Nail Your Next Board Presentation: The Framework Every CIO Needs

**Karen Stokes Lockhart** (0:06)
AI is everywhere, but what does it mean for your business? Gartner is the world authority on AI, with more than 200,000 client conversations and more than 6,000 written insights on AI in 2025 alone. Leaders across the C-suite, just like you, are partnering with Gartner to turn AI ambition into impact. Go to gartner.com/ai to learn more. Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Karen Stokes Lockhart. Today, we're tackling one of the most high stakes moments in a CIO's year, presenting to the board. CIOs spend countless hours preparing decks. But despite all the effort, many boards still aren't confident in the value of their tech investments. Why? The story isn't landing. Today, Managing Vice President and Gartner Fellow, Tina Nunno, shows you how to fix that. In this episode, pull from her webinar on board presentation prep, Tina breaks down how to anchor every board message to shareholder value, sharpen your narrative with a simple framework, and slash prep time without sacrificing impact. You'll learn how to ensure that your next board presentation sparks confidence instead of confusion. Now, here's Tina.

**Tina Nunno** (1:26)
It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to be here with you today, to talk about a topic which is near and dear to my heart, of presenting to the Board of Directors. I spent a significant amount of my time working with our clients, helping them prep for board presentations, and ensuring that in their presentations, they're saying what they think they're saying, always easier said than done. Regardless of your experience in presenting to a board, or if you're listening in because you actually help your CIO or another executive prepare that board presentation, I hope this content will be useful to you, and you'll find one or two things that you can take with you. One of the most important things that is critical in board presentations is what we communicate. Many clients will ask me, what should the font size be? How many words should there be on a page? How many graphics? What's the density? What should the flow be? What's the story? And I'm here to tell you that the most important part of the story is this, is that the key to presenting to the board with less pay and more gain is relentlessly linking IT investments to shareholder value, linking it relentlessly. In spite of all of the work that so many CIOs and their teams put into these board presentations, hours and hours of prep, study amounts of work, when we survey board members, non-executive directors, about how they feel about technology and how much confidence they have in the value of their current technology investments, 76% express a lack of confidence. Only 24% said they were confident or very confident in the value of their IT investments. So I'm here to share with you and encourage you that if you get one thing right in the presentation, please get the value story right. And I'm here to share with you a framework and ways of thinking about this that I hope will help you. Because if you get the value story right, you could practically write the presentation in crayon and you would be successful. Please don't do it in crayon. I wouldn't encourage you to do that. But what I hope you will find is that when you get this right, the rest of the presentation, quite frankly, doesn't matter anywhere near as much. And the quality of your board conversations will go up. If your presentation is beautiful and elegant, but it doesn't include the right value story, no matter how beautiful you've put it together, it won't matter as much, and you won't have the impact that you want to have. So I'll talk a little bit today about how to focus on how much value you've provided in the past, how much value you're providing today through technology investments, and what your forecast is for how you will provide value in the future. So here's today's reality. Today's reality is no one's happy with Board Presentation Preparation or the current Board content. Boards tend to underestimate the prep time of the C-suite by more than 33%.
Most NEDs believe that you spend an average of 13.2 hours preparing for each Board meeting. The reality is closer to 20 And the range here is extraordinary, right? The range here is extraordinary relative to the low end and the high end is absolutely incredible here, with often days and days and days being spent in Board preparation. When we ask Boards how reasonable they feel the pre-read is for the Board meeting, most Board members say on average it's two times more pages and content than reasonable. On average, they receive 147 pages of pre-read, but they believe it's 71 pages is a reasonable number, and that's for the entire Board pre-read pack.