Your Board Deck Is Costing You More Than You Think
INTERNAL AUDITBUSINESSFEATURED
Same Thing, Different Day
Every quarter, it happens again.
A senior leader, sharp, experienced, and someone you hired to drive strategy, disappears for two weeks. Not into a customer problem. Not into a pipeline review. Not even into a conference intended for professional development. Into PowerPoint.
They're formatting cells, chasing their team for updated numbers from three different systems, reconciling last month's deck with this month's data, resizing charts so the logo doesn't get cut off on slide 14, and making sure John didn't use the star-spangled transition animation on every slide... dammit John...
This is what we call the Presentation Tax. And most companies have no idea how much they're paying it.
The Costs
Let's be honest about what this actually costs.
A 200-person team wastes approximately $3 million annually on manual data entry and slide preparation. Not on bad hires. Not on failed campaigns. On literal slides.
According to a recent study from McKinsey, Executive leaders spend 41% of their working day on administrative work that doesn't move any needle. The bigger the team, the worse it gets.
The more successful you become, the more the Presentation Tax compounds.
Board decks. Ops Reviews. Executive business reviews. Investor updates. Governance reports. Each one a 20-hour project disguised as a 60-minute meeting.
Audit Leaders Have it the Worst
GRC is particularly brutal.
Internal audit and governance teams face a version of this problem that is uniquely punishing.
The reporting cadence is unforgiving. The stakeholders are demanding. The consequences of a poorly constructed board pack are real.
And yet most teams are still building these manually.
They're pulling findings from spreadsheets. Copying risk ratings into slides. Cross-referencing control statuses against last quarter's deck to show progress. Reformatting everything to match the template their CISO approved eighteen months ago.
This is not a knowledge problem. Everyone in GRC knows their content cold. This is a presentation problem, and it shouldn't require human hours to solve.
The Problem AI was Actually Built For
Mediocre email subject lines were fun. Autocompleting meeting notes saved us a few minutes. Creating a chatbot that answers FAQ questions is slightly faster than a webpage.
The real opportunity for enterprise AI is autonomous, meaningful work. Systems that connect to your live data, understand your narrative requirements, and produce board-ready outputs, without a human rebuilding them from scratch every single quarter.
It's a shift that's happening right now and it isn't about making humans faster at building slides. It's about eliminating the slide-building step entirely! You define the story. AI completes the execution. Your team shows up to the meeting instead of building the materials for it.
Getting Time Back
What would you and your team do with those hours back?
It's not a rhetorical question.
If your senior leaders stopped spending 40% of their time on reporting infrastructure, what would they do? More executive relationships? Deeper risk analysis? Faster audit cycles? More time actually advising the board instead of preparing decks for them?
Efficiency is cheap. It's easy.
But this is different. It's leverage.
AI in the enterprise gets discussed constantly at the strategy level and almost never implemented at the execution layer. The board deck is execution layer. It's where strategic priorities either get communicated with clarity or buried in formatting.
Effective AI
The opportunity isn't to use AI more. It's to use it effectively.
Stop asking AI to assist with the work. Start asking it to DO IT.
The teams I see getting ahead of this aren't using AI as a drafting tool. They're using it as an execution engine that pulls data, structures narratives, applies brand standards, and produces finished outputs that a human reviews and approves.
We're in an era of changing more than just what your team does. You can now change what your team is capable of.
The Presentation Tax is real. And for the first time, you can stop paying it.
Zach Hawley is the founder and CEO of Steerco, a B2B AI SaaS platform that eliminates the Presentation Tax for enterprise teams. Before founding Steerco, Zach spent 13+ years in enterprise SaaS, most recently as Sr. Director of Customer Success at Workiva, where he managed a >$200M ARR portfolio. Steerco automates the strategic presentations teams spend days creating, turning live company data into strategic narratives. Learn more at getsteerco.com.
These are the opinions of the editors of Internal Audit Next and/or the writer who authored this article. Any use of this copyrighted material without permission of Internal Audit Next - including training for AI Models - is prohibited. Copyright 2026.