Show up to your next board meeting fully prepared.

You upload your board pack. That’s basically anything the board receives to review before a meeting, which usually means the agenda, your management accounts, any management or sub-committee reports, and whatever else has been circulated. Steward reads the pack and from it, generates a brief, grounded against your organisation’s reference documents.

The brief is a short list of governance questions worth asking. Each question comes with a “why this matters” line and an “if you’re new to this” orientation aid.

These questions are a starting point for discussion rather than a script. Your pack still goes out and your meeting still runs the way it always does. The thing that changes is how many board members arrive prepared.

It isn’t. Reading the pack carefully is what Steward generates.

But it’s worth asking whether one careful read is enough, particularly for boards where members carry personal liability. Health and safety obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) put board officers personally on the hook for due-diligence lapses. Financial governance comes with collective liability for things like solvency, reserves breaches, and related-party gaps. In those areas, one missed detail in a large pack stops being an inconvenience and becomes a problem.

Steward gives you a second line of defence. Board members still read carefully. Steward also reads the pack on its own and surfaces the kind of detail that’s easy to miss. That might be an H&S incident report buried at the back of a property report. It might be the reserves threshold the management accounts quietly crossed. It might be the related-party note an auditor will eventually ask about. Most of the time Steward just confirms what you already saw. Sometimes it catches the one thing that mattered.

You still do the governing. Steward just helps make sure the careful reading isn’t the only thing standing between the board and a gap.

There are two reasons ChatGPT doesn’t work well for board prep.

First, it has no knowledge of your organisation. Your charter, your delegations policy, your reserves threshold, your recent decisions are all outside its context. It can offer generic governance advice, but not questions grounded in your actual board.

Second, the confidential pack material is at real risk on consumer AI tools. Unless every board member is on a paid business-tier plan and can confirm the data-handling terms in writing, what they paste in may be retained, used to train future models, or leak into another customer’s session. The free and consumer-tier plans don’t carry a no-training commitment, and realistically, ensuring every member is on a paid plan isn’t something most boards can guarantee.

Steward is built for this use specifically. Your board’s reference documents and pack content sit in your own scoped workspace. Only what’s needed is sent to the AI provider, under contractual terms that exclude your content from training. Data is stored securely, and every access is audit-logged. One product, one contract, one set of guarantees that covers every board member.

Steward is the ChatGPT you’re actually allowed to use for board work.

It depends on which BoardPro plan you’re on. BoardPro now offers AI features on its higher-tier plans, which are meaningfully more expensive than a standard subscription. If you’re on that tier, there’s significant overlap with what Steward does and you may not need both.

If you’re on a standard BoardPro plan without the AI features, Steward is a cheaper way to add AI brief generation to your board’s pack. The two products run side by side comfortably. Board documents are produced in BoardPro and uploaded to Steward for AI assistance, at a fraction of the price of upgrading to the next tier.

Yes. Steward is built specifically for confidential board material. A few specifics worth knowing about the setup.

• Your data lives in Microsoft Azure, Australia East (Sydney). We’ll move to Microsoft’s Auckland region once it becomes available. The data-residency profile is the same as Xero and most NZ public-sector systems.
• Anthropic, our AI provider, processes content inside their own infrastructure and auto-deletes it within 30 days. They don’t use it to train their models.
• Inside Steward, your board pack is visible only to your organisation’s own members. Every access is audit-logged.

Every organisation has its own IT policy and we can’t speak for all of them. As a rough guide, if you’re already comfortable emailing the pack between board members, Steward usually falls within the same scope. Our privacy page lays out where data goes and who can see it in detail, so you can check with your IT or compliance team if you’d like to be sure.

No. If you can email a PDF, you can use Steward.

The interface works like any other web app. You upload your pack, wait a few minutes for Steward to process it, and read the brief that comes out. From there you can share the brief with the rest of the board. You don’t write prompts or pick AI models. The brief is just governance questions written in plain English.

Steward gives you a first pass at the pack. The board still has the final word. Every question it produces is a starting point for discussion rather than a fact stated.

If a question’s premise turns out to be wrong, for example if the AI thought your reserves dropped 30% when it was actually a reclassification, that’s an answer in itself. The board notes it and moves on, and the board members who flagged it actually come across better for spotting it. The board still does what boards do, which is apply judgment and weigh the context.

In practice this happens occasionally and is fairly uneventful. The more common pattern is the opposite, where a question Steward raised was something the board would have eventually asked, just not at that particular meeting. The risk of a wrong question is much smaller than the cost of a missed one.

Either works, but Steward gets more useful as more board members use it.

A solo chair can still get value out of it for organising their own prep, but a lot of the upside is gone. The sweet spot is the chair plus two or three other board members. Once that many people are using the brief, the board conversation noticeably steps up. Board members arrive better prepared and questions stay sharper throughout the meeting.

It’s best of all when the whole board uses it, but realistically that’s uneven. Some board members will love it and some will never log in. That’s fine. The ones who do use it get the benefit, and the ones who don’t are no worse off than they would have been.

Yes. You can run Steward on your last board pack before you commit to anything. We’ll set up your workspace, you upload your last pack, you read through what comes out, and then you decide whether you’d want to use it for the board.

If you do, the next step is a 3-month paid pilot at $50. After that the standard rate is $500 per year, or $50 per month if you’d prefer to pay monthly.

The pilot is the commitment moment. Before then no money changes hands and we don’t ask for card details. If at the end of the pilot you decide Steward isn’t for your board, the subscription cancels automatically and you can keep reading anything you’ve already generated.