expert" to interpret all of this for you, you are already behind. Trustees need to be asking the questions themselves: Are we comfortable with this tool? Who owns the data? What happens if this system gets it wrong?

 

 

Charities must prioritise governance, not jargon

 

This is why Charity Digital’s upcoming event, The Digitally Informed Trustee, taking place on 4 February 2026, is not a tech event. It’s a governance one.

 

The session is hosted by Mark Wood, Chair of Trustees at Barnardo’s and Chair of the Board at Goodstack. Mark is a former CEO of Future plc and a member of PwC UK’s Advisory Council. He isn’t a coder. He’s a senior leader who understands that, in 2026, digital resilience matters as much as financial solvency.

 

The conversation is designed for trustees who may feel out of their depth. We’re deliberately stripping away jargon and focusing on what actually matters: confidence, competence, and knowing which questions to ask.

 

 

A final note on the event

 

The Digitally Informed Trustee sits against the backdrop of our Conscious AI campaign, launching in January 2026 to help the sector gain the power to respond to these changes ethically. But for now, the priority is simple: board engagement.

 

If you are a Chair or a Trustee, I’d strongly encourage you to join us. Not to become an expert, but to become informed. The technology is already embedded in your charity. Being ready for it is now part of the job.

 

Register for The Digitally Informed Trustee