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Every generation, the governance profession is asked to become something new. I have witnessed this several times in my 25-year career spanning law and corporate governance. The early shifts were mostly linked to increased legislation, as the business environment became more complex and sophisticated. The shift now under way is different. AI is testing the profession’s quiet capacity for reinvention more than anything before it, and South Africa’s lawyers, company secretaries and governance professionals should recognise the moment for what it is: not a threat, but the next chapter in our evolution, and possibly the most consequential one.Consider how far this profession has already travelled. The company secretary of a generation ago was a custodian of process: minutes, registers, filings, the machinery of compliance managing complex AGMs. Then came the King codes, developed here over three decades, and the role was transformed. Governance stopped being a checklist and became a mindset. Boards were made accountable to more than shareholders. The company secretary became the conscience of the boardroom, and South Africa became something few countries can claim to be, a net exporter of governance thinking. When directors in London or Sydney discuss integrated reporting or stakeholder-inclusive capitalism, they are speaking a language substantially inspired by principles drafted in South Africa, and here, we need to give credit to industry luminaries such as Mervyn King. The legal profession has travelled a parallel road. In-house lawyers were once consulted at the end of decisions to document what the business had already resolved to do. Today they sit inside the decisions themselves: structuring transactions, shaping strategy, and weighing reputation alongside regulation. The general counsel and the company secretary have moved, over a generation, from a non-strategic role to the centre of corporate judgment.Building the structures that prevent that outcome is not adjacent to our profession. It is our professionAI is the next stage of that journey, and it asks more of us than any previous one. For the first time, the governance profession must oversee not just the people who decide, but the systems that decide alongside them. The old instruments, designed for human judgement, must be rebuilt for judgment that is partly machine.Some predicted the profession would meet this moment the way caricature suggests: treat it as a risk, slow it down, say “no” safely. The opposite is happening. Law and governance have quietly become among the most serious adopters of AI in professional services, using it inside core work: research, drafting, due diligence, contract review, board-pack analysis, agents that produce reports seamlessly. That matters strategically. When the professions built to manage risk adopt a technology with discipline, they demonstrate to every other function that responsible adoption is possible. We are not the brake on this transformation. We are becoming its proof of concept. But adoption is the smaller half of the assignment. The larger half is stewardship, and it will reshape what our profession is.The company secretary’s craft has always been to convert principle into practice: to take an obligation on paper and turn it into an agenda item, a control, a documented decision, or a disclosure that survives scrutiny. AI governance needs exactly that craft. Boards need reliable inventories of the systems in use, because no-one can govern what has not been counted. Consequential systems need named owners, because accountability that belongs to everyone belongs to no-one. Oversight needs evidence rather than assurance: documented choices about where human judgment must sit and proof that it stayed there. A board that cannot question a model’s use is not overseeing it; it is admiring it. Building the structures that prevent that outcome is not adjacent to our profession. It is our profession, applied to the defining technology of this generation.This week, at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, we convened regulators, directors, lawyers, company secretaries and policymakers for the inaugural AI governance and policy symposium. We are deliberately not producing a communiqué; the aim is practical insight that can travel into the national policy process and into boardrooms.The governance profession has reinvented itself before, and each time South Africa’s practitioners helped to write the manual that others followed. The task now is to do it again, with the confidence of a profession that has never merely witnessed change but has always been the discipline through which change becomes trustworthy. Bagwandeen is group company secretary & head of global company secretariat, Naspers and Prosus.
