Boards are expected to look around corners. They spend considerable time examining markets, competitors, technology, customers, regulation and capital allocation, drawing on the information and analysis placed before them by management. Yet some of the earliest signs that a business is changing may be found much further down the organisation, in conversations with customers, on the frontline, inside technology teams or among young employees experimenting with new ways of working. Disruption often begins as a small observation that seems too early, too anecdotal or too uncomfortable to command attention.
This matters particularly in India, where the demographic dividend is now entering corporate India. Gen Z is estimated to number about 377 million in the country, making it a significant consumer and workforce cohort. Its influence is already visible in how companies think about brands, products and customer engagement. At work, this generation is also adapting rapidly to artificial intelligence. Deloitte’s 2026 India survey found that 93% of Gen Z respondents use AI in their day-to-day work, with more than 90% of both Gen Z and millennials saying AI has a positive impact on their professional and personal lives. The significance goes beyond workplace preferences.
A young salesperson may hear a recurring customer frustration. Someone in product may notice a new competitor being discussed long before it appears in market-share numbers. A junior technology employee may discover that an AI tool can change the economics of a routine process. Each observation can look inconsequential on its own. Together, they may suggest that an established business model is beginning to move.
Anyone who has spent enough time inside a large organisation knows what happens to information on its journey upwards. Employees tell managers what they think is relevant. Managers tell the CEO what they believe the CEO needs to know. Management presents the board with what it believes the board should know. At each stage, information becomes more structured, more defensible and more presentable. That is useful for governance and accountability, but emerging disruption is rarely neat enough to fit comfortably into a dashboard.
This is where the idea of ‘peripheral vision’ becomes useful. The centre of an organisation is usually very good at monitoring what is already known. The edges are where the unfamiliar first appears. A board that sees only through formal reporting can have excellent visibility into the present and still miss what is forming just beyond it.
AI makes this even more consequential. Indian companies are moving from experimentation towards broader deployment across functions, while younger employees are often incorporating AI into their everyday work faster than organisations are redesigning their processes. A young professional may already have discovered which routine tasks can be automated, where an AI tool works surprisingly well and where its limitations require human judgment. Senior management may still be working through what these changes mean for the organisation. The board may be discussing an AI strategy while employees are already experimenting with its practical consequences.
There is an important complementarity here. Experience remains indispensable. Senior leaders understand customers through multiple cycles, remember why strategic choices were made and have accumulated judgment that cannot be acquired from a technology platform. Younger employees bring proximity to emerging behaviour, technology and culture. A 24-year-old may be closer to the signal while being further from understanding its significance. A seasoned executive may be further from the signal while being better placed to understand its commercial consequences. Proximity gives you the signal. Experience helps you interpret it. Leadership needs both.
This also gives reverse mentoring a more interesting meaning. It is often treated as an HR exercise in which younger employees help senior executives understand digital tools or social media. There is a larger possibility here: ‘reverse apprenticeship’. The younger employee brings a different view of technology, customers and emerging behaviour.
There is a case, therefore, for boards occasionally hearing directly from the people closest to the changing customer, technology or workplace. Employees usually reach board discussions through attrition, compensation, productivity and engagement scores. Those measures matter, but they largely describe what has already happened. A different conversation might ask: What are our youngest employees seeing that management might be missing? What are customers doing differently that has not yet appeared in our numbers? Which processes are employees quietly abandoning because technology has made them unnecessary? What are we underestimating?
Such conversations would have to be handled carefully. They should not become another HR presentation, an employee engagement exercise or a symbolic display of youth representation. The value lies precisely in hearing observations before they have been polished into corporate language. Three questions may be enough: What are customers doing differently? What are we doing internally that no longer makes sense? What are we underestimating?
The cost of missing such signals is rising. A change in consumer behaviour can become a revenue problem. A technology experiment can become a competitive threat. A shift in employee expectations can become attrition. A new cultural conversation can become a reputation issue. By the time the matter reaches the boardroom in one of these forms, the organisation is responding to an event rather than preparing for a possibility.
India’s demographic dividend is usually discussed in terms of the number of young people entering the workforce. There is another dividend worth recognising: their proximity to change. If companies treat young people simply as talent to be trained, they may miss the intelligence they already possess about a world that is changing around them.
In an economy where business models can change before quarterly numbers reveal the change, the ability to hear that signal early could become a serious competitive advantage. For boards and CEOs, the question is, therefore, worth asking with some humility: What can the youngest person in our organisation see that we do not?
Srinath Sridharan is an author, corporate adviser & independent director on corporate boards
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.